Last week I told you that Shabooh Shoobah had one of my top ten album covers. Here are the rest, in no particular order. The music ain’t bad either…
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Tags: Music
This is our house last April, right after having it painted the utterly perfect green color. To the left is our ginormous apple tree, a few blossoms open. Little did we know this would be the last spring for this marvelously productive tree.
We worried about the apple from the moment we moved into the house. Someone had done some very strange shaping and the enormous root system made it appear as though the tree was planted about eight feet from it’s current location, then snaked on the ground to the right spot and allowed to grow, and grow, and grow. The tree was tall and made tons and tons of apples. I spent many a day lining them up along the front wall, ready for any passerby who had a hankering. Then there was the time contemplating recipes for cider, apple butter, apple sauce, apple muffins, apple crisp, apple pie, apple cake, triple apple cake! Sometimes it made my head spin.
Then, one day about a month ago, I was out front weeding and felt a certain springiness. Had it been a spring in my step, I wouldn’t have worried. I’m that kind of gal. As I walked closer to the crazy roots, it increased, and I noticed a hole, small, but enough to signal trouble. The tree was starting to heave out of the ground. Thankfully it lasted through the awful wind storm. Having it topple then would have been a rather big bummer.
This is our yard without it, a gaping space of light and emptiness. I cried the day the men cut it down. It had provided so much for us – a riot of beautifully scented blooms, a place to watch and feed the wildlife, shade, secrecy, wonderfully crisp apples, the opportunity to share with friends and strangers. Thankfully there is always a silver lining. It opens up the view of the house and provides us with the space for me to indulge in a sometimes obsessive love for cherries, especially the tart kind that are great for pies and drying. Now I can have my very own tree! I hope there is a dwarf variety to suit our small front yard. I don’t want a repeat. Think good thoughts, won’t ya?
I was tagged by my friend Amber to post the fourth photo in the fourth folder of my collection. This is not actually in the fourth folder, but the sixth, because the other fourths were photos I had already posted on the blog, and redundancy is such a drag, you know? You know? Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Anyway, this is me outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris about a year and a half ago. Something about the lighting makes my head look like a giant melon, don’t you think? That’s not the only funny bit to this photo, well not to the photo, but to the general story of the day.
This is our first day in Paris, having arrived only a few hours earlier. We were doing our best to stay awake. At this point we’d been up for about twenty-eight hours, and as we are neither in college, nor rock stars, this does not come easily. However, I felt like, this time, I was going to be able to make the whole day without napping. This time, I shall beat jet lag!
Then we entered the museum, and with the hush of the people and all of the marvelous works of art, the cadence changed. Rather than experiencing the energetic buzz of the city, people moving, cars honking, scooters swerving, we felt the profound quiet of great art and architecture. We became part of the ebb and flow of the museum, yet found ourselves set wholly apart from it. The onset of fatigue was so potent that it set off a crazy chain of events. First, we swayed like drunkards, no matter how carefully we tried to walk – left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. Colleen laughs as quietly as she can, Gregory laughs quietly at Colleen laughing, museum-goers give sideways glances at the crazy Americans who should have respect for work that is neither silly or funny. More laughter from Colleen, then Gregory…and well, you know the rest.
Finally, after we had seen everything we had wanted to see, interspersed with lots of breaks on benches to compose ourselves, we waved our white flags in utter defeat. Jet lag won again. We slowly walked back to our apartment, climbed the stairs, and collapsed on the bed, sleeping for four hours.
