The Meaning of Things

I had some time to do quilting today.  That was a miracle, considering that in the past few days, Buddy was so sick that I thought he was going to die, I had a cold, and Mike had a night of absolutely no sleep and missed work today.  After Nick went to school, Mike and I went to the junkyard together.  Yesterday, we'd had to cancel our babysitter because I didn't feel well, but going to the junkyard actually felt like a date.  Okay, it wasn't a high-end, dress-to-the-nines date.  I could have told him I had things to do and stayed behind.  I could have read, quilted, or gone to Elliot Bay Books to get more Moleskine notebooks.  I didn't.  Mike had been up all night, so instead, I went with him to the junk yard. 

Mike and I could use a fancy date too, but the important part was that we were alone together.  We talked, we laughed, we worried out loud, and we were quiet. I read the directions to him to get there, tried hand him the right tools as he pulled the part he needed.  We laughed walking back to our neat little Prius, surrounded by beat-down cars including one that had a bumper sticker that said 'Redneck Stripper.'  Our bumper sticker says 'Paddle faster.  I hear banjos.'

After that, Mike had to stop at the auto parts store.  Exciting, huh? I walked over to the grocery store to pick up some things so he could make his mom's special mac and cheese for dinner.  On his way back to meet me, he bought a salad for me from Taco Time.  He'd been listening when I'd said I was hungry. 

These were all very ordinary events, even boring if you think about them a certain way.  But I was thinking about it while I stitched my quilt tonight.  I'm making an ordinary fence rail quilt.  It's pretty, but very simple.  I'll probably give it away because, as I worked, the recipient settled into my mind.  To make a fence rail quilt, you take strips of fabric.  You stitch them together and cut out squares.  You arrange the squares so that the first block of strips in the row are up, the second block is across.  You sew them so that they rock back and forth this way all across the quilt.  It's quick to put together and now all I have to do is put on a border and quilt it.  You see, simple. 

Tonight, as I said goodnight to Mike, I noticed the quilt that lay over him.  I had appliqued a circle onto it that fell just about where his belly button was and a star laid across his heart.  I really do think that there is meaning in ordinary things.  It's hard to say why a little salad would feel like red roses or how a quilt lying over someone who's half asleep would feel like a thin layer of love used to protect him. 

Thank you for listening, jb

So Much Quiet

I haven't managed to shift into the fall season gracefully.  The first week Nick was back to school and Mike headed back to work, I ran errands like crazy trying to catch up.  I'd missed some things since our friends came in from out of town and we extended our vacation with them.  I forgot about the two small bags to return to the grocery store and the department store that got lost under the pile of backpacks and the picnic basket.  It was embarrassing to think of returning them.  For the summer activities, I had let go of any semblance of neatness so that Nick's room evolved to a state of having only a narrow path through which he traveled to get into his bed.  Then, my Himalayan Blackberry, the worst of the exotic plants I want to eliminate from my yard had grown up the side of the garage and up and across the roof of our shed.  It hasn't even produced enough berries to redeem itself from my hostility. 

For the past two weeks, I accomplished nothing.  On Labor Day, I tripped and fell going into the Evergreen State Fair.  Oh, I had looked forward to that day, but lost most of it in a haze resulting from the jolt.  Now, two weeks later, the road rash on my leg is just shedding the last of its scabs, and still keeping me up at night with the itching.  My elbow really isn't broken.  It aches now and then, but I can still hit a very high note and leap wildly when I accidentally tap it on something solid.  With all of this attention on my newfound frailty, Nick is changing.  I dread the day when he takes my elbow to step up over a curb.  I know it's coming sooner than I care to think about.  Oh, I want him to be a sympathetic man.  I just don't want to be the recipient of that sympathy.

In all of that healing, I missed a weekend at the Scout camp, but then Nick missed it too by catching a weekend cold.  Oh, he was so sad he missed his weekend and not a school day.  Not one.  But the good news for him was that we allowed him to skip a half a day of school and go to the Puyallup Fair.  Now, when do I get to go?  My fair experience this year was flawed.

Now finally this week, I feel up to doing things.  I could go to the Seattle Art Museum.  I could walk through the sculpture garden on the waterfront.  I could paint, bike, swim, or hike trails, but instead of loading my bike onto the rack and finding a trail, I'm hanging around at home.  Worse than that, I'm actually spinning around and doing mostly nothing all day.  Just about the time the boys are getting off the bus, I'm gearing up for some real fun.  I'm on the verge of quilting, writing, or finally learning how to knit socks.  I could save some money and make notebooks, but no.  I'm just hanging about.

God knows, I haven't found a notebook out there that satisfies me lately.  After a week of hobbling around in search of something decent now that our local Borders has closed, I finally went all the way into Seattle to find notebooks. Elliot Bay Books never disappoints.  I think I spent $100.00 on all my happiness in just being there.  I bought three books for Nick and a couple for me.  One of them has satisfied me with its title alone, 'Crimes in Southern Indiana.'  Now I could tell you a thing or two about crimes in Southern Indiana.  I'll let you know if the book runs down that country lane.  Doesn't matter, really.  I have my own mental book with that title, but I'll get to that later too, a lot later.  Plus, I brought home a couple of almost-perfect notebooks from Moleskine.

I like the Moleskine notebooks.  I really do.  But the one I just started using has, on it's first page,

In case of loss, please return to:
________________________________
________________________________
________________________________
________________________________
As a reward: $ ____________________.

Okay, I get the part about returning the notebook.  It'd be embarrassing to lose one, especially with all that personal dross.  I haven't lost one.  I wouldn't, I think.  Still, I'm not likely to put my address into every one.  I'm still too burned by that identity theft thing that happened last July to go throwing my personal information around, even in a notebook that I don't expect anyone else to open. 

The reward part is just hubris.  I mean really.  Here sits a person with this brand new orange notebook.  She opens it to the first page.  There it is, the valuation portion of her thought process.  But wait, she hasn't even put her name in the upper right corner the way she usually does.  There are lines for that.  (She hates lines in her notebooks.)  Then, after she's supposed to write down her personal stats and doesn't, she has to determine the value of this as yet unwritten work.  Really?

I'm supposed to think about all those early morning entries, the ones in which I'm still asleep with the cracked Itoya pen in my hand, wishing I had two or three more hours of sleep, the ones in which I can't even spell, let alone carry on a coherent thought?  It's embarrassing to think of how many times I wrote about how little sleep I got the night before and the aches and pains I bear, let alone the random thoughts that come when I'm still lost in an incoherent dream from the night before.  My notebooks aren't worth a reward. 

That said, I scribbled out that section of my new notebook and still revel in it's silky pages and the ease with which I haul it around with me wherever I go.  I'll probably buy more the next time I go to Elliot Bay Books, but I'll probably scribble out that part of the notebook with some swirly scribbles.

So this week, I've been reading too much and cleaning too much and thinking too much about the first page of a new notebook.  Mike might disagree that I've been cleaning too much.  What I'm doing is trying to make it easier on him.  The only good new in procrastinating all my really interesting activities is that I've reclaimed Nick's room and our guest room. The nice thing is that this guest room has an empty desk to which I can escape when the silence becomes unbearable at 2pm. 

Thank you for listening, jb