The classics

Spring Fever has me in its grips. I want to clean all the things.

I was rearranging and re-sorting the library just now (isn’t it fun to call it “the library” instead of “the bookshelves”?) and began to chuck a lot of the paperback mysteries that I’m pretty sure I’ll never get back to. And then I worked my way around to my classics.

Goodness. There is a lot of emotional pull on those shelves. College. Grad school. The literature courses and the literature degree and the literature-centric master’s thesis; the literature professor with whom I was a favorite, who actually ran a Major Authors course on the Bronte sisters at my suggestion, and with whom I had a very sad falling out. All those years of turning to my current assigned novel when the rest of my coursework got to be too much. The Anglophilia… a lot of it is there. Pride in being able to slog through an 18th century novel. Chest-heaving Brontes, dizzy-delight in Dickens, wonderment at Hardy.

I grew up before e-readers and the internet. Before mega bookstores If you wanted a book you had to find it at Waldenbooks or at the library or in your school’s Weekly Reader. If it came from a store you had to find the money to buy it. If your library didn’t have it you were out of luck, because there was no internet and no computers to network libraries for easy interlibrary loans the way there is now.

My parents had two cardboard boxes of paperback classics in the basement. Sometime in my early teen years they pointed them out to me, and I read my way through them. Sheer delight. There wasn’t an internet to look up an author’s complete bibliography, so I took the contents of those boxes as my information. Here are all the Hardy books, here are all the Bronte books, here are at least some of the Dickens books.

I have kept my paperbacks around out of pride, out of nostalgia, and out of hope that some day I’d have a child who would find them and read through them and get as much out of them as I did.

But now there are e-readers and in ten years, when Mimi is the right age for them, who knows what better thing there will be. These classics are out of copyright. They are free to download. She can look up bibliographies on Wikipedia. I’m not sure she needs my paperbacks to become well read.

So my question is, is it worth keeping them on the (much needed) shelves as magical objects, totems to instill bibliomania in the family, or should this literary ship up anchor and sail away from dead-tree editions?

What do you think?

Getting the hang of it

We have successful macro mode shots with the new camera. Canon must have re-written their software (I mean, obviously, in five years they worked on it) because the camera chooses… different places to focus than the previous two. The previous two would almost always settle in on the center of a flower, while this one strays to outer petals. I think the results are good anyway.

I cut these daffodils on Monday when it was sunny and gorgeous. I knew rain was coming and they’d get beaten down and bedraggled outdoors and I was right. It’s another multi-day gloomy spell… a cold, wet, late spring. Oh well, the carrots and radishes and peas don’t mind, the wildflowers are coming up on schedule, and just maybe I’ll manage to grow sweet peas that blossom this year. I’ve been looking at Tasha Tudor’s Garden and feeling wistful. I suppose it’s a normal part of gardening to always want to tear out everything you’ve done and start over, right?

Earth Day (yesterday)

Yesterday, nature gave us a gorgeous Earth Day. It was in the high sixties with a pleasant breeze, sunny, and the flood waters from last week had receded from our nearby trail so Mimi and I took a long walk.

I took a lot of pictures of wildflowers, but I was letting the new camera cruise in Auto mode, and that was a mistake. For closeups I definitely need to manually set it to macro mode. Oh well. Mimi and I saw vinca, Virginia bells, Dutchman’s breeches, spring beauty, and some trillium foliage that hadn’t flowered yet. We saw six deer grazing in the woods. We saw a black squirrel. We crossed the bridge and listened to the bats that live inside it go squeak-squeak-squeak. Little Tootse, as you can see, walked part of the way wearing her smart froggie backpack/tether. She’s in no danger of running away while on the trail, but when she has it on she trot-trot-trots along with me, and when she doesn’t she dawdles. So froggy it was.

New camera

Every camera is better than the camera before.

My new camera is a Canon PowerShot Elph 110 HS, Canon Zoom Lens 5x 15, 4.3-21.5mm 1:2.7-5.9, 16.1 megapixel, and it’s red. And that’s all the information I’m capable of giving about it… except that it seems much better at composing itself than my previous camera, which had far brighter and more vivid color than the one before it. All three have been Elphs. The first was purchased circa 2005, the second in September 2008. Technology advances, yes it does.

Pond colors

My aesthetic angst is getting less angsty and more enjoyable. I’m having fun putting together colors and patterns and textures that I like. I’ve listed a whole bunch of quilting fabric on eBay, by the way, and will be listing a lot of charm packs soon soon. Check it all out. Got to make room (and make money) for stuff I might eventually use, you know?

Yesterday I began knitting this cowl for myself out of stashed yarn in a scrummy blue-green pondlike color. This is Valley Yarns superwash worsted weight that I bought long long ago, before I knew Mimi would be a girl, meaning to knit baby things out of it. I’m happy that it’s come back to me. I’ll wear it longer than she would have.

I apologize for the pictures taken under my Ott light by the way. Don’t I know better? Yes I know better but the sun ain’t gonna shine anymore. It’s been raining and overcast all week and the forecast says it won’t ever stop.

For a while I boycotted Joann’s. Then they moved to a new location and started staffing the store with more than two employees at a time, so one has a fair chance at the cutting table. I’ve been going back sometimes since then, and like a particular shelf of prints right at the start of the quilting fabric section. These gray and white prints called out to me (and were darned affordable too).

And these pretty pond colored, one-color prints called out to me even more. So simple and so pretty. I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. I want to wear them. I have too many scarves and cowls and things to go around my neck already. Hmm.

And finally this cut, also from Joann’s, but more expensive. So sweet though. It looks like the fabrics my mother made my baby dresses out of. I’m going to keep this back until I know exactly what very special project to use it for.

A consistent aesthetic

Spring restlessness is upon me again. I want to do big things, but all I can get around to is dreaming about big things that feel like only small things orbiting a really big thing I can’t lay my finger on. Do you know what I mean?

Here, watch Mimi play dress-up while I ramble. Welcome to my life.

Great blogs, or the ones I consider great, seem to be written by people with art degrees who have a consistent artistic vision. Everything they like, or at least everything that gets on the blog, goes together well. Maybe Bauhaus is their thing. Or shabby chic. Maybe cutesy-poo, maybe colonial, maybe Scandinavian. The point is that a blog with a really great Scandinavian aesthetic sticks to that aesthetic and doesn’t start dabbling in Civil War reproductions.

Is it careful blogging? Is it self-discipline? Is it an artistic gift? Is it being unplugged from constant browsing of other blogs on the internet, thereby avoiding temptation to try something new?

And do I have it in me to have a consistent aesthetic? I did well for a lot of years with English country, then turned toward midcentury when I met my husband, then lapsed into nothing-at-all while Mimi was a baby. Now that it’s springtime and my brain has some fresh air rattling through it I want to get that focus back. Or do I? Isn’t it just window-dressing for real life? Does it really matter? I think it matters to me. I want to like the feel things have about them. I want things in my life to whisper to me.

So I’m in my midcentury house with my English country furniture, and I’ve been dabbling in Scandinavian/storybook/pastoral stuff. I dream about greenhouses, literally. Oriental carpets, shining furniture, curvy glass, ferns, rocks, muted blues and greens and browns, glistening wedding-ring china and rain on hydrangeas. I wonder if I’ll ever pull myself together.

The itsy bitsy spider

No song has ever gotten more smiles out of Mimi than The Itsy Bitsy Spider. She’s less fond of this real one that stowed away on the year’s first bouquet of daffodils. “Oh! Scare Mimi!”