Do you Name Your Couches Too? And other musings

I don’t make elves anymore. I make little fairy village houses instead 

but I used to make elves. I used to snip pieces of fabric to sew into elf outfits. The elves I made myself and stuffed with batting – they were usually made of felt and clothed from things I found in my home, such as, to name a few sources:

-The extra fabric found under my couch ( that couch I’d once owned and named Giddy Moonbeam).

-The buckles and thin straps from a well worn pocketbook (made fine belts and boots).

-And here’s one more source of many: red flannel of an old bathrobe. 

So you can imagine, with my love of broken pieces (I do mosaics) and repurposing scraps and whatchacallits, into new things, that when I learned of zero waste Daniel I was tickled. 

The fashion industry is extremely wasteful. (Daniel Silverstein and his Reroll Technique) Zero Waste Daniel  sews scraps that would’ve been otherwise discarded, into useful Cool Clothing. 

I like gnomes too, fairies, little people who live just over the veil. 

This gnome lives in Vermont in my father’s backyard. 

When I was about 10 years old and my parents finally let me Trick or Treat without them (I suspect my father followed in the car) there was one house. Unkempt lawn. Dried tall grass not quite concealing a menagerie of gnomes. These porcelain figures were faded, peeling, charming… and their old painted eyes followed you as you braved the weedy path to the front door. I never forgot them. 

Ever hear of a REAL “Ornamental hermit…?” (Usually) a ‘grizzled old man’ who doesn’t mind living in seclusion, hired to sit in gardens and watch over flaura and fauna? Wealthy landowners in days of olde used to place ads for human garden gnomes. Ads like this:

…he shall be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for timepiece, water for his beverage, and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr. Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.

Such was life, says Abby Norman of All That Is Interesting. 

                          …

We have a dog. Also a cat. These are my little people these days:

The dog is 5, the cat’s 17. They generate a lot of poop. They must think they’re royalty, right? People going around scooping and discarding all body secretions. Having said that, I’m going to segue (pronounced seg-way) into this little gem about poop:

In other news, says The Guardian:

     “There’s too much human feces on Mount Everest. Human waste left by climbers on Mount Everest has become a problem that is causing pollution and threatening to spread disease on the world’s highest peak,”     -said the chief of Nepal’s mountaineering association on March 3rd, of 2015. 

((((((((((I understand there are bodies there too, never recovered.)))))))))) 

Memento mori (Latin: remember that you have to die)

I read this book recently. SPOILER ALERT forthcoming; (though not too big a spolier)

          About 1/2 way through the book, I realized where this was book was headed. And I should’ve realized that sooner for two reasons:

1) The word dying is in the subtitle of the book and

2) Nina’s author bio on the backflap (which I had read already because I always read that first) was in the past tense.

This author is a descendant of RW Emerson, by the way, and it shows. Truly, her bright career was only getting started. 

She writes of a spat that she (as an adult) had with her mother (where they each gave the other the silent treatment) while they were vacationing abroad and exploring a historical site. The poem was long, Nina shares the last few lines in The Bright Hour. It goes like this:

You reached out to me for balance/

Even though we weren’t speaking/

And a minute later I had to do the same/

——————————————————–

This is an irony of life. It’s like a short poem I once wrote -here are a few lines:

Don’t get too close/

Don’t go away/

——–

Here’s another irony for you. Which is also a segue. Pun intended. The guy who bought the Segway company (Jimi Heselden) from inventor Dean Kamen: 

accidentally rode a Segway off a cliff to his death in 2010. 

MEMENTO MORI

And this couch where I sit, (name: Mad Tatty) is nearing it’s inevitable end of days.