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Taken on a walk one afternoon last week, when the sun was shining, and the moon was also shining. |
I have work to do. Today there's a podcast interview at two, but before that, and aside from preparing responses to the questions the podcaster sent me, I need to spend some time in research, and to write at least 200 words toward a large project with a submission deadline in June (we're all rolling with this as if it were actually going to happen, and who knows, maybe it will). I'm also, at this moment, wrestling with Welsh poetic forms like the clogyrnach for my own edification and enjoyment. All of that, and washing my hair, comprise the morning menu. But first I thought that, just so this isn't all about what clothes I wear, I'd share some random photos from the last few days.
Spring is coming, here in the North Carolina Piedmont.
I love these 1950s silverplate soup spoons, of which I bought a dozen in an antique mall in Salt Lake City sometime in the mid-1990s, when we lived there. Somehow I'm down to maybe six of them – what, O Family, have you done with my beloved soup spoons? – but those six get used daily. My kids like to eat cereal with them. Here the texture of the placemat shows up more clearly than the spoon handle does, but you can see why I especially love these spoons in the springtime. If I actually had a need for more cutlery, which I do not (though I would like my other six spoons back), it would be cool to have an entire set of the pattern for Easter, would it not?
Not long ago, I did a major reshuffle of furniture in the back of the house. This end of the downstairs hall, between the kitchen and a small back room – used as a bedroom by previous owners, until the owner before us put a big honking gas fireplace in it and turned it into a den; that's how we use it, though we've rather pretentiously called it "the study" – used to feature a green leatherette loveseat my mother bought in a thrift store in roughly 2003. This loveseat lived at my brother's house until he moved and didn't need it, at which time it came to us. It's not a pretty loveseat, but it is very comfortable. The dog especially found it so, until he got too old and arthritic to get upon it anymore. I used to sit on this loveseat at the end of the hall and read to my children. It was kind of a random place to sit, but it was one way to fill up this odd little space.
Anyway, for some reason I can't find a photo of the green couch in situ at the end of the hall, so you will just have to imagine that space, which I will picture in a moment, filled with a green leatherette loveseat. Meanwhile, not long ago, it began to occur to me that none of us had sat on that loveseat at the end of the hall in a long time, maybe because we all wanted to sit by the fire in the study instead. It's, like, actually warm in there in the wintertime. So one day a couple of weeks ago, in a burst of springtime-anticipatory fervor, I shoved bookshelves around in the study to open up one wall, up-ended the green leatherette loveseat, and heaved it through the study door. I also bought it – not a slipcover, because slipcovers never fit this kind of furniture very well – but a pet cover. It's pretty beat up at this point, having been the dog's couch for a long time, so now, even though the dog doesn't actually lie on it, and even though I KNOW it looks dorky this way, it does look better than it did. The cover is very comfortable, too, good for human napping, as I have reason to attest. Here's the current arrangement in the study:
As I said, dorky, but we revel in newfound comfort before the blue shimmering of the gas fire. Meanwhile, here is the end of the hall, where I put a bookshelf and Windsor chair that used to be in the study:
The chair, which came from my dad's law office after his death, is falling apart. We keep gluing it back together, and it keeps falling apart again. Someday we will find a suitable replacement. We do have another identical chair that is not falling apart, but it occupies a more prominent and visible place in one of the front rooms.
I used to keep children's books in that book rack, which was handed down to us from a friend who got it from the children's hospital where she worked. Now I keep magazines in it, reflective of our eclectic tastes and inclinations.
I've been moving these orchids all around the house, meanwhile, trying to find a place they like. Most of them came from my mother, who has a proliferation of orchids and no place to put them all. Now I have a proliferation of orchids and am trying to keep them alive.
By and large, they aren't doing too badly. They seem to like this windowsill, which faces more or less east, but thanks to the shade provided by the back porch (which I will NOT be photographing anytime soon, unless I need an illustration to communicate the concept of entropy), the light they receive is indirect, which orchids are supposed to like. It's also warmer back here between the kichen and the study than it is in the front of the house, where I had had them in a southeast-facing window that receives a lot of direct light early in the day. I look forward to the summer, when I can move them onto the front porch where everything seems to flourish. But as I said, they aren't doing too badly right now:
I never thought I liked orchids, but they are pretty things, and if you can get them to bloom, it's very satisfactory, as my mother likes to say.
In other news, this is our last semester of home education. I've been at this project – which I never set out to take on – for seventeen years now, my youngest child's entire lifetime. Home education has give me much to think about which I would not otherwise have thought about, and the intersection of poetry and home education has catapulted me into the world of podcast interviews, but now that my last two children, ages 17 and 18, are graduating this May, and both have college acceptances in hand . . . am I ready? I don't know. I have a feeling we're going to drop them off at college, come home to our empty house, and feel – what? I don't know. Triumph not unmixed with grief, I expect. But here are books for the last term of their homeschooling lives, waiting to be picked up (because I ASSIGNED THEM STARTING THIS WEEK, PEOPLE) and, one hopes, read:
If you're interested, our entire senior year, week by week, is here. They're both taking some dual-enrollment classes at the college where my husband teaches: the 18-year-old is taking German and film studies, while the 17-year-old is doing Russian (for fun; she's already taken three semesters of French) and Western Civilization. For me they're reading the Divine Comedy, a series of novels, some economics and government, mostly via essays, and other stuff I can't remember right now even though I read what they've written about it all every week. They're also each writing a senior thesis. It's been a good ride, and we intend to ride it hard all the way to the end, but let's face it: May can hardly come soon enough, say we all.
But truly, right now, I have work to do.