Random and Simple? Raise Your Hand

The delightful Christianne of Lilies Have Dreams has tagged me with a meme. This one has two main features that are all me.

1) Simple.
2) Random.
Maybe I ought to just type my name six times.


Simple Random #1
I enjoy shopping at flea markets, antique shops, garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales. Yeah I love a bargain, but more than that I love the human interest stories there. It's fascinating to imagine the people, places, circumstances, and lifestyles surrounding all the simple and random items spread out on the tables or hanging on the racks. I'd much rather have an eclectic house and wardrobe and know that someone else had a life in this chair, this skirt, with this pitcher. I'm a small part of a big story. (Watch The Red Violin, btw.)

Simple Random #2
An ideal day for me is sitting bare-headed in the sun in my lawn chair with my bare feet in a cushion of grass. Watching the birds build nests, listening to the bees buzz by and my children laugh and call to each other from the other side of the yard. I'd have a book with me, but I would not be reading it. I'd simply be soaking in the elements.

Simple Random #3
Hubby and I have our queen-size mattress on a king-size bed frame. (Free bed frame in awesome condition... human interest story... see Simple Random #1) The Engineer and Lover-of-All-Things-at-Right-Angles would really like to replace our queen mattress with a king so things fit in a neat and orderly fashion, but I LOVE it! The extra gap on either side of the mattress makes a great "extendo-bedside table" where I can keep all the books I'm reading that don't fit on the teetering stack inhabiting my real bedside table.

Also on the "extendo": an embroidery project, sketch pencils, a homeschool planner, my laptop and a doodling journal. Occasionally a plate of cheese and crackers.

Simple Random #4
I love asparagus.

Simple Random #5
In elementary school, I entertained the notion of becoming an Olympic platform diver. In an alternate reality, you might be rooting me on in Beijing this summer.

Simple Random #6
If given the choice, I would grow nothing but flowers in my garden.

For some reason, I feel slightly guilty that I don't care much about tending fruits and vegetables. Is it the pragmatist in me chastising that the world can't eat flowers and therefore I'm not contributing to the betterment of humanity? Did I have some kind of scarring experience in a veggie garden as a child? Am I worried I'm being anti-Proverbs 31 Woman and robbing my family of a nutritious meal in favor of "pretties"?
I don't know where this odd and minor guilt comes from. You don't care what I grow in my garden, but the guilt tinge is there nonetheless. It hovers around me at the garden center when I gleefully go straight to the hydrangeas, hibiscus and hollyhocks.
Eventually I heave a big sigh, get responsible, and go to peruse the things that grown-ups plant. Tomatoes and peppers. Green beans and potatoes.
sigh.

(I do have some veggies growing this year. So there.)

And in simple, random fashion... The End.

grandMother's Day

Justin Roberts has a sensitive, lovely, heart-warming song on his latest CD, Pop Fly, that we're just loving at our home, especially with Mother's Day coming up.
And who doesn't love a mother?

My daughter tells me I hardly ever make things from scratch. She is going to tell her own children about the way her grandmothers all cooked from scratch. (Then she is going to tell them that her own mother was remiss in the scratch-cooking department.)

This song is dedicated to our three lovely grandmothers. Grandma Pat, Grandma Dollie and Grambee.
It's called, From Scratch.

She takes a little makes a lot
Be careful sis it’s kinda hot
Is there more inside that pot
I’m hoping so and thinking not
She gave us much more than we thought
From scratch

We love you, Grandmas.
You gave us much more than we thought.
From scratch.

Gagged and Bound, Hanging Upside Down

The drops weave together daily,
their fibrous web,
and bind me in this sticky love.
I trip upon my own heart strings.

They shoot me full of adrenaline, then entangle me, gag me, rob me
Leaving me to finish off what's left of myself.
Heart racing, eyes bulging; wet, salty and gasping.
Wishing, perhaps, they'd completed their aim this time.
Please stop toying with me and end it.
(Then thinking that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.)

I'll try to gnaw my way free
But I always end up chewing on things too long.
Snapping a constricting heart string, I may not know where to stop.
When am I truly free? What does it feel like to finally be unstuck from the web?
Someone sauntered by and filled my ear with helpful hints and timeless truths,
Their own heart strings still dangling from their ankles,
Snagging twigs and dry leaves as they passed.
"Go over-under, through-the-loop
Twist it three times to the left."
(But your knots are not my knots.) (I just wanna make that clear.)

I looked for the Queen of Hearts, but only managed to find the Spades.
I do suppose it's apropros
The blood's drained out of me anyway.
What's left behind when I'm out of juice,
Gagged and bound, hanging upside down-
Empty, black and dangling there?
So Queen of Spades it is.
We meet again.

Those tired old eyes. Watching her lifeblood ride off into the distance.
Has her heart chosen to leave her for good? Trickling away on a daily basis.
Gagged and bound, hanging upside down
She looks powerless to stop those hell bent horses.
Voiceless against it all.
(Frankly, right now I wouldn't even know what to say if given the chance.)

It's all there somewhere. Scribbled down in a fever and wrapped tight beneath the tangle of love and blood.

Maybe the Spade Queen is the Heart Queen with a weird case of hemophilia.
Only clotting when she's been bled out.
Surrounding her, rather than coursing through, the viscous red sticks and swells.
Imprisoning her.
Bringing death from within her own beating heart.
(Weird is right!)

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.
It is always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

Do you find this comforting or the death knell?
Swaddling clothes and embalming strips feel very much the same.