I know exactly where they are!

This afternoon, we did shopping. Hobby Lobby for stuff to make little people dollies. Brookshires for groceries – I didn’t remember to take the list in, but I did remember what was on it, because everything started with C:

Cokes (diet)

Coffee (espresso beans, and Community with Chicory)

Cream (half-n-half)

Cat litter

Card (birthday).

So, that was okay. After that, we drove to Noonday, to Marcus’ antique store. Bob W is doing metal sculpture these days – he’s in his Praying Mantis period. Here’s a picture of the first one, about two foot tall, and sold and living in Tennessee now (I THINK it’s Tennessee). The current one will be about six foot tall, when it’s done, and will hang on a gatepost. We needed to find something for eyes (we were thinking doorknobs) and something to make wings out of. Well, we didn’t find anything we wanted for those, but he did get a new sawmill blade to make knife blades out of.

Marcus has two big, sweet black dogs and lots of fun stuff at the store, and I wish I’d taken my camera around his place. I wasn’t sure of etiquette about doing that, and we were home before I thought, “You coulda ASKED, you dummy.” But I didn’t. He has little steel armadillos, and the bodies are made out of something that looks like springs, about two or three inches in diameter. They’re all rusty, and they’re funny and I liked them. But I didn’t know what I’d do with one at the moment, so I left them all there. He was showing me other things – a dreamcatcher on the ceiling, that’s knotted out of sinew in a five-foot square frame, and a violin he’s having evaluated (I don’t believe it’s a Stradivarius though), and some pottery and jewellery.

Mostly, for aesthetics, I don’t much like glass. It’s hard and it’s cold. But I love blue and green glass – I like those glass things that we called “transformers” from hydro poles, and I like the big blue and green glass balls that the fishing boats used to use to float their nets in the oceans with. Marcus has big bowls and watering cans and baskets full of marbles – green, white and blue glasses, opaques and clear, big ones and little ones … I couldn’t resist. After all, I lost all my own.

I was looking at a milk bottle to put them in, and carrying it around with me. Then I found this bowl, and I knew it was what I wanted instead. It was dusty and sticky because there was a big rust-coloured candle in it, but I took it home. And, three pounds of marbles to put in it. Oughtta take me a long time to lose all those. Marcus took a few minutes to calculate the price – he said, usually people by them by the twenty, not by the pound. These are good for nothing at all except joy, you know. I can’t think of a sunny spot in the house to put them, but I’ll try.

We came home and had lunch, and while I was washing the bowl and marbles in the sink after, Aubrey, one of Bob’s great-granddaughters, knocked on the door. Very quietly. She’s the quieter one of the two sisters. She wondered what I was doing, so I told her to look on the table – most of the marbles were clean and in the bowl by then. Yes, she was allowed to play with them, and they were so warm because I’d washed them.

I’d made a lemon-garlic sauce to go with roasted chicken legs for lunch, and was putting that away, and licked my fingers before I washed that bowl. She wonder what I was eating, and I late her taste the sauce – she liked the lemon-ness, but it was “too hot” because of the raw garlic. I’d made black tea yesterday that has dried raspberries and raspberry leaves in it, and put it in the fridge for iced tea. I put some of the sugar we keep here to feed hummingbirds with, in hers, and lots of ice in both of ours, and we took the iced tea (in blue glasses) and the bowl with the marbles and the camera outside, and she took some of the pictures.

Then she found the old compressor that Grandaddy Bob had put ears and a tail on her for big sister to practice trick riding, when SHE was six. I took the trick riding pictures, and I got a good new one of the Tiger-Kitten, who’s about seven months old now. Then her Nana came to get her, and I walked them home, and kept going down the road to drop off a birthday/thank you card to the young woman who’d left the Tiger-Kitten here (“Just for overnight, til I can take her to the shelter, cuz I found her in the road.”) on Maundy Thursday. Except, I needed a new kitten that day, so she lives here still. I put a photo of her, little, in the birthday card.

That’s my fun day so far. It’s almost 7 p.m. We had lunch late, and Bob’s napping. There’s kick-ass chicken curry I made yesterday waiting to be microwaved when we want to eat later. It’s been really hot and gorgeous today. I’m taking my book back out into the hammock for a while, til I can’t read any more, assuming the cats let me read at all.

Why I 'Druther Be Here than Anywhere Else

Derek (www.dockofkingslynn.blogspot.com) is here. He took this video this afternoon, and put it on YouTube so I could post it here tonight. Too big to have e-mailed it.

Earlier this afternoon a box full of lovely teas and a teapot (MOST necessary for Hobbits) arrived from www.specialteas.com. I highly recommend them. Little kids and cats NEED cardboard boxes, so I gave them this one.

The black cat is my Yeshua. He was born a year ago yesterday, and his mother abandoned him when he was a few days old. Bob fed him kitten formula with an eyedropper for three days, then I got here, and I became the Mama Cat. I fed him, bathed him when he was dirty, taught him how to dig a hole in the sand and dripped water on him so he'd learn what to do with the hole in the sand. He is the most beautifully natured cat.

The little one in the box is the Tiger-Kitten. She was brought here by a neighbour on Maundy Thursday, after she'd been found in the middle of the road. The plan was she'd stay here overnight (the girl who found her has allergies and bad dogs) and be taken to the shelter the next day. Somehow, she never made it to the shelter. Yeshua is most definitely mine, and Tiger and Yeshua belong to each other. She's an Egyptian Princess cat, with the kink in the end of her tail to hold rings on, while the princesses bathe.

Starting Over

I’ve blogged before, but not for a year, I don’t think. So, this is starting over.

And, life is starting over too. At 54 years old, I’ve left home. I have lived my whole life within a 20-mile radius of the hospital where I was born. In a small town. My dad taught for a while at the high school I wound up attending. I’d go to the office for an aspirin and the secretary would say, “Can you take aspirin? Your FATHER can’t take aspirin!” And I’d tell her I could, and she’d give me two. My teachers knew my father too. It’s not that I got into trouble – I was a good girl and got good marks – but there were disadvantages. My sister went to the same school I did. When my Mum remarried, my new stepsister and stepbrother had all been to high school with us. My son went to the same high school as all of us, and even though it was more than 20 years later, he had some of the same teachers. At parent-teacher nights, as a parent, I saw mostly people I’d gone to school with, as other parents, sometimes as teachers.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of that. Lots of people have lived like that since the beginning of time, and lots of people do it happily. Things happened in my life though, in the years since I’ve turned 50, and I changed a lot. I don’t want to do the things I’ve always done. The people who love me celebrate my changes, for the most part. And at the same time, there’s a subtle pressure not to be TOO different. I found it that way. Your mileage may vary.

The other thing is – I was always timid. I didn’t strike out and do things on my own. I used to be terrified of heights, and now I climb on chairs, ladders, countertops, windowsills, piles of rocks, to do what I want to do. I’m learning how to drive a car for the first time in my life. I want to try things I haven’t tried before, find out what I can do by myself. It won’t be by myself, really, I’ll have lots of help.

A friend of mine suggested recently that I’ve been a respectable hobbit all my life. Bilbo Baggins was a respectable hobbit, who never did or said anything unexpected, right up til he was 50 or so, it says in the book. And then Gandalf put a sign on his door saying he was a burglar looking for employment, and the dwarves took him at his word and hired him on Gandalf’s say-so. Bilbo resented the whole thing, Gandalf and the dwarves and the expectation he’d go with them. He was frequently afraid, and lacked the resources it looked like he’d need. And he resented the dwarves’ belief that a timid hobbit couldn’t be of any use to them, and decided he’d show THEM. Somehow, he got through his adventures, and he came back a changed hobbit.

The analogies all seem apt to me. I’ve spent a lot of my life being a respectable hobbit, and now I’m going off to have adventures. I don’t EXPECT to meet any dragons. Bilbo did. But I do believe that like Bilbo, if I do meet one, I’ll find I’m equipped for the encounter, in ways I don’t have to know yet.

The road goes ever on and on …