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.