The Brocante Home Chronicles.

The Credit Crunch

 

"Do you live in a house or a home? Are you in it for the money or the love? Do you think you'll be happy when you move? Or are you happy now?

Does it give you financial security or emotional warmth? Does it make you feel like you are getting somewhere? Or does it make you feel like you're there now?

If it could talk, could it tell anyone what your favourite colour is?

When your little boy draws a plane on the wall do you reach for the paint roller or grab another crayon and draw a rocket? Is it perfect? Or is it real and still perfect? 

Do you keep it as empty as possible to create space or do you fill it with all the people and things you enjoy the most?

Do you look in estate agents windows? Or do you look in your own windows and think "how lovely"?

Are you constantly monitoring it's price or are you measuring its occupants heights on the back of the bathroom door? What's the most important thing you put into it, two-fifths of your salary, or your life and soul?

What's the most important thing you'll get out? A profit? Or a treasure trove of memories that'll never ever go down in value but always up.

It's not too late.

A house can always become a home. Love not money. That's what gives a home a soul.

And a home's soul is NOT FOR SALE.

HOME IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PLACE IN THE WORLD."

 

Ikea Print Ad, 2007.  

How Lies Grow

 

"The first time I lied to my baby, I told him that it was his face on the baby food jar. The second time I lied to my baby, I told him that he was the best baby in the world, that I hoped he'd never leave me. Of course I want him to leave me someday. I don't want him to become one of those fat shadows who live in their mothers's houses watching game shows all day. The third time I lied to my baby I said, "Isn't she nice?" of the woman who'd caressed him in his carriage. She was old and ugly and had a disease. The fourth time I lied to my baby, I told him the truth, I thought. I told him how he'd have to leave me someday or risk becoming a man in a bow tie who eats macaroni on Fridays. I told him it was for the best, but then I thought, I want him to live with me forever. Someday he'll leave me: then what will I do?"

Maxine Chernoff. 

Domestic Goddesses

"To me "domestic goddesses" have made the lives of ordinary woman a misery. My favorite recipe would be to roast one slowly on a spit."

Kathy Lette.

Heck. Who yanked her chain?

For A Five Year Old.

 

A snail is climbing up the windowsill

Into your room, after a night of rain

You call me in to see, and I explain

That it would be unkind to leave it there:

It might crawl to the floor; we must take care

That no-one squashes it. You understand

And carry it outside with careful hand

To eat a daffodil.

I see then that a kind of faith prevails,

Your gentleness is moulded still by words

From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

Your closest relatives, and who purveyed

The harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your Mother,

And we are kind to snails.

Fleur Adcock.

Little Things.

 

After she's gone to camp, in the early

evening I clear out our girl's breakfast dishes

from the rosewood table and find a dinky

crystallised pool of maple syrup, the

grains standing there, round, in the night, I

rub it with my fingertip

as if I could read it, this raised dot of

amber sugar, and this time

when I think of my father, of the Vulcanblood-red

glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a

broken open coal. I think I learned

to love the little things about him

because of all the big things

I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.

So when I fix on this image of resin,

or sweep together with the heel of my hand a

pile of my son's sunburn peels like

insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am

paying attention to small beauties,

whatever I have- as if it were a duty

to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

Sharon Olds.

Once upon a time a friend of mine walked through my house and said, "Goodness Alison if only your housekeepers knew the truth about your house: cracked lino and Finn's scribbles on the wall...". Well yeeeees, I thought, looking at her in mild astonishment and wondering if I have rendered myself oblivious to ugly truths and taught myself only to see what is lovely? 

I have long considered this a gift: to be able to see only good. To forgive ugliness and ill-treatment. To ignore the hole in the lino, because there is nothing to be done about it until I'm slightly richer than I am right now and smile instead at the pile of vintage cookbooks I refer to on a daily basis. I do it with everything you see. Sometimes to my detriment. I look at my thighs and think hell's bell, the universe hasn't been kind there lady, but heck thats  a cleavage and a half you've got going on there Missus! I forgive abysmal behaviour in men who are clearly drunk. Or bonkers. Or both. And think instead well yes, he's a hopeless cause but heavens a girl could drown in those blue eyes! I dim the lights and pretend theres no such thing as dust, forgive Finn just about anything cos he's got such delicious curly hair and do nothing at all about the size of my bum because I have decided I am Rubenesque and the rest of the world is just gonna have to deal with both that and the fact that the slates on my roof are in a sorry state, but that wreath on my front door is a joy to behold in every passing heart.

I am foolish. And proud. And yet part of me suspects that this is my problem. That life would be easier, happier, no scrap that, just easier, if I weren't so very stubborn about seeing only the little things and forgetting the bigger picture. That there is a tomorrow after today and my word wouldn't life be fine and dandy if I could be the kinda woman with a five year plan and a careless disregard for the miniscule detail that makes my heart sing on a daily basis...?

On Toys.

"You have come, of course, into an art gallery full of pictures and felt that sense of beauty that seems at first overwhelmng. Then little by little,  you select here a picture and there another that, for some reason or which which you cannot analyse, seem to satisfy you or meet your need or mood of that moment. The old critic may deplore your choice and deride your taste, but choice and taste they remain.

Now has it ever occured to you that a toy shop is like that to a child- a child art gallery? The breath almost leaves the tiny body  in the midst  of all the first wonder. The little hands reach out as if to snatch each seperate object, yet even as they close around a woolly dog, perhaps, the dancing eyes discern another toy quite different, one entirely unperceived by the elders looking on. Lead the child away if you will, but note how impatient he becomes to return to where he may feast his hungry gaze once more once more on that one toy- perhaps the very last toy you would have picked out for your child, just as the pictures you picked out in the art gallery were the last that a criic would have picked out.

Do you realise, you father or mother, what deep meaning may lie hidden  behind your child's selection of that special toy? Do you understand the essential need that may prompt the want? It is often there, and if parents would only seek to analyse the child's express desire , even for certain toys, child education and child welfare would in a very great measure cease to be the bugbears that they are today to all too many parents. The fact is, we parents are too prone to select our children's "toys" to suit our own tastes rather than the needs of the little ones for whom they were designed."  

The Girls Own Annual, 1917.   

Impossible Things.

"There is no use trying" said Alice "one can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Lewis Carroll.

The Good News.

I knew it. I just knew that somebody somewhere would have been able to put it into words more eloquently than I will ever be capable of.  This is, I think, what I was in my own muddled little way, trying to say when I wrote Hear No Evil, Say No Evil...

They don't publish
the good news.
The good news is published
by us.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
and the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling it's wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen! You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow
and preoccupation
and get free.
The  latest good news is that you can do it.

By Thich Nhat Hanh.

Tomorrow Is A New Day.

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense..."

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What Is The Real Simple Life?

"It is curious how many people have got the idea that to live a simple life a person must live like a hermit, or in a hovel, or in a bare room, adopt uncouth ways, and disregard everything either modern or beautiful. They do not seem to be able to get it into their heads that there are two ways of achieving the simple life.

One is by not wanting things, and being cheerful and happy without them. The other is steadfastly and bravely toiling for what you want- and getting it. A definite aim, or a  definite determination to be  cheerful  in aimlessness; either of these is a recipe for  the simple life.

Simplicity, with all that it implies, is a state much to be desired in thinking, in dressing and in living; but this does not mean crude, comfortless ways of doing things, or negligent ways of dressing. Make home happy; hold loved ones first in your heart; leave off fussing over fashionable ways of living; be natural, and you will be living the simple life, though you clean house by electricity, entertain hospitably, and you have every convenience known to man. The quality of the individual is what determines the simple life, never her surroundings."

The Girls Annual. 1919.   

Advice On Low Spirits.

“1st. Live as well as you dare.
2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 or 80 degrees.
3rd. Amusing books.
4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.
5th. Be as busy as you can.
6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
8th. Make no secret of low spirits to you friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment.
9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.
11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.
12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.
13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
14th Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.
16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.
17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
18th. Keep good blazing fires.
19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana.”

So said Sydney smith to one Lady Morpeth back in 1820. How astonishing then, that modern day cures for misery, minor heartbreak or "low spirits"  are so very similar, almost 200 years later.

Last night Mr Bangers and Mash  declared our two month old relationship kaput (I'm not very good at this game am I?), issuing an exit speech that made me laugh and made me cry and eventually found us drinking coffee together two and a half hours later, holding hands and trying to ignore the fact that begging him (He is lovely, gentle and funny, with more morality in his little finger than I've got in my whole body. And he has a very desirable roll-top bath and understands html. Whats not to like?) not to abandon me, complete with obligatory snotty nose, probably wasn't my finest hour...

So today please forgive me for over-indulging in centuries old advice and a big tub of Bohemian Raspberry Ben and Jerries. Should you find me stalking the streets of this green and pleasant land, bear in mind that I am doing my best to be in "the open air without fatigue" before returning to my humble abode to make the room where I "commonly sit" gay and pleasant...

I don't know what was troubling  Sydneys friend Lady Morpeth,  but better advice she could not have receieved.

Not Yet.

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch –
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

Jane Hirshfield.

Love Poems.

"The Designer seemed to have a collection of books of love poems. I asked what he liked about them, and he came over, looking  very excited.  He  pulled out a  book of Neruda.

'I love Neruda!"  I said, relieved that we'd now have a topic.

'I haven't read the book.'  He opened it to the frontispiece and showed me an inscription. ' I like the handwritten stuff, ' he said 'You know, love stories that get donated to the Salvation Army'

Apparently the Designer would thumb through these books of secondhand poems, looking for inscriptions dedicating sonnets to people who were no longer adored. He liked that they'd been tossed out among the fondue makers, blenders and leftovers of marriages.  He  liked to think of love relegated to curbside pickup, put into cardboard boxes with old  lingerie and cat scratching posts. It made him feel as though his own life was maybe not so dismal, as though other people gave their love away, as well, as though other people had not understood it's value. Love poems. Inscriptions vowing forever. Just paper in the end. The Designer was replete with other peoples failures."

The Year of Yes by  Maria  Headley.

Buy it on Amazon...

Chasing The Rainbow.

" Surely few regret having chased when children across the wet and briary field after the end of the rainbow. Even after we learned the pot of  gold was a  myth, the inspiration of the chase far outweighed the disillusionment.  Even the darker fictions but add colour to the memory. Few of us would take out of our  memories the thrill and awe of the night  we thought the world was coming to an end; the day we saw the first circus parade and thought the cages gold;  the mysterious white  form which we fancied hovered over the churchyard that dark night.  If the  colour of these fancies and folk stories still lingers after wisdom has come, we are the richer for it, provided that knowledge has brought the power to know the realfrom the imaginary. The use of grown-up wisdom is to teach which is fancy and which is substance. It is not meant to take away the colour of the mind or grind life down to nothing but material facts. Rather is it to carry over the wonder of fancy and more firmly attach it to the substances that endure ..."

The Girls Annual, 1919.

The Mother.

"Of course I love them, they are my children.
That is my daughter and this is my son,
And this is my life I give to please them
It has never been used. Keep it safe, Pass it on."

Anne Stevenson.

Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk-

Here is a soul accepting nothing.
Obstinate as a small child
refusing tapioca, peaches, toast.

The cheeks are streaked, but dry.
The mouth is firmly closed in both directions.

Ask, if you like,
If it is merely sulking, or holding out for better.
The soup grows cold in question.
The ice cream pools in it's dish.

Not this, is all it knows. Not this.
As certain cut flowers refuse to drink in the vase.

And the heart, from it's great distance, watches, helpless.

Jane Hirshfield.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver.

The Home-Maker.

"But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the home-making necessity, the adroit perversion of the home-making instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy, that home-making had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine table linen, expensive rugs.... God!how about keeping alive some intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? How about the children? Did anybody suggest to women that they give to understanding their children a tenth part of the time and real intelligence and real purposefulness they put into getting the right clothes for them? A tenth? A hundredth!! the living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric of the little human souls they lived with- did they treat that with the care and deft handed patience they gace to their filet-ornamented table linen? No they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishclothes..."

The Home-maker, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1924

Falling Cloudberries.

"There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint of a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment..."

Tessa Kiros.

The Kitchenette Building.

We are things of dry hours, and the involuntary plan
Grayed in and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy song, not strong
Like "rent",  "feeding a wife", "satisfying a man".

But could a dream  send up through onion fumes,
It's white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterdays garbage ripening in the hall
Flutter or sing an aria down these rooms.

Even if we were willing to let it in
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since number five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water and hope to get in it.

Gwendolyn Brooks.

Thoughts After Ruskin.

Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind me rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places.

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickiling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
-All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.

Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphiyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool  around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.

Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!

And when all's over, off with their overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essence of lilies and roses.

Elma Mitchell. 

The Girls.

A mosquito tipsy with blood, the children dozing
Prams are curdling on the patio
Here a high buzz of female conversation
Over cups of coffee, intelligent, worn young faces.

The house has a lot to answer for
But no-one asks it to account for itself
Instead they address themselves to the well of experience
A long, long throat before you hit the water
The penny will be falling for years.

The room is charged with danger. At the bottom
Of the well there lives a toad
Clammy and neglected who forces them to speak
Words bubble up, the toad is wounded.

They are thick with children
Look what we have fished out the water!
Each nurtures a genius at her breast
Who sucks her dry. It is beautiful
Sophisticated, dangerous, dull, charming.

George Szirtes.

A Childs Eye.

"The children's eye is forever being educated and ugly things should not be brought superfluously before them..."

Clarence Cook.

One Art.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.


Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.


Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.


I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.


I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


Elizabeth Bishop.

Sane and Quiet Enjoyment.

"The emphasis upon competition in modern life is connected with a general decay of civilised standards such as must have occurred in Rome after the Augustan age. Men and women appear to have become incapable of enjoying the more intellectual pleasures. The art of general conversation, the knowledge of good literature—who in our age cares for anything so leisurely?

Some American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the borders of their campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.

The cure for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life."

Bertrand Russell.

Love After Love.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott.

The Only People For Me.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like  spiders  across  the stars."

Jack Kerouac.

The Christmas Thing.

My grandmother sat
On Christmas morning
Mending overalls.
A tall tree glittered,
A hen was roasting,
And the room was merry
With dolls and balls,
So why was she mending
Overalls?
The air is magic
On Christmas morning
And it isn't a time
For doing chores.
We had given her
A brooch that glittered
After anxious searchings
Of ten cent stores
So why was she working
At everyday chores?
I didn't know then
But I learned much later
That Christmas magic
Goes through and through
The fabric of living
Love, threading her needle,
Made mending
The Christmas-thing to do.

Jane Merchant.

Fireside.

"I dream of a home with a hearth- fire in it, a cat and a dog, the footsteps of friends-  and you!"

Lucy Ward Montgomery.

What Would You Buy?

I went to a teeny little antiques fair on Sunday with Mark's Mum (She's off her trolley, but I love her) and found amongst the flotsom and the jetsom some teeny little treasures including flowery hankies for wrapping teeny Christmas gifts, a vintage childs learn to tell the time puzzle for Finley's stocking (horribly difficult to put together!!), the prettiest jade green necklace, two child sized padded hangers, a few little gifts talking about may ruin a surprise or two, and a box full of Victorian building blocks with a picture on one side that took me flying back to my childhood...

I am ten. I am standing in Nana's teeny little hexagonal shaped hall, running my hand over the bumps on the little bamboo telephone table and  talking to my mum on the old green phone. Nana is making gravy in the smallest kitchen you have ever seen and I can see Helen squashed up on the sofa watching Shirley Temple in The  Little  Princess. I am wrapped in a brown peasant patterned brush cotton shawl with a long cream fringe, pinched from Nana's wardrobe and tied fetchingly in a knot at my chin. My hair is longer than it will ever be again and I am on the brink of teenage boredom. We are here every weekend and I know this flat like I know the back of my hand. I know the smell of Nana's downtrodden slippers. I know the name of every Frank Sinatra album in her fake mahogany display unit, the way the water in her taps is always steaming hot and the little pot holder that describes itself as a "get round to it". I know how  cold  the 1930's  tiles are in the bathroom,  the repeat of the turquoise swirls decorating the carpet,  and the tweedy green scratchy feel of the armchair in the living room.

And most of all I know what the picture of the balloon seller says on the wall above the telephone table:

"If there were dreams to sell, Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rang his bell, What would you buy?"

Words written on my heart ever after. I know this picture you see.   I know what the balloon seller looked like and the black of the frame against the wallpaper. I know how much Nana loved it but I don't know why. Who bought it? Did she buy it herself? What happened to it when she died?  What dreams was she hoping would one day be for sale?

And more than this. Did she  know as I do, that  dreams  are like balloons?  That if you let go they float away for ever, tantalisingly out of reach or sometimes lost in the sky forever?

Don't let go. Hold them till your knuckles turn white.

Those Winter Sundays.

Sundays too, my Father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in weekday weather
Banked fires blaze. No-one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking
When the rooms were warm he'd call
And slowly I would rise and dress,
Fearing the chronic anger of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of loves austere and lonely offices.

Robert Hayden. 

DayStar.

She wanted a little room for thinking,
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
A doll slumped behind  the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage,
to sit out the childrens naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch-
The pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
A floating maple leaf. Other days
She stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before  Liza appeared
pouting at the top of the stairs
And just what was Mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas  rolled over
and lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place  that was  hers,
for an hour - where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Rita Dove.

P.S:  I'm soooo in love with the way that sleeping womans nets are filtering the light. Oh to see life through a net curtain hey?

The Windows.

How do you earn a life going on
behind yellow windows, writing at night
the latin names of plants for a garden
opening the front door to a wet dog.

Those who love you, forgive you, clearly
with steaming casseroles and red wine.
Its the same film down all the surburban streets.
It's a Wonderful  Life. How do you  learn it?

What you hear- the doorbells familiar chime.
What you touch- the clean warm towels.
What you see, what you smell, what you taste
all tangible to the stranger passing your gate.

There you are again, in a room where those early hyacinths
surely sweeten the air, and the right words wait
in the dictionaries, on the tip of a tongue you touch
in a kiss, drawing your crimson curtains now-

Against dark hours. And again in a kitchen
the window ajar, sometimes the sound of your radio,
or the scent of your food, and a cat in your arms,
a child in your arms, a lover. Such vivid flowers.

Carol Ann Duffy.

My November Guest.

My sorrow when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of  Autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be:
She loves the bare, the withered tree,
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Herpleasure will not let me stay
She talks and I  am fair to list:
She's glad the birds have gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate deserted tree's,
The faded earth, the heavy sky.
The beauties she so truly see's
She thinks I have no eyes for these,
And vexes me for reasons why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days.
Before the coming of the snow.
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost.

The Right No.

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him: and saying it,

he goes from honour to honour, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no.
Yet that no- the right no-
drags him down all his life.

Che Face...Il Gran Rifiuto.
C.P.Cavafy.

Mistress Peggy.

Funny little face.

Never wears a smile;

Two wooden legs,

Couldn't walk a mile.

 

Stupid little head

Only made of wood;

Yet does her duty

As everybody should.

 

Sets her tiny teeth

And won't let go,

Never mind how fiercely

The wind may blow.

 

She's a very useful

Good old friend of mine;

Little Mistress Peggy,

Of the laundry line.

By Charlotte Druitt Cole.

Joyful Girl.

I do it for the joy it brings
because I am a joyful girl, 
because the world owes me nothing,
and we owe each other the world
I do it because it's the least I can do.
I do it because I learned it from you,
I do it just because I want to
because I want to.

"Joyful Girl", Ani DiFranco.

Home Is The Hunter.

She's watched for  his return
at each day's evening, his briefcase
stuffed as if with deermeat,
umbrella  a spent spear.
Forty years of triumphal entrances,
attentive welcomings, end in this
gift-loaded euphoric  homecoming.
Something near to fear

stirs in her. The house
has been hers throughout the core
of every day, close shelter
for her busy morning hours,
her re-creative afternoons.
Now it opens its traitor door,
switches allegiances to his clamour,
his masterfulness, his more
insistent needs. How long had she
dug, hoed and planted the suburban
flower  patch, made it colourful
and fragrant for his weekend
leisure? Now he comes in with the air
of a pioneer, as if her patient garden
were wilderness for his first
cultivation; and she'll pretend

(habits are hard to break) when called on
to admire, that everything he grows
is magical, as if no million years
but he alone made this summer's rose.

Pamela Gillilan.

Mrs Icarus.

I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute Grade A pillock.

Carol Ann Duffy.

Illuminating The Fog.

"Derive happiness in oneself from a good  days work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us."

Henri Matisse.

Dressing Up.

Clipperty clop! Clipperty clop!
Down the stairs I come,
I've got my mummy's shoes on,
That's why I  cannot run!

I've got my mummy's hat on,
I'm all dressed up you see,
I think I am a princess,
Going out for tea.

I've got my mummy's coat on,
It's much too long for me.
Oh dear! I've tripped up on the stairs!
That bump you heard was  ME!

Joy Phillimore in The  Tiny Tots Annual, 1955.

Wet!

She turned out the shelves of the cupboard;
She turned out the drawers of the chest;
She settled to throw half the rubbish aside,
Then flung it back feeling depressed.
She got out her mending-those stockings
Had never seemed "hopeless" before-
She pushed them away. On a very wet day
One can't sit a-darning- that's sure!

She started to write a  long letter.
She started and that was the end!
For when the wind howls it's difficult quite
To know how to cheer up a friend.
She read half a page of a novel,
And then with his nose on her knee,
Her little dog-chum told her "Not to look glum,
But to boil up the kettle for tea."

The Girls Own Annual. 1918. 

Down To Earth.

Woman Magazine: April, 1959.

As Sweet As Can Be.

"We cannot change yesterday, that is clear.
Or begin tomorrow until it is here;
So all that is left for you and me,
Is to make today as sweet as can be."

Emma.C. Dowd.

Hidden Tapestries.

"Often I speculate as to other peoples patterns. Given the same material, each of us would weave a different design.One housewife from her cleaning, cooking, mending, will fashion something drab and commonplace. another from the same routine will spin a gay design out of  her pleasure in the craft of homemaking. One man will make a dingy pattern from his daily walk to work, while his neighbour weaves into it little sparkling fragments from that same walk, made of his delight in shape of clouds and shadows, the sound of raindrops chuckling in the gutter, the fanlight of a Georgian doorway. Old Mrs A. spins into her pattern ugly shapes and livid hues made of her spite against the neighbours, while next door Mrs. B. is fashioning a mellow tapestry from gardening and books and kindly thoughts.

Each of us shows the world some part of the pattern we are weaving, but most of it we hide away in secret, either because we cherish privacy or because we cannot help ourselves. So we may never see our neighbours finished patchwork; we can only guess at the non-entity or brave design. It may be that many an apparently conventional pattern is quixotically blazoned with strange fantasies of the imagination, and that a dim design flashes into unsuspected loveliness when illuminated by the glory of the hidden spirit. How we should exclaim in admiration, or delight, or horror, at the revelation of those hidden tapestries!...and yet, to speculate is usually more entaining than to know."

Leonora Starr, To Please Myself Again, 1952. 

Appreciation For your Normal Life.

"They say that one of the reasons for tragedy is that you learn important lessons from it.. Appreciation for your normal life, for one thing. A new longing for things only ordinary. The feeling is that we are so caught up in minutiae - slicing tomatoes and filling out forms and waiting in lines and emptying the dryer and looking in the paper for things to do- that we forget how to use what we've been given. Therefore we don't taste the plum. We are blind to the slant of the four 0'clock sun against the changing show of the leaves. We are deaf  to the throaty purity of children's voices. We are assumed to be rather hopeless- swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius, with which we  are born, lost within days of living this distracting life. We are capable only of moments, of single seconds of true appreciation and connection. That is the thought."

Elizabeth Berg, Anything's Possible. 

I'm From...

I'm from bathtimes in the kitchen sink.

From Johnson's soap and Mum's perfume.

I'm from sunflowers by the fence (golden yellow,

dusty faced, they beamed at me.)

I'm from the ivy scrambling up the  apple tree,

whose sturdy trunk grew from the ground.

Like my solid, planted feet.

Kate Ashton.

HouseWork.

"Housework is what a women does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it."