When a Clothes Hamper is More than just a Clothes Hamper

The heavy white dirty clothes hamper of my mother’s was one of our favourite toys.  It could be anything. On Saturday evenings my mother would ritually perch each daughter on top, one after the other, after our evening bath and tightly roll our hair in torturously hard yellow plastic prickly curlers and wrap each of our head in paisley printed sateen babushkas.  This ritual would ensure that each of her offspring would have cute Shirley Temple curls for church the next morning.  On Saturdays only was the hamper viewed as being contributory to a torturous night sleep…

for the rest of the week it was an instrument of imagination.

The outside of the hamper was white plastic imprinted with maniacal swirls and stars. I figured out if I put a piece of blank paper over it and rubbed with a wax crayon I could get the most interesting of designs a few of which were good enough to find their way on the refrigerator door or taped to the kitchen cupboard.

The hamper was the best place to hide when the neighbour kids were over to play hide and seek.  A little kid hoped for a few dirty clothes at the bottom to soften the seclusion…especially if the seeker was especially slow that day.  And because the lid was heavy and closed with a “thud” you were secure in a relatively sound proof hiding place to giggle freely over the ingenious choice of hiding spots without giving yourself away.

And what a wonderful pretend countertop or desk!  My sisters and I would drag it out of the bathroom into the living room or our bedroom and have it serve an alter when we played mass, or a desk when we played school or even a kitchen counter on which we rolled out imaginary dough to make the best Saskatoon pies on the planet.  It was also an ironing board, a surfboard, a drum and even a “time out” spot for the cat where we’d stick out finger in the air holes at the back and have Beatrice the Cat bat away.

I have fond, fond memories of that sturdy white clothes hamper with it’s glittering gold handles.

My friends who have kids often tell me that when their children are very small they seem to have more fun playing with the boxes their toys came in rather than the toys themselves.  When do we lose the ability to amuse ourselves with the basic of materials and our own imaginations?  So often we automatically think, “if only I had a DS or a Wii or an X-box”, not that there is anything wrong with owning these things, but remember the good ol’ days when the box the new washing machine came in caused enough excitement to last a week.  Or if the cat had kittens your mother didn’t see you for the whole summer because you planted yourself beside that box of kittens at every opportunity.

I wonder if those days still exist for children?

So inexpensive.

So simple.

So imaginative.

So incredibly filled with whatever potential the imagination holds.

Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long Leggedy Beasties

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!
~

Scottish Saying

Soon it will be Halloween.  I’ve never really participated with much enthusiasm when it came to fully reveling in this holiday.  I grew up on a farm a fifteen minute drive from town.  Trick or treating was limited to a few scattered farmhouses in the neighborhood so the haul of sweeties was never a big one.

The BEST costume I had was when I was in kindergarten.  My mom made me a witch outfit.  I loved it.  It consisted of an old black skit, my mom’s black turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up, a crepe paper cape and a cardboard  hat.  When I wore it, I oozed Halloween-ness … although all pictures of that time show me with a red chapped nose and white tissues poking from my sleeves.

Another year I was an elf in a borrowed costume from a friend of my mother’s. The school Halloween party was in the school gym and I figured I was the ringer for the “apple bob” competition but whenever I bobbed for apples my little green hat would fall off and land in the communal tin tub water (and NOW I say EWWW!).  It was very frustrating.  And to add to my discomfort my leotards were too large for me and kept pooling at my ankles causing me to continually hike them up in a VERY unladylike manner.

Not long after I decided to be a sheriff ghost.  Not a ghost of a sheriff, but a sheriff ghost.  There is a difference I’ll have you know.  I was very ingenious when it came to the construction of this costume.  I carefully  I cut two dime sized holes in a bed sheet, made a sheriff star out of tinfoil and engraved “Sherriff Ghost” on it incase anyone got confused, then proudly put a cowboy hat on my head.  And seeing how ghosts are already dead, there was no need for protection so packing a gun was unnecessary.

The year I went as a Ukrainian baba was my last year of trick or treating.  I think I was only ten years old and already beginning to tire of the production of it all.  I attempted to look like an old bosomy woman with a blue and white polka-dotted dress complete with ceramic cherry broach,  a paisley kerchief on my head and tied at my chin, pillows stuffed in strategic places,  and misapplied red lipstick.  I thought I was fabulous…but I was upstaged by my cute little sister who went as a something cute like Holly Hobby or a princess or something I can’t remember but still feel somewhat resentful about.

This year I contemplated creating a costume where I would be  “the Queen of the Universe” complete with solar systems and black holes swirling around me and a glittering tiara on my head.  But , alas, the planets wouldn’t align and I didn’t have time, or the energy…ok AND the motivation to do its creation justice.

Sometimes I wish I could get more wrapped up in the festivities of Halloween.  The thought of donning a new persona if only for an evening is a tempting one.   There are so many I’d like to try on for size…the Queen of Hearts, Marilyn Monroe, Static Cling…the choice seems to be more difficult to make than the costume itself.  Maybe I should start strategizing my costume for next year now, that should give me plenty of time to make it spectacular!

Or maybe I can just enjoy the trick-or-treat sized candy bars available and watch a good horror flick on television to satisfy my Halloween craving.

What are you being for Halloween?  What’s been the BEST costume you’ve ever had?

To Knit Up the Ravelled Sleeve of Care

“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast”.

~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

I should never sleep in.

I know this but I do it anyway.

It’s not that my alarm didn’t go off, or that I slept through the clock radio, but I actually woke up five minutes before my alarm was set to go off and purposely set it a half an hour later….

then proceeded to lay awake thinking of all the things I won’t be able to do now that I’ve hacked half an hour off my day.

I don’t often “sleep in”on a work morning.  It’s just that I didn’t sleep very well – ok I didn’t really sleep at all last night.  I tossed and turned.  Then tossed again.  Then turned on the television (let me tell you that there is NOTHING on television 2:52 am when you only have basic cable).   Then surfed the net, listened to a couple dozen podcasts, played some solitaire, wrote a bit.

And then, around 5:20 in the morning, I started to feel as though maybe I could drift off…exactly 30 minutes before I was due to get up.

So I decided to sleep in.

Which meant that I felt behind all day.  Not enough time for adequate caffeine consumption.  Not enough time to beat the line up at the Starbucks drive thru.  Not enough time to get all my photocopying done before classes started..

Not enough time.

Not enough time.

Not enough time.

But really, you can never make up the time you lose when it comes to sleep.  At least you can’t steal it from your morning because then you just feel short-changed all day.

At least I do.  And grumpy.

Very, very grumpy.

So tonight it’s an evening of crawling in early, at least early for me.  And here’s hoping that my “chief nourisher in life’s feast” isn’t sitting on his ass having a coffee break.

Repost: You Can Dress Me Up But you Cant Take Me Out

I have the tendency to fall.

Often.

I don’t think it’s because I’m exceptionally clumsy.  I just get preoccupied.  And sometimes I find it difficult to multitask.  Walking and talking can be difficult.  Walking, talking and sightseeing can be even more difficult.

Interestingly enough I fall most often in foreign countries.  I’ve had epic falls.  One time I fell in Rome.  I was with a group of students, carrying a backpack of mammoth proportions when I just,

well,

fell.  Took a nice gouge out of my left knee.  Our lovely gentlemanly tour guide had brought his teenage son with us that day.  Both were very concerned about my injury.  The attention of a handsome Italian man did help alleviate my humiliation.  His big brown eyes framed by thick lashes looking at me with deep concern and sympathy.

*Sigh*

Another example of an epic fall in a foreign country occurred, in Japan.  I’m walking and gawking and

down I go

in the middle of an intersection.

This time, however, it wasn’t purely my fault.  A fleet of European tourists on bicycles cut in front of me and threw me off balance.  Falling on my left knee again and ripping a hole in my jeans.  Which meant that I had to go to the Gap and buy a new pair.

My experience buying blue jeans in Tokyo was not a pleasant one.  I went to the rack and sorted through the sizes. Size 0, size 0 size 2, size 2, size 2, size 4, size 6, size 6….

…

size 8!!

One size 8 in all the Gap.  In stock for the rare “chubby” Japanese girl.

*Sigh*

Picture it. The south of France.  A beautiful bed and breakfast outside the town of Carcassonne.  I climb the staircase to the room to deposit my suitcase.  Deliver the suitcase successfully.  Close the door to the room to descend the stairs when I notice these amazing photographs framed on the wall.  All sepia nostalgic oozing in Provencal charm when…

…down the staircase I plummet.

*Sigh*

Thankfully there was a small landing after five or six steps before the stairs turned toward a set of ten.

Now my left knee has weird ganglion-ish scar tissue.  Not a pretty sight., but little souvenirs of past trips (and past “trips”) taken.

If since learned that if I’m traveling alone to STOP first. Then look.  This way I can really be aware of what is around me.  Appreciate what is new.  Smell and hear and see and touch without having to concentrate on walking. Or if I’m not alone in a new environs to take the arm of my traveling companion. Then, I can safely take in the sights without doing undo harm to myself.

Like life.

When your world gets chaotic, stop and look and get a clear visual of your immediate situation.  Appreciate and evaluate then cautiously propel yourself forward.

Or

when life gets unfamiliar to take the arm of someone you trust.  Heart breaks.  Injuries. Failures.  New jobs.  New loves.  New schools.

The journey will then be far more successful.

An Open Letter to the First Snowfall of the Season

Dear Dumpage,

I have to admit I’m not impressed with your unannounced arrival.  It was purely unanticipated on my part and I can only call it rude.  As any well-meaning season knows, a heartfelt and welcome arrival is one that occurs gently.  A gradual shifting of temperature change and slow morphing of precipitation from a liquid to a semi-solid is appreciated. But not you and not last night.  You slammed into the my neck of the woods with your obtrusive whiteness making the fact I can’t find my mittens onerous and inconvenient.

And don’t get me started on the fact I still house my golf clubs in the back of my vehicle.  No, I’m not ready to remove them and replace them with my cross-country skis, thank you very much.  I want to make THAT transition on my OWN time.  I resent the fact you’re forcing my hand when it comes to this.  You can sting my cheeks with your impudent flakes until I”m blue in the face but I’m not going to budge on this one.  The clubs will be rattling their lighthearted tune echoing of sunlit summer days of yore for several more weeks I’ll have you know.

It’s with brutal honestly I tell you that I have not missed you.  Not even remotely.  I have attempted to completely obliterate you  from my memory and therefore have not reflected on our past interactions with any sort of whimsy or nostalgia.  Once in a while I have flashbacks of freezing appendages, itchy toques and uncontrollable slippages on ice all causing me to sigh in despondency.  But I’ve been fighting back with doses of vitamin D,  and mist tans, and surfing travel sites of warm and welcoming tropical locales.

You are not yet welcome in my world.  Sure, at this time of the year you have a few minions who naively, and somewhat robotically revel in your arrival.  They feign excitement but we all know they’ve been duped by your pathetic Christmas card charm.

Please know I have not completely written you off as a useless season.  Come December 24^th you’ll be more than welcome to settle in and contribute romantically in your fairytale whiteness lending a nostalgic quality to my Christmas, but until then I request that you hang in the periphery of my place of residence, in a neighboring province perhaps, and wait until I’m ready to deal with the inconveniences that come with your arrival.

Respectfully yours

Me

The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.  ~e.e. cummings

 

~ Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring. ~ Charles Dickens

 

Creamy Chocolate Fudge Cake a.k.a The Weekend

You know what I like about Friday evenings?  Not that it’s a time of partying or dancing or late night carousing,

which it very well could but doesn’t have to be.

No.  I like the fact the entire weekend is sitting before me.  Time filled with potential.  Like an entire chocolate fudge cake just removed from the oven and sitting on the kitchen counter cooling.  Waiting to be covered in creamy buttermilk icing.

Anticipating the first forkful then devouring the entire thing.

This evening the cake is still sitting on the counter.  It’s early Friday evening and I’m in my flannel pajamas curled up in bed

knowing,

with blessed relief,

that I have the ENTIRE weekend before me.

The pieces of my weekend vary from week to week.  Sometimes one piece will be to sleep in as long as my body (and mind) will let me, my mission being to stockpile as much REM as possible.  It’s decadently delightful to wake up when the sun is already up!

Sometimes my second piece of weekend cake is to get my house “in order”

literally.

Cleaning bathrooms, washing floors and doing laundry.  Always with good intentions but oftentimes never accomplished.  I may have to just pick away at this piece throughout the week.  I wish I enjoyed the taste of this piece more than I do, but is usually  find it

bitter

and dry

and more boring than not.

A third piece, of course, is to visit and coffee and partake in joyous libations with friends.  A standing morning coffee with parents, a jaunt to the farmers market.  Lunch or supper with friends.  Strengthening the bonds of friendship

with the investment of time.

Often a piece will include work.  Sad but true.  It’s this piece that makes me feel guilty if I don’t partake. I’ll have to accomplish a bit of marking and planning just to settle any work anxiety that may surface

and niggle

at any attempt at an entire weekend of vegetation.

And, sometimes, if a final piece remains it will be one of complete indulgence.  A massage, a pedicure, an afternoon of window shopping, looking for nothing and everything in particular.  Or maybe even a couple or three or (shall I dare say it) four hours of reading…FICTION!

But for now,

at this very minute,

the cake sits in its entirety on my kitchen counter.  An entire weekend waiting for me to cut into it and devour it at will.

But for now,

just knowing it exists

makes me simply happy.

Repost: Flaunting the Fortrel

You know how there are some things in our childhood that we are unable to let go of no matter how many years have passed?  Here’s one of mine:

I remember the colour of the dress I wanted when I was five years old. It was bubblegum pink in shiny pink satin.  Funny thing is I, in my adulthood, own nothing even remotely similar in my wardrobe and never have.

My older sister was the one who wore the pink satin with the delicate, white lace trim.

I was a “tomboy”.  I loved my blue jeans.  Mom knew this so instead of satin I got a dress in light blue fortrel with white piping and buttons.  The “sister” also got the patent black shiny shoes with the glittery silver buckle.  I got the brown soft leather shoes with the black stitching and decorative punch holes.

Her shoes tapped as she walked.

Mine shuffled.

I always thought this was unfair.  I don’t know why.  I thought the pink dress and black shoes were sooooo pretty.  Not that I wanted to wear them for myself but I didn’t want my sister to have them either.

I think this dress choice affected me somewhat growing up.  I remember going through a plaid shirt and jeans phase all through junior high.  It got so that even my dad made the comment “you should buy yourself a shirt.  Something with ruffles or lace or something.”  I never knew my dad noticed.

I’ve always had a strong attraction towards neutrals.  Basic black isn’t just a staple in my wardrobe…it my wardrobe.  Basic black is what I feel most like myself in.  I’m not saying if Mom had chosen the pink satin for me my closet would presently be filled with florals and pastels. What I do think is that maybe mom knew me better than I did myself.  I was blue and brown leather.  I think she was trying her best to let our own little identities to come out and show themselves distinct from each other.

I have to admit, however, I do have one shirt in cherry blossom pink that obtrusively hangs in my closet amidst the stoic black articles of clothing.

One of these days I’ll channel my little girl self and wear it in public.

When You Need a “Time Out”

I’m reading “By Nightfall” by Michael Cunningham and I’ve come across this passage:

“ – a study- with profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever…there were three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowed with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-boated paperback copy of Daniel Deronda”(page 45).

I love the description of this space and I want to visit it.  Inhabit it for a summer.  It is a place I could spend an entire season cuddling with the cats and  reading all of the books  (yay George Eliot!) in a big comfy chair.

Lately it seems as though there has been a plethora of books and articles and websites telling us how to create a personal niche that is truly and exclusively your own.  Some say to create a “dream collage”, or “sacred space” or even a “meditation corner”.  I say phooey.  You don’t need a formal name, an area with a label.  All you need a place where you can breathe and be distracted from reality if only for a few minutes. Nothing formal, nothing premeditated or organized.  Just a spot.  A personal” time out” site.  And it doesn’t even have to be in your own home.  The little corner table at the coffee shop down the street, the back desk on the third floor of the public library.  A place to roost.

I have two spots.  One is my bedroom especially now that it’s been repainted.  It’s calm and cozy and all it needs is a suitable bookshelf to house all the books I’ve bought but have yet to read (yes…there are enough to fill a bookshelf.  At the moment they’re residing in my kitchen cupboards…loooong story).  The second in the “big boy” lazy boy recliner at my mom and dad’s.  There seems to be good feng shui where that Lazy Boy is situated that can’t be explained.

But, because this is MY space I and I do have a penchant to dream…and dream big I did actually find a picture of my dream “time out” spot.  Want to see it? I found it on  http://www.desiretoinspire.net/

Here it is:

Isn’t it beautiful?  What is you “space”?  Your spot of refuge and vegetation?  Write and let me know!

Repost: A Ritual Called Reading

I’ve been chastised and persecuted and ridiculed in public to the point where I have to go underground in order to practice a ritual that is so frowned upon by society I dare not reveal it to anyone…

…ok, maybe to you.

Here it goes…

I don’t read novels the same way most people do.

Friends have screamed,”but you ruin the ending that way!” ” Why would you do that? That is not how you’re supposed to read a book!”  ” It’s just wrong!” ” You’re a freak!” And I am not giving way to melodrama here…these are direct quotes, most of them from loved ones.

Granted I am the type of personality that hates surprises.  When I was a kid, and Mom and Dad where out, I’d search the house high and low to find my Christmas gifts.  And I don’t particularly like going to movies because I can’t skip ahead or fast forward to the end of the movie, watch the resolution, then rewind the flick back to where I left off.

I much prefer DVD’s for this reason.

When I start a book I don’t just flip to the first page of the first chapter.  Rather my reading ritual is to scour all the publication or newspaper accolades (snippets that are listed on the first page or two  of some books, or sometimes grace the back cover).  I’m not sure why I want to know other opinions before I come to my own but if one of the accolades is from an author I admire, I’m more likely to purchase the HARDCOVER of the intended book. I then usually read any author information, or book club or readers club suggested questions and answers if they are included in the publication.  Finally I read the interview with the author at the back of the book if there happens to be one.

Then, and only then, do  I settle in and read the first quarter or first third of a novel. Next I flip to the back and read the ending. Now I don’t just leave it at that.  I DO go back and continue from where I left off.  I do have a genuine interest in seeing how the author gets to his final plot destination.

Who’s to say an author’s true intent is to have his or her novel read from front to back, beginning to end, following the story in order of the page numbers?

I’d like to think I do this is because I enjoy the journey of the read as well as the destination.  There have been a couple of books where skipping to the end has given me NO clues to the resolution of plot.  “Boys in Trees” and by Mary Swan being one and “Four Letters of Love” by Niall Williams being the other and I still enjoyed both immensely.

Is there a proper way to read a book?

Harold Bloom writes in the preface of his book How to Read and Why : “There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read… Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is the most healing of pleasures.  It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends.  Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.”

To me, reading a novel has become almost ritualistic.  A comforting routine that allows me, as Bloom suggests, solitude without loneliness.

It’s all about Lenny

At the end of June of this year, while my all time favourite singer and long time crush, Lenny Kravitz was having a refreshment on a patio somewhere in New Orleans when out of the blue he heard his own music being played…

live, just down the street from where he was sitting.

So, as any decent recording artist would do when flattered by imitation,he decided to check it out.   And, lo and behold, it was a local high school choir singing “Fly Away” in an open auditorium at a nearby park.  And Lenny, in an act of quintessential “cooldom” joined them much to the choir’s astonishment and delight.

How ultimately surreal would that be!  I WISH Lenny would come visit me while I’m singing his tunes as I clean my condo, or while seat dancing driving to work in the morning.  I love this story because it goes to show that

if you live it

and breathe it

and sing it

dreams really can manifest themselves.

It just takes some strategic variables like location and timing and, more often than not, perspective. If you’re consistently “singing” your dream, its tune always in the back of your mind and on the tip of your tongue and not just conjured up when you’ve got a spare moment or during “scheduled” dream time

manifestation is immanent.

I’d like to think timing and perspective will just take care of themselves because they will always exist or the individual has some degree of power over both.  Location, however…

“I’d fly above the trees

Over the seas in all degrees

To anywhere I please”