travel

From Madison to Franklin Lakes; New York to Tampa; Tampa to Captiva Island and back again; return to Franklin Lakes and on to Chapel Hill; Chapel Hill to Madison.

All in the next month—I can’t wait. Really.

Approximation.

In terms of my taste, I’m (not so) secretly a sorority girl of the highest order. I wore pearl earrings every day when I was a camp counselor and swam with them even in the murky lake water. I have a Tiffany heart bracelet, though it rarely sees the light of day. I like it, but I’m also kind of embarrassed to like it—though I suppose it would be worse to own one if you didn’t like it. I own quite a few pieces of Tiffany—some of them gifts, many of them second-hand. I bought my beaded ball bracelet off of the “For Sale” forum at Wellesley (how fitting). My Elsa Peretti sapphire and sterling ring came from Ebay. I used many of the hours I spent in my office in Virginia learning how to identify Tiffany fakes, and I’m pretty good at it (if I do say so myself). And, though it wasn’t a conscious tribute, I even painted most of the interior of my house in a certain shade of aqua.

That said, it comes as no surprise that I have, for some time, liked these. After months of vague longing, I did NOT blow my back-pay (bargained for us lowly TA types by our fantastic union) on (part of) one of the enticingly showy diamond-and-platinum keys. I didn’t even spend 3/4 of it on a gold one or nearly 1/4 on the sterling variety that would coordinate so pleasingly with my bracelets. I’m no fool. I bought these instead. And, keeping the total for all three under $20 (including shipping), I also bought this—a dead-ringer for the Tiffany one I (not so) secretly adore.

And these? Oh, I have plans.

also

I would like to paint a zebra.

In which I blog even though it’s December

Mr. Cat apparently doesn’t approve of my attempts at holiday merriment. I came home today to find a small wooden deer ornament on the floor with one of its legs gnawed and twisted off at a terrible angle. At least they didn’t get the snail.

I love this tacky little tray. I bought it last year at Savers and have been looking forward to using it to… display a ceramic lamb? The lamb is part of a set that also includes another lamb and some sort of pony/donkey/horse thing. They’re meant to supplement a Nativity set, but the pony thing hangs out near my old books year-round. I’m less fond of the lambs, but at 84 cents for the set, it hardly matters.

day 30: at last

I realized tonight that it’s probably been ten years since I decorated a Christmas tree. I have the most ridiculous ornaments, amassed over the last four years from the post-season sales at Anthropologie and Pottery Barn. Like almost all of the art on my walls, most of my ornaments represent some type of animal. A lot could be said, perhaps, about that animal-collecting impulse of mine—I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s so deeply rooted that I have a hard time even imagining why I would buy landscapes to hang on my walls or stars and snowflakes to hang on my tree. Do the the tiny mushrooms or the pom-pom Santa do anything to mitigate the level of crazy? Perhaps not enough, but my tree definitely looks like an explosion of crafty things. Perfect! I’m terrified for the fate of these crunchable ornaments. I have the most wonderful gray wool goat wearing a tiny fringed wool scarf—I took it out of the box and all of cats went crazy. I put it back. Maybe someday.

I spent all day writing—and some of the evening patching more concrete with my dad (or holding the flashlight while he patched). I’m starting to like the vegetable lamb thing again (more animals), which is good since we’ll be spending a lot more time together in the next few days. I’m having a hard time telling how and if this will actually turn out to be any good, but at least I’m working. It took me five hours to write one paragraph—the first one. When I closed my computer to go home and realized how few words I’d actually written—even if they did finally feel like the right words—I thought of one of my more disastrous sections last year, when I tried to get my students to discuss the first line of Mrs. Dalloway. They were unmoved, arguing that the one line didn’t matter any more than the rest of them, and that the story could have started off some other way. But it doesn’t. And those first lines are hard.

And with that, here is my last line of (unofficial, kind of failed) NaBloWriMo.

day 29: hmm

1) I had Indian buffet lunch with my dad. Then we went to Home Depot for concrete and started to patch the hole in my foundation that sometimes squirts water into my basement.

2)  After many hours of chiseling and inspecting concrete (and another trip to the hardware store), we had dinner at Alchemy. The onion rings were amazing.

3) The DVD drive in my MacBook hasn’t worked in weeks. I just figured out that my AppleCare expired two days ago. I want to scream.

4) I took my tree out of the box and plugged it in. The cats are already gnawing on it. This does not bode well for my plans of further ornamentation.

5) Back to school tomorrow. Also, more concrete. Perhaps I can use some to patch my DVD drive?

28: home

The old farmland on Irishtown Road where my aunt built her house feels like home.

The backyard where the boughs of a massive weeping willow used to hide my cousins and I—

the turns of the road, past the log cabin that my grandfather built, past the Bessemer where he worked,

past the houses of second cousins and great aunts and Agnes, who used to share the party line—

by Center Church and down Bottle Hill Road in the dusk—

This feels like home.

27: time

I think that most people who know Grove City at all know it only as the site of a large outlet mall.  I often wonder about the towns that must lie just beyond the outlet malls that I pass on my frequent long-distance drives—it feels sometimes like the Grange hall, Gray’s Nursery, and my grandparents’ house could be just down the road from any of them.

The nursery is closed now—not for the season, but for good. Too many times, I think, I’ve ended up in sites of decay and disrepair, taking pictures of my family’s past. Sometimes I wish that time would stop moving—that this town would stay still.

26: a lot of catchin’ up to do

We always go to the Guthrie, in downtown Grove City, where there is always only one movie at a time. It’s hit or miss. This weekend it was mostly miss; there isn’t much to recommend Old Dogs. We sat in the balcony, as my cousins and I did when we were younger, as my mother and her sisters and her brother did when they were much younger, and as my grandfather did when a ticket was five cents. Today it’s only five dollars. The movie was terrible—but it didn’t matter. It usually is.

day 25: no internet access

I made five pies yesterday: three berry and two pumpkin. I also went to the outlet mall (twice–it’s only down the road), picked up centerpieces with my cousin and Ricky from my grandparents’ house—where we spent a while admiring shelves of bells and old photographs of my mother and her twin sisters—and had some delicious (?) Sheetz coffee on the way home from County Market (where we saw some Amish shoppers outside of Aldi).

We’re currently in the intermission between food and pie, and I snuck away to blog on my mom’s computer. Due to the slightly strange status of the internet connection at my aunt’s house—the ethernet cords have to be fished up through the floor from the basement by my cousin—I wasn’t able to blog last night, post-pie. We didn’t finish until about 1am, at which point everyone was sprawled all over the couches, polishing my grandmother’s silver in anticipation of the main event. I made cranberry sauce and went to bed.

I think it’s time for pie now. Then we’re going to take a walk to see the neighbor’s ponies. More blogging to come.