Tag Archives: August Break

#augustmoon2013 Day 22

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Midday

lovebugsbirthdayToday, at midday, I was wrapping a present for my soon to be 15 year old niece. She told me when I saw her this summer, “I’ll be able to get my permit, drive a car — can you believe that?” How she got to be 15, how it is that she’s not still the tiny little girl who would pretend to read the newspaper while she twirled her feet or the one who would sing “I’m coming up, so you better get this party started” every time she walked up the stairs or the one who loved watching Scooby Doo and eating broccoli with cheese or scrambled eggs with ketchup and answered to Love Bug — this I can’t understand.

I told her in the card I wrote her that it was hard to believe she was already 15 because so much of the time it feels like I’m still 15. And yet, Eric and I have been married almost 20 years, Obi and Dexter lived their whole lives with us and are now gone, we’ve been in this house 12 years already, I’ve been at CSU for 13, and I’ll be 46 in a few months. Time goes so fast, life goes so fast, too fast. Taking a deep breath at midday and telling Jessamy that loving her is one of the truest things there is, it’s all I can do to slow it down.

#augustbreak2013 Day 21

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Something Old

vaseMy great-grandmother’s vase. I don’t come from families who have a lot of antiques, things to hand down from generation to generation, to be inherited. If I were to take this vase to Antiques Roadshow, they’d most likely say it was something mass produced and because of its condition issues (cracks, broken pieces glued back on, parts missing), it’s not worth much money. However, it’s precious to me.

I’ve collected a lot of art from thrift stores, all with a similar aesthetic — botanical, natural, mostly Asian, usually including some flowers and always birds. It wasn’t until at least 10 years after I started collecting that I realized the thing they all had in common, the birds. Every single item had one or two birds. I contemplated why that might be, why I was drawn to that imagery. I think it’s because birds seem fragile, vulnerable, with their soft feathers and mostly tiny bodies, the way most of them communicate through song, and yet they possess the power of flight, for them a simple and fundamental freedom, and for me so utterly impossible.