THURSDAY WITH SIS

After a late-night long time of talking, I emerged from our room to find Sis sitting in the downstairs den with her cup, feet up on the ottoman and a fluffy pink plaid blanket around her feet. She'd plugged in the pot, got out cups and all the needfuls, and the whole house smelled of the fragrant brew. I sat and tucked my feet up, as well, and we talked and watched Cash Cab and then went up with our second percolator into the sunshine of the upstairs sitting room.

Chris came home for lunch, and we got out the Things in Dishes, plus the leftover Chinese, which is always the best leftovers, ever. We just talked and sat until about two, then got out the albums she’d brought. Apparently most of the pictures inside had been applied by me or by her---someone with childish zeal and a heavy hand, with great glops of Elmer’s on the stiff corners clutching them to the sheets of black crumbly paper.

I got us out each a small cake-icing spatula, and we sat and slid the dull flat blades into the gaps between paper and picture, easing them away from the corners, and leaving quite a few big fuzzy dots on the backs. With small scissors, we trimmed all the edges neat of the clinging black fibers and clumps, brushing away all the residue we could manage, for later ease in snugging the pictures into a new archival album.

We passed pictures back and forth, resorting to the big negative-clarity magnifier a few times, and for ONCE, had only ONE person pictured whom we did not know---one of Mammaw’s Sisters-in-Law who attended her housewarming when they got their new house in 1959. I'll have to look it up in the Family Tree, but that's pretty good for a bookful of pictures, long forgotten.

Even with small snaps of Sis’ second birthday party, she named every single small face beneath the party-hats, saying where they went to college and who they married, and for most, where they are now.

We reminisced of young friends lost way too soon, and how our hearts were broken in that youthful, devastated way---for such useless loss of all that bright promise, of course, but in a personal aspect, in that WE were affected, and that was just too much to bear. We spoke of folks from our hometown, from the surrounding towns, from college, from our heres and nows, with delight in some and regret in others.

We just kept throwing each other lines and remembrances, which in turn kindled others and more memories as the words flowed faster than thought; we DID laugh ourselves silly. Sis says we haven’t had a good visit til we cry some and wet our pants laughing.

And it was a MARVELOUS visit.

And moire non.

FRIDAY WITH SIS

Thank you all for joining in---we've had a lovely visit so far. Sis stayed in her PJs all day yesterday, and we just totally relaxed and talked a mile a minute.

She introduced me to "CASH CAB" and we've been shouting answers across each other, we've talked about old times and how old was she when this and that happened and what WAS the name of that woman with the parakeets, etc. And of course, as it always happens, one mention kindles another memory of someone who and where did we go and do you remember the time? . . . Talking fastfastfast and getting out the memories and laughing our heads off---and somehow we're exponentially wittier and smarter when feeding each other lines and answers.

It's a SUNNY day through the sheers, and we're about to go back upstairs to our comfy chairs and solve all the affairs of the world.

Or at least our little G.R.I.T.S. corner of it; she's headed for the shower, we've finished the first perk of vanilla coffee, and later we're going to stroll down the street to a little Carniceria/grocery for the makings for her wonderful Chicken Enchiladas for supper.

Company in the kitchen is a wonderful thing.

SIS

Happy March, Everyone!!

This promises to be a busy rest-of-the week---Sis will be here any minute, the guest rooms are all ready, BabyGirl is watching Fifi the Flowertot while I finish up the kitchen, and another one of those still-warm carrot cakes with the cream-cheese-pecan frosting is perfuming the whole house with spices.

Sis and I hope to spend whole mornings over our coffee, sitting upstairs in the sitting-room sunshine (though she DID confide from her Deep-South heart that a gentle drift of snowflakes past the windows would not go amiss, just for the cozy factor). We want to look at more old pictures, name the long-ago relatives and friends if we can, and put the names on the backs. It's so sad to lose track of our Roots just because the pictures come down the generations with no clue as to who or what or which side of the family they were.

And we have whole gaggles of Paxton folks circulating through our heads---church folks and townfolk and folks scattered on their farms and little bits of land. They will be from our memories, our wishes, and our imaginations, with no insinuation of which is which, since they will be like long-worn quilts from a fragrant old cedar-chest: scraps and pieces of whole cloth, aprons and dresses and shirts and a bolero or two, or a small snip from the MOTHER pillow sent from Japan by Carey Luke Bishop, while he was overseas. All the pieces will be separate, different colors and patterns, velvet and gingham and denim and suede---good broadcloth and flimsy voile, all cut and sewn into a pattern and a story and a town.

She and I always have a laughing, crying good time---we share our own stories since we last saw each other, we reminisce over old times, we remember folks fondly or with longing or regret or even a smitch of irritation, as is true of everyone's remembrances.

I've got Things in Dishes in the fridge: Paminna Cheese, Egg and Olive and a BIG bowl of Chicken Salad with apples and grapes, along with a box of fresh croissants and lots of nice crackers. With pitchers of iced tea and endless percolators of coffee---that spells a good, easy visit, with a stop for a nibble and a cup and a walk around the neighborhood if the weather stays sunny.

She's good company, with a good warm laugh and an easy kind of settling-in which makes her at home and us glad to have her here. We'll be in the kitchen together, as well---she'll be making her marvelous Chicken Enchiladas for us one night, with REAL Texas guacamole---I've got five avocados at the peak of their shiny selves.

We'll have Chinese takeout one night, and go to a restaurant that we love on another. And we'll talk. We'll probably both be hoarse at the end of her visit, waving silently down the airport concourse.

So, if you don't see me for a few days---we'll be right upstairs. Or gone to lunch. Or at a bookstore. The possibles are the best part, after the good company we're keeping.

FOUNTAIN PEN

I have ink on my fingers today---I just filled my new fountain pen for the first time.

That's a FEELING. I'd been admiring and picking up my graceful new bottle of ink since Christmas, for it came with the pen. It's shaped like a squat, very smooth hourglass, with, like a lot of us, a lot more sand run through than remains. The lid is like a wide-top shako, sans plume, and the whole thing is made of the smoothest glass, with the inky depths converted into gleaming onyx by the shining curve of the hip.

The pen came with a cartridge insert, which was blue, and since I have always had a preference for black ink, I've been scribbling grocery lists and phone numbers and jotting down and toting up with the new hand-heft of this pen.

The pen itself is a riotous purple, chosen by our GrandBaby, because it's her favorite color. The clip is exactly that, like a Gucci paper-clip, strong and sturdy and sleek. And I'll be writing today, a bit, REALLY writing, for almost all my words are set down in clicks of the keyboard. I CALL that writing, for it engenders a spark of satisfaction, but the real thing is done with hand and pen.

I would not trade my keyboard for a quill employed by the Founding Fathers, and I cannot fathom how the Classics ever came to be. How those persistent writers thought a thought and got it onto paper in the halting process of dip and drip and skip and dip again, I'll never know. Dear Jane and Anthony and all their kind, with the cupful of whittled feathers and the clotty, smeary ink, were geniuses of a level to astound, for they put down such graceful, such telling sentences and ideas and phrases as to entertain, delight, halt the breath and change how we think about things.

If Xanadu came to Coleridge in a dream, whole passages lost to an untimely knock at the door, how DID he get down what he did? Scrabbling for paper and quill and ink and a quick whittle at the nib, with perhaps a halt for finding his spectacles---then all that stop-and-start to the scribbling. At that one poem alone, I am amazed.

Backspace to erase a line, highlight a whole paragraph and send it into nothingness with a quick flick of the delete, type like the wind before the thought whispers out (and it was such a GOOD one, too---and now an enticing, frustrating tickle melting through the floorboards of my brain)---those are the tools which we've come to depend on. Lining through a phrase, or using a pen-knife for both quill and erasure, blade-smoothing away a word with painstaking care, for paper was dear---who could think two thoughts in succession with such rude methods?

I also have excessive admiration for the writers who just pounded an old Underwood, getting the thoughts into play through the clatter of that anvil-with-keys---Gone With The Wind was written on one such, I believe, and word has it that she piled page after page into a dishpan and slid them beneath her dresser. Dedication and hope and a story to tell, that's what it took.

When I was in grade school, I don't believe even a glance from that cute Fields boy in third grade would equal the joyful anticipation kindled by a new lined tablet and a fresh-sharpened Eberhard #2. Just the smell of the thick paper with its visible micro-tendrils pressed smooth, and the scent of the pine shavings and the powdering of the lead as that old hand-crank wall-sharpener put a point on the pencil---nothing was as heady or promising.

And now, a just-opened bottle of India Black, dark as campfire coffee, and this new medium-point fountain pen---fountain pen. With the four new journals, one-per-season this time, from Chris---I have a feeling I'll soon have the old familiar callus on my right middle finger, and the hand-tingles which literally DO spell Writer's Cramp.

AUNT SHIRLEY'S BUTTONS

For those of you who commented or e-mailed about your own love affair with beautiful buttons, homely buttons, special buttons, and all buttons of all colors, shapes, uses and persuasions, or just for anyone who likes something PRETTY, DO take a look at this.

I'm totally in awe of the time and talent it took, plus the absolute unerring eye for the form and color---this is the reason I dedicated that last post to Jeanne. May I present a part of her Aunt Shirley's lifetime collection of BUTTONS:

http://backyardneighbor.typepad.com/backyard_neighbor/2009/10/antique-buttons-with-a-whole-new-meaning.html

This is a Happy March Present to you.