Your lockets, your foxgloves, your elusive ceremonies

I have a small trail of blisters running across my foot not far below the protrusion of my ankle bone. Right now they make me think of tears. Maybe because blisters weep when punctured, or because reading or watching the portrayal of a lover's mourning (always a weakness of mine) has coaxed me to tears twice this week, or maybe it is the very real witness I've played to sadness over the past days. They all fit together easily.

No one's laundry will be aired here. I respect the privacy of those I love. But your thoughts and images and stories touch me. Last year I felt like the world was shaking for many, and standing still under my feet. Reaching out and listening was what I tried to do. I'll try again, and again. It will not be enough, but such is life. Sometimes your stories mirror each other, or interlock unexpectedly. Maybe connections can form, reform, revolve, and improve things. Maybe I'm just being maudlin in the quiet upstairs room of a music-making house. I always hope bad news can somehow result in good change, and can form humble irregular pearls. You have before.

Other things occupy me as well: preparations, projects, indecision, amazing smells, backsliding and improvement. When business and routine take off to their summer cottage, change and contemplation and adventure rather messily house-sit.

Good night sad songs, walking on hot coals, blushing surprises, grunting cats, and wonderings. Always, always, always, good night to wonderings.

melting with the right company

When I first arrived folks were getting ready for the arrival of our party's inspiration. Despite the best intentions of our canine assist, we managed to overfill a table handily.



The hostess charmed me with her lovely set up and vintage table linens. Her home made the perfect setting for a candlit tea revel. We sipped and chatted on a hardwood floor, under a navy ceiling, to the comforting background of box fans and summer insect noise.



But somehow everything changed when two androgynous troublemakers came in from the heat. They carried cheap beer and BB-gun into our midnight tea party, but they walked like demi-gods of trickery. Of course, folks slowly meandered outside and took turns sinking ankle deep in the backyard sand and shooting a tin can by candlelight.



Eventually we serenaded our birthday girl with blurry warm voices and an un-tuned mandolin. She could have, like Guinevere, asked any quest of us on the strength of our natal-day loyalty. Thankfully she didn't, and just sipped her fine birthday whiskey with good grace. Candles, sun tea, crumbly sweet tea cookies,wispy cigar smoke, bad aim, and dear friends turn the warm night strange and golden.

Bad news, good wine, and better books

So, we all receive bad news from time to time, but I've found there are a few ways to most happily put oneself back together, and one of my favourites includes a glass of wine, a snack, and an armload of new books from the library. Today the wine is a Riesling, the snack is homemade cornbread, and the books are travel bits for the upcoming trip to England.

I have two fantastically huge books of travel porn. These are the photo-laden, idiosyncratically organized, theme books of dubious usefulness, hence travel porn. These give me inspiring views that will surely complicate my travel plans. One is The National Trust Book of Great Houses of Britain by Nigel Nicolson and the other is Timpson's English Villages by John Timpson. The others fall into two camps; we have the useful but fairly standardized British guide book, and the much more interestingly focused snotty book for those of us that Lord Whimsy* would call retrosexuals. These historical guides only tell us how to find the old stuff. The books could care less if we get stranded without a loo or a place to sleep so long as we get to see Roche Abbey (from 1147) and Faldouet Dolmen (a grave from the Neolithic era built like a long underground stone hallway). I chose The Intelligent Traveller's Guide to Historic Britain by Philip A. Crowl and arranged by historic period and The Cambridge Guide to Historic Places by Kenneth Hudson and Ann Nichols. The Cambridge one is thankfully much more travel oriented; it at least lets me look up a town and then find all of its historical flotsam in one go.

To distract me from these wonderful companions, I also have a party to attend. My friend has brilliant timing for her birthday; I must thank her. The celebration is to be a charming dress up tea party, but I'm guessing things will veer off from there. I can always trust my friends to embroider our most humble plans with their fitful strangeness. To best support them, I suppose I should make tiny sandwiches and find a frilly dress. Perhaps I'll be able to catch some of tonight on film; I can only hope.

*Lord Whimsy makes terrariums, uses remarkable pocket scarves, and writes lovely books about nature and art and all things related to his particular variant of dandyism. This is a link to Whimsy's really charming first book