Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Homes Away from Home













Summer has arrived in its fullest brightness. These sweet sunny steamy southern days remind me of when my dad was assigned to Liberia while my mother and I fanned ourselves in St. Pete before air conditioning in our house was a staple of any month from March to November. I remember going to the movies not so much for the movie itself but for the icicle decorations outside advertising to the world that inside we could be chilled to the bone. Those were the precious afternoons of "double features." I remember coming in from school to see my mother happily ironing (!)while listening to the latest on the radio which seemed to be tuned solely to news of Mickey Mantle. Letters from my dad ran to five or six typed pages. He didn't fade under the heat the way I did. The mail boat went out on Fridays so each letter was diary like. He never skimped on detail and found humor in everything. His postcards, on the other hand, said all we needed to know in few words and a good picture. B.E. said something nice when she came over. She said, "No matter where you move, your place always smells the same." I was surprised. I asked, "What does it smell like?" She said, "Wood and memories."






...may you find old postcards and significant scents to bless your day...












Sunday, June 20, 2010

Nearing the Solstice





It was a seashell kind of morning. I expected to walk out of the door of the Shire and find the ocean rolling along instead of the trees. I put on the bracelet I received on my sixth birthday and Diansica's beads from Key West. Daff and Oto gave me a L'Occitane tote which I immediately decorated with a sunflower. I wore my Thomas Tallis skirt (named after the fact that I had sewn it just before singing in the tiny New Hope Presbyterian Church for the first time and the anthem was by Thomas Tallis). Then it was off to Mexican food at Casa Ibarra, the beautifully restored yellow house in Hillsborough. After lunch we stopped in at Goodwill where I gave a little gasp. The Angel of the Day had been a card B.E. made several years ago, "The Angel of Kite Flying." I've never known quite what it meant but as I was browsing the books, I saw The Kite Runner for 81 cents. It's a book on my list to read. I opened it to see how I liked the beginning paragraphs and discovered it was set in Golden Gate Park where some kites were flying, "...a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky." A blurb review by Isabel Allende stated that after reading this book, everything else seemed bland. Sounds good!


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...may your special day be either a good memory or sometime in the future and bring you blessings.