Salty like hot dogs (and tears). Sweet like marmalade (and life).
Running boy from Time for Bed, Ned by Pam Zinnemann-Hope, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton
Man on a bench from The Old Man and the Afternoon Cat by Michaela Muntean, illustrated by Bari Weissman
Rabbit from ?
I sent this one to my son, Sam, because it fit his sense of humor. The caption went something like this — “He was so busy watching the man with the parachute that he didn’t notice the birds perched above his lemonade.”
It makes me chuckle.
I was insistent that we have our Easter egg hunt in the orchard… because of this picture
Not quite 50 years ago, in that same exact spot, we hunted for Easter eggs — my brothers and sister and I. I don’t think we called it the orchard in those days because it was almost inconceivable that those saplings would actually grow into trees that would bear fruit.
My mother stood in the middle and watched us race around looking for eggs — real eggs, hardboiled and dyed, not plastic and filled with candy.
This year, we filled plastic eggs for Henry. Mary and Laurel hid them in the orchard and on the way to the orchard.
Some were placed high in the trees. Henry isn’t up to climbing yet, so his uncle “Fred” helped him reach them.
I know Easter isn’t about the eggs and the egg hunts, but there’s something deeply satisfying about so many generations doing the same activity on the same piece of land.
“I ran away once and you didn’t even notice,” one of my children told me accusingly.
It brought back a flood of memories.
I ran away once. Slighted once too often by my siblings, unappreciated by my parents — I knew it was the only thing I could do. So I put a loaf of bread in my backpack, along with a flashlight, a jacket, and a pack of matches, and headed up the hill behind our house.
The first bit was steep and prickly with wild raspberry bushes. I huffed with exertion and didn’t stop to enjoy a single berry.
I hiked past the little spring-house that had been the source of water for the house before my parents dug a well.
Finally I reached a grassy knoll and sat down to rest.
I waited for someone to come looking for me. Surely someone would notice I was gone.
I waited, imagining the shock and the worry. My mother would ask each sibling, “Have you seen Sally?” and the worry would grow.
They would look all around the house and the barns. She’d probably make Peter or Jimmy climb into the hayloft to see if I was there.
But they wouldn’t find me.
The tall grass on the hill was perfect for putting between my thumbs and whistling — but I stopped myself. Someone would hear it. Then they would know where I was.
The grassy knoll, it turned out, was also an ant hill so I moved to a little mossy spot near a tree.
I pulled out my loaf of bread and ate a slice — not because I was hungry, but because I was bored. Plain bread is also boring, I discovered. I wished I had brought a jar of peanut butter. I put the bread away because I knew it would have to last me at least a week.
As I started to stretch out in the moss for a little rest, I nearly placed my hand in a pile of animal droppings. Abruptly I sat up again. Hugging my knees, I started to cry. Surely I was the most unloved child ever.
But down the hill was my house.
And my family.
And my dog.
And our passel of cats.
I climbed to my feet and headed back.
My mother was working in the garden, picking beans or peas.
“I ran away,” I announced to her as I got closer, “and you didn’t even notice.”
She straightened up and looked at me. “You need to be gone more than 20 minutes if you want me to notice,” she said.
And she went back to work.
All that passed through my mind when my own child told me about running away.
I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t repeat my mother’s words.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Child with suitcase and backpack from Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah! by Allan Sherman and Lou Busch, illustrated by Jack E. Davis
Plants from a broken pop-up book
Laurel sat next to me on the couch last night when I started this post by writing the title and inserting the picture I planned to use.
“Are you going to write about me?” she asked. “I help.”
Indeed she does. Laurel is an outstanding sous chef. She is often with me in the kitchen at dinner time helping with meal prep. She scours the internet for healthy recipes and sometimes volunteers to make dinner, on which occasions I am her sous chef. I think that’s pretty remarkable for a 13-year-old.
Mary helps, too, in her own way. She empties the dishwasher, unasked and often unseen. She brings my father his nightly beer. She makes sure he has the baseball game or Wheel of Fortune on after dinner. She has fixed him lunch on days when I’m not available. My father will say, “Mary is solid,” which I think may be cringe-worthy words for a 17-year-old to hear, but by which he means that he can count on her, a high compliment.
And the truth is, all my kids are great helpers. They have acted as gardeners and landscapers around my parents’ property, mowing the lawn, weeding the myrtle, cleaning up sticks and debris. They have chauffeured, accompanied, and assisted, attending to their elderly grandparents in so many ways.
Lately, some of my adult children have been caregivers, staying with my father over weekends when I need to be away. It’s a huge help to me.
I’m quite sure they inherited the helping gene from their father. Bud is one of the hardest-working, most generous people I know.
So thank you to all my helpers. You know who you are. I see what you’re doing and I appreciate it.
This picture is very early in my whole cutting-up-books-to-make-cards adventure.
The tree is from Garth Williams’ beautiful book, The Rabbits’ Wedding, the book that started it all. I picked it up at a yard sale, a gorgeous oversized picture book that had sat in the rain. It was starting to mold and smell — but the illustrations were so beautiful that I couldn’t stand the thought of it going to the dump. So, blindly, I paid a ridiculous amount of money for a soggy moldy book — 50¢ — and brought it home not knowing what I would do with it.
The girl is from Sarah’s Unicorn by Bruce and Katherine Coville. The illustrations in the book were all black-and-white, so I watercolored her, as well as the background.
I don’t know where the bird and nest are from.
The other day I stopped by the thrift store again.
I have a routine. When I drop my father at the nursing home where my mother had been — he likes to visit some of the employees — I make a quick trip to the thrift store. One is just down the road from the other.
I headed for the bookshelves where I found a worker was pulling books off and tossing them into a box.
“Are you getting rid of those?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “Who would want them?” She picked up a paperback novel that had obviously either sat in the rain or been dropped in the toilet and held it out to me.
“I might like some of these picture books,” I said, pulling one out of the box.
I hit the mother lode that day.
Bedraggled, colored-in, torn, falling apart books are my favorite. I have no guilt cutting them up. I feel as though I’m giving them a new life.
When I made Laurel a coupon book for her 13th birthday, I cut up our personal copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo (author – Arlene Mosel, illustrator – Blair Lent). The book about the younger brother with a short name and the older brother with a very long name was a favorite with my children.
Chang is tenacious about getting help for his brother, the title character.
I think that’s what I love about the story. Brother looking out for brother.
For Laurel, my youngest daughter, a girl with seven older siblings, she has a lot of people to look out for — and a lot of people who look out for her. I thought it was okay to use that book. A good reminder.
Because that’s what family is all about — life/love in brokenness and care for one another.
The background is from Mother Night by Denys Cazet.
The family is from Wheels on the Bus (a Raffi Song to Read book) illustrated by Sylvie Kantorovitz Wickstrom.
I love the way this picture turned out. The family is the point of light in a dark world.
The question is, are they coming or going? Are they refugees fleeing a greater darkness? Or are they arriving home after a long journey?
Whichever it is, I see them pausing to look at their house.
In statistics, an outlier is an observation point that is distant from other observations.
I don’t think of my little family as outliers, though. I think of them as looking at home.
For a couple of years, my father kept saying, “I need one of those things,” and he would mimic someone holding a device in their hand and tapping on the screen.
We tried to convince him that an iPad would work well for him — it’s bigger and does a lot of the same things — but no dice. He was sure he needed a smart phone.
Last summer one of my sons upgraded from a iPod Touch to an iPhone, so we gave his iPod to my father. We could connect it to wi-fi in the house and it would function in basically the same way as a phone. My son set up an iTunes account for him, and I had my sister send him his one and only message.
At 87, this is one new trick the old dog can’t learn.
It sits on his tray table. I charge it about once a week for him. The one time I forgot, he told me that we needed to buy new batteries for it. Modern technology is hard for an older person to understand — even the basics of recharging a device.
But every day, he picks it up and pushes the home button. I put a picture of my mother on his lock screen.
“Good morning, Elinor,” he says, and then he sets it down.
I think he finds some security in seeing her face each day.
He found a use for the iPod I wouldn’t have guessed.
I mailed this card to my friend, Shannon, whose blog, moving honestly, is a most aptly named blog. The barn is from a falling apart copy of Ox-Cart Man, written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure where the bunny or the background came from. I’m pretty sure that the rabbit was in an over-sized scribbled-in copy of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The snow scene — I just don’t know. I should keep better track of these things so I can give appropriate credit.
But here it is — April 1 — and I woke up to snow.
Every day, my father looks for blue skies. “Do you think we’ll see any blue skies today?” he asks every morning, peering out the window, not unlike my rabbit, wishing that he wasn’t seeing snow.
I left the house early this morning. My husband knows how stressed I have been lately and offered to hold down the fort so I could do something fun. I made plans to meet one of my children for breakfast.
My drive was beautiful. Snow clung to the trees and mist hung like a curtain on the hills. I finally pulled over to take a picture.
“Fred” treated me to breakfast. When we were going through the line, I answered a trivia question and won a free blueberry muffin from the chef. He rang wind chimes over the register when I told him the correct answer. His glasses were modeled after Elton John’s — white and rhinestone encrusted. I tried to refuse the prize because he had given me a hint.
“No, no,” he said, “I only told you what I wanted to tell you.”
He smiled, handed me my muffin, and started singing. It wasn’t “Good-bye Yellow Brick Road.” “Fred” says he sings all the time.
We went to a craft store after breakfast. I needed more Modge-Podge for my collages.
“Do you want me to ask where it is?” “Fred” asked.
“No,” I said, ” I think I’d just like to wander and find it.”
So we wandered, not in any order, sort of serpentine.
A man in the poster section called to us. “Hey! Look at this one,” he said to us as we walked past. He lifted a poster out that showed a silhouette of a cowboy riding a horse against a backdrop of red sky. “My wife knows this guy. She used to live in Wyoming.” The man was older, wearing a red flannel shirt and a NASCAR cap, and glasses with photochromic lenses — and he was pleased as punch that he was that close to celebrity.
“That’s pretty cool,” “Fred” and I both told him.
We continued our lazy search for Modge-Podge and eventually found it.
When I finally got back home, my dad asked if I had seen any blue skies.
“Not today,” I told him.
“Are we going to see blue skies sometime?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
He’s living in anticipation of those blue skies. I know they’ll come. Sooner or later.
But for today, I’m going to live in the moment. I’m going to eat a blueberry muffin given to me because I knew something about David Cassidy, and revel in the fact that I met a man whose wife knows the guy on a cowboy poster.
It’s a good day.
Thinking today about fortune…
I found many quotes about fortune favoring boldness or bravery:
Then I took a little road trip.
I found this fascinating article about how changing a simple thing like font can improve retention and student performance.
And I found a quote from an entrepreneur, a young woman who followed her dreams and started an e-commerce fashion site
This seemed an appropriate quote to follow hers:
Louis Pasteur, the Father of Microbiology, kept cropping up.
Really, I was looking for a quote about bowling. Something along the lines of
I can’t find anybody who said that though.
But I know it to be true.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 