WONDERWHIRL

 

Doesn’t it seem longer than One Month Into Winter?   These raggedy-cold days---even those with such glowing sunshine that you’re called OUT into whatever daytime interests are motivating (or in my case, merely upstairs into that bright sunny guest room with all the comfy pillows and soft blankets and BOOKS for an afternoon)--- these days are gone in a blink, yet it seems ages since December. I’m moving as slowly as the time, hardly working, letting things and chores pile up around me like liabilities of largesse.   We had so much fun and festivity and food and togetherness during Christmas---indeed from Thanksgiving on, with gatherings and visitors and decorations (all of which, contrary to tradition and sense, are still UP.   The tree still shines out the front windows, the small poinsettias-in-pots are valiantly dropping their leaves upon a vast pile of mail covering their buffet, and snowmen, Santas, stockings and a tee-ninecy Bumblesnowman inhabit a big wicker rocker in the living room, presiding over all the unsent/unclaimed presents languishing on the tree skirt.   Even downstairs, great swoops and swags of ribbon-lights twinkle an eternal carnival onto our breakfasts, our evenings, our TV nights, and scatter around the room, across the pages of our Nooks, the printer, the TV screen and picture glass on the walls like strings of glowing beads in some magical hall at Versailles.    I've been a neon-fiend since childhood, and this is Heaven.

 

We had a wonderful time, and now my batteries (typed that "betteries," and I think there MUST be a place in us all---a magical socket seldom used, for betteries to keep us primed for the slow times, the hard times) are storing up and my mind refreshing, for the words are coming, though sparse.     I'm trying to think of something, anything, to write about---reminiscing over Cajun friends of my youth, some old cooking memories, how feeding the Harvesting Crew in my own first-married years matched the old Harvest Dinners put out by the farm women when the Threshing crews came through in the old times, making their clean sweeps of the fields.   

I woke today thinking of the prizes on Queen for a Day, remembering the mink stole and a buncha Lanvin stuff and a bottle of FAME-by-Corday, along with stoves and dishwashers and sets of dishes and cookware.   And I dream of the books of my childhood, most of which set me on the road to all my love of reading.

So, despite setting some of the bits and pieces into WORD for translation to something comprehensible, I'm still whirling through the past, in a flurry of Apricot Nectar Cake, Nancy Drew, and Autumn Haze Mink.   (Yes, I know those books should have been something lofty,  like Plutarch's LIVES or Landor's CONVERSATIONS, but Nancy Drew it was, and I’ll not apologize for it).   Think of how many dedicated nurses owe their career choice to those little Trixie Belden paperbacks, or the ground-breaking female newspaper columnists and TV newscasters spurred on their way by the captivating Brenda Starr, and rejoice.   I’ll go now---this has turned into an enormous tutti-fruiti/potpourri/paperback twinkle-light peach cobbler of memories.

Moiré non, perhaps.

Y'all be sweet.