We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~ Thornton Wilder

It seems to me that every Thanksgiving is sweeter than the one before, and so, every Thanksgiving ends up becoming My Favorite Thanksgiving Ever. Maybe as we grow older, we become more aware of all that we have to be thankful for and that awareness makes the holiday that much more poignant. As my mom and I added our dishes to my older brother and sister-in-law's table on Thursday, Mom pointed out the floral-patterned plates before us. "Mom and Dad's good china," she smiled. But it was the first time since my grandparents had died that I'd seen it, and the sight of the cream-colored dinner plates with their delicate pink and blue flowered rims made me choke up. A wobbly-sounding "Ah!" was all I could manage in response to my mom, but I know she understood. And in the midst of missing my grandparents so much, I couldn't help but be grateful for having experienced a love from Papa and Grandma so strong and pure and good that even seven years after their deaths, just the sight of their dinner plates is enough to make me cry. If you've loved someone so much, and been blessed enough to miss someone so much, that just the sight of his or her belongings makes your heart ache, then you understand, as my mom did. And I am happy for you. It is Thanksgiving every day when you know that ache and "Ah!" 

Thanksgiving 2008 ~ Bread Dough Cornucopia ♥

My favorite thing in a long time that I've cooked or baked, this cornucopia is made of bread dough. :) I wrapped ready-to-bake (a.k.a "whack-the-tube-against-a-counter") dough around a cornucopia I'd shaped out of foil, braided the edges, baked it, then removed the foil. 'Cute for a vegetable tray but would make sweet individual/mini cornucopia rolls too. I'd wanted to try this idea for ages--I'd saved a magazine clipping of the project in my Thanksgiving scrapbook/idea book years ago--and it turned out just as I'd hoped. ♥

Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

♥

Starting Over Yet Again (And Thank You, Instructor Steve)

My motivation to walk and eat right seems to have gone haywire lately: I'll walk six miles one day and nap instead of exercising the next three days, eat really well for a week then not bother to stock up on healthy groceries for the next week, fill out almost all my daily food diary during the day and not complete it at night, and so on. One of my math instructors in college once reprimanded me while looking over my self-made study materials for his class by kind of snidely opining that I should do more work and less preparation for work. And although I argued that I did both--I really worked quite hard even to pass that class--I understood what he meant: I'd put together a number of sample tests to take, I'd rewritten some of the textbook thinking it would help me memorize the step-by-step how-to of the problems, I'd copied and organized into one folder all the formulas and other tools from the text and from books and resources I'd borrowed from him, I'd done so many little things that fell under the category of "This Math Class and Things I Know About It and Things That Might Help Me Do Well in It," but I was really doing very few actual math problems. I was working around the subject instead of working on the subject. And I can see now, these past few weeks, that I've been handling this weight loss/better health challenge of mine in much the same way: I've signed up to have various diet and health-related newsletters emailed to myself, I've taken a couple "before and after" pictures, and I've bookmarked a bunch of articles online that contain good tips and information on weight loss, but I've been skipping my walks, not eating well, and slacking off with my food diary too. So as Instructor Steve would say, it's time to do more work and less preparation for work.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace. ~ Georges Bernanos

Two little things that have made me quite happy today are my new green and white thigh-high tube socks and a rose bush I walked past on my way home from work this afternoon. The ring of our apartment's buzzer late this afternoon announced the just-in-time-to-wear-on-a-cold-night sock delivery, and I'm quite sure I've never loved a pair of socks this much. In fact, I hate wearing socks--I'd rather go barefoot anytime--and these are the only ones I've ever had on that don't even feel like socks. They just feel like warm legs and feet. I think I'll be getting my mom a pair of these for Christmas this year. And just breathing in the roses' perfume as I walked home today took me back to something good in my 80s childhood. Once I've identified the rose, I'll add it to my "Someday Wish List." Meanwhile, with warm feet and a grateful heart, I'm off to bed.

So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family. ~ Haniel Long

I spent a lot of last year scanning family photos and adding them to online albums, and the peace of mind I feel at having them all together and accessible to me now when I'm hours away from my parents' photo albums and baby books and boxes of loose pictures makes all the time it took to sort, upload, date, and label them worthwhile. One of my favorites is this one of me and my younger brother taken in the mid-1980s.  My brother was about three years old here, and I was about eight. (Even if I didn't know the date already, my Mary Lou Retton Wanna-Be haircut would be the giveaway for me.) When Mom announced she wanted a picture of us, Bri stood up on a kitchen chair. We threw our arms around each other completely spontaneously, which is what makes this one a family favorite. My grandparents kept this picture in one of their albums, and every now and then while visiting them, I would pull the old albums down from the little three-tiered brass shelf Grandma kept them on and would make my family look through all the pictures yet again. The stories that get told and retold about each picture never change, and so my mom has always said the same thing about this shot: "I asked you two to smile for me and you held each other like that as if you'd planned it." The photograph captures something my memory never would have: Bri and I looked so much alike in 1985! I hadn't realized as a child that we had such similar eyes and smiles. What I have always remembered, though, is how hard we were laughing both while the picture was taken and afterward. The fact that we'd both decided at the same moment to put our arms around each other like that struck us as wildly funny, and we laughed over it like loons. Both the picture and memories always make me smile. ♥

Over Homemade Bread and Jelly

At my grandfather's viewing in April of 2001, one of his friends, a garrulous man named Sam I remember as a more self-assured and quicker-to-laugh Jackie Gleason, sat down with me and one of my cousins, the two of us Papa's only granddaughters out of seven grandchildren, and talked about how he had admired our grandfather. Our own generation would have to do a hell of a lot of work to become the kind of people our grandparents were, Sam told us. Papa and those of his generation seemed quite special and just good and strong in some way that later generations did not. The only other thing I specifically remember Papa's friend telling us was how rare and wonderful it was to know someone who, when you unexpectedly stopped by for a quick visit, would welcome you into his home and say, well, first, Papa's usual "Take your hat off and stay awhile," and then, "Here, pull up a chair. Mum just made some of her bread and we still have jelly from this past summer" and how good it was just to sit with Papa in the kitchen and talk over fresh homemade bread and homemade jelly. Sure, some people offer coffee or cake for a guest, Sam went on, but to be able to visit over bread and jelly! That our grandfather had no pretenses about such things and understood how good it was just to catch up with a friend over homemade bread and homemade jelly...! Sam wanted us to understand this. He went on and on about it. It was such a simple thing, he told us, but that was one of the things he would miss the most now that our grandfather had died, and there just weren't people out there like our grandfather anymore.

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, she mentions that her future husband, Almanzo, once asked her, "What kind of man do you think I am?" and Laura admits that she'd never given it any thought. But it is something I've given a lot of thought, and I remember deciding--no, not deciding, just knowing--that day at the funeral home that I would never marry anyone who didn't understand about the bread and jelly. 

Red Gingham Couch Makeover

One of this summer's big projects in the apartment has been redoing a couch we bought on craigslist last fall. After weeks of hand-sewing and hot-gluing--no sewing machine here--I'm thrilled that this is finished. Mom bought me about five yards of the red gingham fabric for my birthday in May. I haven't made new pillows yet. 'Am all sewn-out, and these will do for now. 'Declaring this done.



Done, done, done. ♥

And Stuffed approves too.  ♥

A Post for Nikki, My Fellow Vintage Clothing Fan :)

I recently "met" the lovely and sweet Nikki of The Scarlett Rose Garden. She has lost more than 80 pounds--which is about the same amount of weight I had to lose when I started my own weight loss/better health journey last year--and thus has been quite an inspiration to me. Her photos and writings just exude warmth and love of life, and I'm so glad to have found her online.

Nikki designed her own wedding gown and asked today to see the one I've had in mind since I was 18, so here for my fellow vintage clothing-loving new friend is my dream gown. Mr. Mike and I can skip a "real" wedding and just head to the courthouse and I'll be happy, as "wedding hoopla" has never interested me much, but even if we got married in a trash dumpster with only the flies as our witnesses, I'd still want to be wearing this dress.  It was designed by Yumi Katsura and was featured in the June 1995 issue of Victoria magazine. I was looking through my grandmother's magazines while staying with her during the summer of 1995, and when I saw this photo, I just knew this was the only wedding gown I ever wanted to wear and even now, 13 years later, it's the one I want. The design itself looks pretty simple, so if I can't find an inexpensive dress that looks enough like this, I'll likely just create my own: An off-white gauzey long-sleeved blouse with a long skirt, a strapless cream corset or swimsuit underneath, a collar and French cuffs and faux bow-covered buttons up the back and along the cuffs...I'm sure we'll find a way to get the look I want. :) It's just such a sweet dress, and since the photo shows the model with her back turned, it's always been that much easier to imagine myself in it. With my hair pulled up and the last 30 or so pounds gone, that back-turned picture's probably how I'll actually look on my wedding day anyway. And I think 18-year-old Val somehow knew that all along, which is why the photo spoke to her the way it did. ♥

His House Was Perfect....

"His house was perfect,
whether you liked food, or sleep,
or work, or story-telling,
or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best,
or a pleasant mixture of them all."
 ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Although I've found myself loving many of the quotations from A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories over the years and understand the charm of the characters and their (mis)adventures, I've never read the books or felt any urge to do so. While looking for something cottage/decorating-related online the other day, though, I came across two illustrations by E.H. Shephard's that depict Pooh's home, and oh! my! goodness! It's like someone was poking inside my mind and drew the exact picture Of Val's Dream Home (s)he'd found there. Ever see a photo so "you" that you ache to jump right into it? I could happily and most contentedly live in these illustrations, and indeed, I kept thinking things like "Hey, I have that quilted patchwork pillow!" "I already have those tablecloths!" "That looks just like my stool from Papa and Grandma's house!" "That's my pink floral wing chair slipcover!" "There are the brick floor...the pink/yellow wallpaper... the cupboard for canned goods I've always wanted!" Who knew Winnie-the-Pooh and I share the same dream home?

I learned five days ago the titles of the specific books these illustrations came from, and in the strange way these things tend to happen, I stumbled upon both books at a thrift shop after work today. So now I head to bed to read, at long last, Milne's stories and to squeal over more of Shepard's sweet depictions of my colorful little "someday" cottage.