out of the green and into the blue…

I am sick, y’all. I got this weird sorta shiny happiness thing going on. I’m scaring my kids. Zachary is like, Mom, what is WRONG with you?! I don’t know, son. I’m just happy.  I listen to Dr. Wayne Dyer in my car, he tells me, you know, the things you want to come to you, the things that make up the body of your Life’s Calling, those big things, oh, they WILL come, but they come on GOD’S time, not my own. And they come in abundance. Things I don’t even know I want to come to me will come on God’s time and boy howdy, a big ass bunch OF it. Okay. I’m hip. I’m down…

The corollary to this is: While I’m waiting for the thing, my Life’s Calling, my Special Purpose, (it may even be a Special Porpoise, my life’s work could involve dolphins in some way… sorry, I saw the word, purpose, and it just happened…), while I’m patiently waiting for God to speak to me, I would do well to live in the moment, this moment, it is what it is… This is Life, right this minute, you know, while I got my hand in the dishpan, scrubbin’ the lasagna outta the glass dish, I gotta enjoy that part too, because that there is Life, I got bits of tomato floating over my hand, and a thin layer of orangish grease threatening to coat my nice white plastic dish pan and I wish I could be outside sitting on my deck with my book and a soft pillow and a breeze, but  here I am in this orange grease, and Franki and Zack in the background, sitting on the livingroom floor, actually playing a game together, laughing and negotiating and cajoling and fighting and whining and laughing again… these games on the floor are getting more and more rare, between the two, Franki is growing up, at 15…. in the past 3 or 4 months, she has started doing her hair in a lovely, demure little side -swept pony tail, she looks so very… Audrey… just kinda romantic and sweet… and she puts on an eensy bit of powdery pastel eye-shadow, blues and purples, and a dash of mascara, just a swipe, so that you can’t even tell she has on mascara, except her eyes are popping and sparkling and you just can’t put your finger on it… tiny stars dangle from her ears, the stars are her favorites, mine too….  sometimes I catch a glimpse of her from across the room, or across the yard, and I think, who’s that? I think it’s an adult, or at least a large teenager person, and then I realize, well, it IS a large teenager person, it’s FRANKI. Sigh…

She has a boyfriend now too, that’s a new development, among others. This boy is Russian. He was born in Russia and has a Russian accent, he moved here when he was three, and you’d think he would’ve become more Americanized, as far as speech at least, but I think his mom has a pretty thick accent still.. But the boy is so quiet. I have picked him up about 4 times, to take them to watch ballgames or movies together… I have asked him, oh, I’d say 8 questions, that’s all I could come up with, 2 questions per encounter… Except I think I asked him if he had a dog TWICE, accidentally, because I remember him saying, “yeah, a German Shephard” twice, because I remember thinking, “I don’t care much for German Shepards” twice… But every question I ask him is met with a single sentence answer, and then that’s it. I can’t figure out how to get a paragraph out of the boy. He put the “painful” in “painfully shy”.  I feel actual PAIN for him when he has to get in my car and answer that stupid DOG QUESTION again.

The boy is very handsome. No, make that very VERY handsome. He is blond, nice thick blonde hair and nice teeth. No idea what color eyes, because we don’t make eye contact. We’re both embarrassed about the damn dog question.  He brings Franki a rose in a plastic conical-type sleeve, bought from the BP Station within walking distance of his house. Actually, the boy has to walk about 12 suburban blocks to get that rose. Suburban blocks are bigger than city blocks and wayyyyyy smaller than country blocks. I lived in the country growing up, the STICKS, when I rode my bike “around the block” you know, I was gone for HOURS. But the boy walks to get the rose. Not once, but twice he has given her a rose.  She puts them in an old cobalt glass medicine bottle I gave her, and keeps them in her room until they dry out. I taught her to throw away the dried up rose and keep the beautiful little scrap of ribbon that came with it. I’m teaching her this because I watched Flower Childe dry all her bouquets and roses for YEARS, the flaky, musty old mess of dried roses… some people like that sorta thing… My Franki will love shiny little bits of ribbon instead….

A couple weeks ago Franki was cleaning her room, and she brought out her collection of HotWheels cars, she had them in a white plastic dishpan, about 3/4′s full of gleaming, colorful little cars. HotWheels are amazing, if you think about it, so small, so perfect, so shiny, and wheels that turn, and some have little doors that open and if you could just get tiny enough you could climb in that little silver interior and drive… all the way across the living room… so she presented her dishpan 3/4′s full of HotWheels to Zack, hey, you want these, I’m done with them.   Zack said NO! You keep them! Later I found him sobbing in his room. Franki doesn’t want her HotWheels. She doesn’t want her Pokemon. She doesn’t want her skateboard guys… he sobbed and he sobbed, hot scaulding little boy tears like acid on his flesh he scrubbed them from his face as fast as they appeared and he shrank from my touch when I tried to smooth his hair or rub his back, his skin was burning and his shirt sweaty from his pain and I cried too,  remembering… the feeling of abandonment and urgency when Aunt Sis refused to play Barbie Dolls with me because she was too busy mooning over stupid BILLY YOUNG with his stupid long lumbering legs and his geeky goddurn glasses and his nasty black hair and lean arms sticking out of his stupid generic baseball style T-SHIRT…

I spend a lot of my time now, sitting on the floor with Zack, listening and feigning interest in the 154 Pokemon he has to list and show me individually on his Gameboy DS, or the 200 Pokemon cards he has MADE BY HAND, as he lists each and every power they have, and which one evolves into which one else… I am a poor substitute for his sister, I know, but I’m all he has…

Franki got a babysitting job too this summer, 2 or 3 days a week, which takes her away for HOURS, all day sometimes… Oh how the boys suffers… Plus she’ll have 3 weeks of Band Camp too, and that’s all day… sigh… I’m gonna witness a LOT of Pokemon evolutions…

The pool was sucking my will to live this year. I think that’s why I’m in a good mood today, I think the pool has finally turned the corner. Into Blue. Out of the Green and into the Blue. sounds like a Neil Young song.  The problem is, I shot my mouth off about how I’m using Bleach, Baking Soda, and Borax to run my pool, that’s it and that is all and the Stupid Pool Store can SUCK IT, they are not going to get MY MONEY this year, they are not going to “analyze” my water and “prescribe” for me about $800 worth of BULLSPIT! By GOD.  And then I let my husband and son take the cover off the pool, without my supervision, and those geniuses dumped the entire winter’s worth of leaves and other assorted tree detritus DIRECTLY INTO my starter water… How’s a gal supposed to battle THAT with stuff I find under my kitchen damn sink?! Also, it didn’t help when he started up the pump and the pump said “HMMMMMM” instead of “WHGGGOOOOOOOOORRRSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH”. Very bad when pump says “HMMMMMM”. As I waited for the new pump to arrive, the water, my beautiful starter water… went swampy, swampy green, with dead mosquitos and japanese beetles floating in the middle, and fluffy white THINGS from the trees floated down down down and landed on the murky green surface. If two round alligator nostrils followed by two round alligator eyeballs had popped up out of that water, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Eyelash? What’s the experssion?

I keep buying window treatments. I have 9 windows in my house. And 7 in the Elm St Annex. That’s 16 windows. Every single one of the windows I own has a window treatment on it, or it doesn’t, like my kitchen, I like that one to be blank and let in the light, but my point is, I got plenty of window treatments already in use. And yet, I keep buying them. Whether they are 50cents at a yardsale, or $6.00 at Salvation Army, it doesn’t matter, I keep buying em up. Last week I spent $16.00 at the Army, and about $7.00 at the yardsales, just on window treatments alone! Oh the lovely sheers… in all the colors of the rainbow… and patterns, do you know I found polka dot sheers last week, do you know polka dots is now my signature color.. and oh the glorious glorious valences! I got valences for every season! Every mood? Feeling somber? I got somber daggone valences, hey, look right here, black damask floral, ROSES EVEN, with 5 inch braided dingle dangle trim…. Feeling celebratory? Hey, I gotcha covered, I got electric green swirlled sheers from IKEA, happy happy happy!!! Feeling romantic? Floor length purple velvet will wrap you right up  in luxury and love…

The problem is, people don’t sell good curtain rods any more. My curtain rods are weak. They bow in the middle from the weight of a pair of SHEERS. And they don’t make room for layering. People used to sell quadruple curtain rods, with room for 3  layers of various sheers and drapery panels and other assorted innards, and then top it off with a fancy scalloped valence, WHOOOOboy, they sure knew how to do up a window back in the olden days! Nowadays, it’s all about “natural light” and “simplicity” and “clean lines.” Pffft.  I went through my Asian period. It was bleak and bare and pale green and light purple and I am glad it is over. I think I’m in my Victorian gaudy glass bauble period. I think I’m a little bit Steampunk. I want brass clocks and compasses and hourglasses and kaleidoscopes and all manner of magical sparkling old and mysterious wonder-filled whirring things scattered about my life…. I want to wake up and hear chink plink scutter fltttt whrrrrrrrr, I want to hear things working, stirring, chiming, turning over, clicking, clacking, ringing, shifting, ticking…

I now have two enormous rubbermaid bins full of window treatments, and 4 sizeable drawers full in the extra dresser down in the gameroom. If some good curtain rods should happen to come my way, I am READY.

Flower Childe and her man-friend may be renting the Elm St Annex. Which brings a relief the size of Texas, but also, a trepidation the size of… Wyoming or some state slightly smaller than but real close to Texas. It’s so friggin’ complicated, that little house and my two oldest daughters and men who date sisters and sisters who are so mad and so hurt with each other and so raw and a mother who can’t find her place in this mess, a mother whose every move is supporting one and spurning another and vice versa the next day, who only wants them to come together because they are missing out  on their best support their best friend… even times spent with  my own sister, times spent laughing until we are on the floor.. those times are tinged with regret for my daughters, that they have lost sight of each other… and my oldest daughter who has lost sight of herself, her very self… and the times I want to be happy for Flower Childe and grateful for how she’s keeping herself, and keeping in touch, staying connected, but that’s always tinged with pain for my Beane, and how she’s so disconnected and awash in… that which is not HER…. the opportunities Flower Childe has, and the resources… and the ones that were taken away from Beane, or that she just won’t reach and grab what IS available, she won’t try, she won’t strive. Failure to strive, failure to thrive…I want her to wake up and reach out, dig out, pull out, grab and grasp and yearn and strive…

oh where or where did my good mood go…

Oh. Here it is! Poppy! Poppy is my clown, my court jester, my own personal litte polkadot, she’s a white spot on a black background and hey, you wanna see something funny, how about the way her whole back half, the entire back half of the dog wiggles, she launches 4 inches off the ground all four paws at the same time are OFF THE GROUND while simultaneously the back half wiggles back and forth, when she sees me, when she hasn’t seen for for a good hour or so, if I run out to get milk and bread and popsicles and window treatments, when I walk back into the house I am treated to this amazing display of joy, this arial ballet, as it were… her ears pinned back like only a Boston can do, till she looks bald and like some sort of bug-eyed FREAK, it makes her eyes bug out, I think the same muscles that pull her ears back also pull the skin back from her eyeballs and her tongue lolls out and her mouth cracks in a crazy bug-eyed bald-headed ass-wiggling GRIN. And I just laugh. Because I know the kids get this same greeting when they come home from school and she’s been on lock-down in the kitchen all day… And my husband gets it when he comes home sometimes off of some weird shift at work and the house is empty and Poppy’s in the kitchen, waiting, waiting for her people… 

Poppy is an amazing invention.

I’m obsessed with this website now too:   http://newdressaday.wordpress.com/  Because of this website I have recently acquired a stack of monstrous muu muus and various and sundry other fashion disasters, a pile the size of Texas or at least Wyoming, strewn lavishly over the back of my couch, next to the equally huge pile of window treatments … sewing projects, waiting, waiting, ever waiting and growing, growing, growing, waiting for the magic, the magic to occur, in which I trundle down down down into the gameroom and dig up my magical sewing machine whrrrrrrrr and get to stitchin… sigh… it’s all just waiting there for me…

and the sun comes out in full force and shines down upon my decidedly BLUER less SWAMPLIKE pool today… this aqua blue font dedicated to MY SWIMMING POOL!!! LOVE!!!!

Hi, my name is Momonroof, and this video is a gift to you: