The Elephant's Child

Simple Pleasures: This Guy.

Fouteen years of marriage, and it just keeps getting better.  I'm a lucky woman.

 

Simple Pleasures: A Chair of My Own.

My mom found some different chairs for her living room, so she gave me her old ones:  two matching cotton-velvet upholstered wing-back chairs.

I'm very happy.

I hate our couch. It's an ugly pale blue that shows dirt, and it's uncomfortable for me. It's too tall for short-legged me, and yet it's not deep enough to sit with my legs curled under me.  It also has some broken bits down inside which means it sags towards the middle. Oh, and the fabric is falling apart and the stuffing is starting to come out.

But now I have a place to sit that doesn't hurt me. I have a bin with my current reading right at hand, and an old trunk in front of the chair to put my feet on. 

The spice-orange velvet even mostly works with my cinnamon and olive green color plan for the living room. The plan is not fully implemented yet.  I need to convince my child that an olive green slipcover over the couch is something to be left in place and not to be trashed and pulled around the house, and I'd really love to paint the walls.  But I'm getting closer.

For now though, I have my own chair.  (The cat has claimed the other one.)

 

 

 

 

 

Simple Pleasures: Sparkle's Projects

Bottle Horse, King Clover, Princess Leaf, and Strawberry Ninja.

Sparkle spent about an hour and a half laying in the grass the other day singing and talking to herself while she made these.

It feels so good to see my daughter's creativity and to see her interest in making things.  Along with the ability to think crictically and to sythesisize information, being able to do things is one of our top goals in homeschooling Sparkle Kitty.  I see a growing trend of teens adults who are completely incapable of doing anything concrete with their hands, from chopping an onion, to sewing on a button, to changing a flat or replacing a wiper blade, never mind more complex things like playing the piano, knitting, wiring a light switch, or canning a jar of applesauce.   I don't want Sparkle to be one of them.

Simple Pleasures: My Kid's Artwork.

I dare you not to smile.

Simple Pleasures: Juxtaposition.

Balloon flowers in blue, a gift from my friend Melanie, who lives in South Dakota, and whom I've never met in person.  A marigolds mix to the right, and Coral Orbit hybrid geraniums to the left. At the back, blades of a purple tall bearded iris, a division from my mom's plants, which are in turn a division from my grandma's irises.

Simple Pleasures: A Sunny Kitchen.

Wall color is called "Ashen" but I can't remember off hand what brand I bought. It was one of the better paints carried by Menards.  It's gray, but just barely. It has tons of yellow in it, so it's very warm. That's why it looks ok with the wood cabinets; it's all the yellow in the gray. Think dove gray.  Think polished concrete; it's the exact color of wet drywall Spackle.

The smaller windows face south, the larger ones, west.

Simple Pleasures: Blue Chair, Roses, and White Siding.

The "candy striped" rose is a division off of one of my mom's roses. You can see that it's completely trashed the arbor it was supposed to grow on. The blue chair was begged off the landlord of the house next door. A former tenant left it behind, and subsequent tenants ignored it, its matching chair, and a third chair which was white at one time but is now completely covered with surface rust.  All will get painted soon with a rust-converting primer and a violet-blue, something like Behr's Pandora.  And may I say that I hope my neighbor never paints his garage? It's a too-perfect backdrop for my garden!

Treasured Ephemera.

Ephemera are the bits of paper that accompany us through life: letters, postcards, grocery receipts, to-do lists, stamps.  Church bulletins, ration cards, student ID cards.  Report cards. Junk mail.  Freebies handed out by insurance companies, funeral homes and grocery stores.  Desk calendars, advertisements.

I love ephemera.  I especially love old ephemera, and I love artists who chop it up and reuse it.  (Nick Bantock is perhaps one of the best-known of these.)

I have some of my own bits saved: a few ticket stubs, the receipts from our trip out west in 1999, our last big road trip before a highly sensitive, high-needs baby took away a lot of the pleasure of hitting the open road, the store receipt from my wedding dress.   I have some saved bits of ephemera much older, too.  In my writing box where I keep my dwindling stash of Clairfontaine Triomphe stationery, I have an old blotter, a Morton's Salt advertisement with a soft blue paper backing. I still use it, imprinting my hybrid cursive/block hand side-by-side with my mother-in-law's great-uncle's long, dip-penned Spencerian script. It's the 1920's equivalent of a modern-day refrigerator magnet with the local pizza joint's delivery phone number on it, except more useful since I can no longer eat pizza and nobody sells ink blotters anymore.

My most treasured bit of ephemera though, is my WHO immunization record:

This is the cholera page, chosen for its inky, oversize Third World bureaucratic stamps.  That's a lot of cholera shots, a disease for which immunization is no longer generally recommended, since simply avoiding drinking untreated water and seeking immediate medical care for the constant diarrhea by with the disease is identified do about about as much good as the shots did. 

On another page of my WHO record book is my smallpox record.  Surely I was one of the last few people to get the vaccine! I've also, at various times of my life, been vaccinated against typhoid (nowadays an oral vaccine, not a shot), yellow fever, rabies, and Hepatitis B.  I've received gamma globulin injections to protect against Hepatitis A, and spent years on two kinds of malaria prophylaxis, both chloroquine and the more scary mefloquine (I think that's the one it was. My dad will hop on in the comments if I'm mistaken.) Besides that, I've had all the usual vaccines: tetanus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis.* 

My little yellow WHO record was just as important as my passport while I was growing up overseas, or at least it seemed so.  It went where I went, and it was a strange feeling to realize that it was essentially meaningless once I returned to the US.  I remember being sad when my last vaccination, my 1988 yellow fever shot, would have been due for renewal. It was the end of an era, the end of my world-traveling days, and a door that closed with heavy click.

*In the US, pertussis is seen by many parents, especially those dubious of the way-too-many immunizations given to babies, as "not that big a deal."  But overseas, where the overall health and nutrition of the population may be poorer and access to antibiotics and secondary care is more problematic, it is a very ugly thing.  When I was still quite young, a neighborhood outbreak brought children and mothers lining up on our front porch for medicine. I'll never forget that horrible coughing.  It doesn't kill a small child, usually, but it makes you wish Jesus would take them home just so the coughing would stop.

Simple Pleasures: This Clothespin

This clothespin belonged to my husband's grandma, who is now in her nineties. I think that before it was hers, it was her mother's clothespin, my mother-in-law's grandma, the woman who first owned the Hoosier cabinet that now sits in my dining room.

It's smooth as silk in my hand, this clothespin.  Every time I use it I feel the touch of the hands of four generations of practical, hard-working German women across nearly 100 years of diapers, sheets, and dungarees.  In this clothespin is April rain that fell while Grandpa was trying to get the corn in.  In this clothespin is October sun, early in an Ohio evening, shining low through the west door of Grandma and Grandpa's house. 

In this clothespin is a little bit of happy.