I Gave Myself Flowers

Happy Monday world!

Today started out a classic Monday for me. I got on the scale and found I'd gained for weight than I would have liked over the weekend, I couldn't figure out what to wear (which always makes me feel ugly) and it was cold and grey with lots of wind outdoors. I started the morning by crying in the refrigerator while I was trying to get breakfast.

Image by mbgrigby via Flickr

But you know, I washed all the dishes, I planned out a fresh juice to make myself later that day, I took Aaron to work and then bought myself an armful of flowers on the way home, found a voicemail on my phone from an acquaintance who just called to say she admired me and was thinking of me and then the sun came out and the wind died down. By the time my aunt knocked on the door with her sewing machine cheerfully tucked under her arm, ready to sew the day away together, I was feeling pretty alright.

Sometimes you just need to figure out how to heal what ails you...even if it means a few indulgences. You're worth it.

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Titanic to Promising

I was having a bad morning. The kind of bad morning you're bound to have after Monday comes barreling down the road and hits you head-on, after a fabulously happy weekend. I headed in to paint with my friends with a bad attitude. I felt a little like somebody gave me a brain-ectomy and replaced all my wits with over-cooked spaghetti, given me a teaspoon to bail out The Titanic with and then waved blithely from the distance as they set a fuse to crackle slowly towards the ship. So overwhelmed and so hopeless and so alone. I am wandering through new parenting issues that feel super over-the-top and I periodically feel so alone in my marriage and am even feeling at-sea in my housekeeping routine (which, darn it, I was so on top of a week or so ago). Blast Blast Blast.

Image via Wikipedia

So, anyhow...there I was heading in to church...wondering if I should even be there...thinking that I might not even stay and in walks my sweet landscaping friend. So sweet, this friend. And with her gentle way, she flourished an onion-skin paper my direction and suddenly, there on my empty watercolor sheet (uninspired and unproductive in the painting department today) there was the most beautiful garden plan.

A plan. A solution. A stunning work of art, featuring my yard. And just like that, my day turned from ridiculously over-the-top sucky to absolutely survivable...yea, foreshadowing promise.

I feel like I felt when I had my portrait drawn by an artist friend as a surprise.

I feel like my life and my self and the world I am trying to live in and create are beautiful or at least look beautiful to some people or could be beautiful. So much of the time the problems we wade through every single day and the mind-numbing road blocks that zing stunningly up in the way start to feel like they mean something...I forget they mean nothing more than the fact that I'm alive.

Living in Color

I like Calvin and Hobbes...and somehow...even though Calvin's dad makes his usual incredibly confusing muddle of the topic....there's something to this idea. I somehow feel a little like color was invented in very recent history. Its hard to imagine the turn of the century and the 20-30 years afterwards being reliably "real" somehow because I see it all in these somewhat less lively looking black and white photography. People feel like sketches, not real humans and it somehow really shocked, emotionally moved and deeply touched me to see this little series of photos that The Library of Congress has put up on Flikr....Rare Color Photographs of The Great Depression Era.

The people feel heart-breakingly real....alive...and somehow painfully interrupted and touchable. Its very core shaking especially in the midst of  reading The Grapes of Wrath. (We're nearing the end) I feel in some small way from looking through the photos that the people still are in some vague sense. They don't feel like someone's ancestor...they feel like themselves: mothers and fathers and young women and little boys with messy hair. There's something very gritty and gutpunching about it for me.

I am also impressed by the true formality of the era in small ways. The dresses that the black field workers are wearing look like church clothes to my modern eye. Very interesting to see female mechanics working with make-up, pretty scarves on their hair and just so touches.

Here's a link the whole shebang on Flikr and if you have less time in your life, here's a more touching smaller selection of them, singled out by ABC