Taking the Turn

I didn't tidy up much for the Solstice tea party yesterday--
cutting the fire-fighter drop-hole in the dollhouse took too much time.

I decided: 
This is it. I am going to STOP trying to reestablish order before people come over, even Official Guests.

Why bother?
Having yarn and toys and art-making supplies and books scattered all over is not a bad thing.
In fact, it's a good thing to me: I love being around other people's doodads and projects.
As long I clear places to walk, sit, and set down tea cups, that's good enough.

I've carried the ghost of my mother trying to please her mother:
My mother used to set me to helping her clean our house when my persnickity grandmother came to visit--down to washing the baseboards along the wall.
It never worked: 
My mother never felt secure in her mother's approval, or love.

For all the ways her life frayed at the ends, I always felt loved by my mother. 
I've got plenty of insecurities, but I've got that, like a pearl from a fairy tale.
Use it, Fresca!

And my room looked so fun yesterday, actually. (My mother would love it.)
bink said the Playground Dollhouse fits right in, and it does:

I don't know carpentery, but I want to construct more features like the hole. 
I picture making things that move...
A cupboard with a spring, from which dolls can pop out when the door is opened, for instance.
(We get Jack in the Boxes at work--I could salvage the innards of one.)

I'm sure whatever I make will be rough, like all my things. 
Suitable solutions do look like their creators.
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II. Jester Art

I asked Jester if he'd send me some of his paintings to share.
He forages for mushrooms, loves the Grateful Dead, and not long ago discovered the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, illustrator--
often of Russian fairy tales--like Bilibin's poster (The Firebird?), below right.

These things show in Jester's painting below, left.  (Sorry, small resolution.)

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III. "The Turn"

My coworker Totter is facing an awkward turn in her life, 
like the famous corner in the Rose Bowl Parade, 
where marching bands have to execute a tight right-hand turn.

As Totter and I drove the dollhouse to my place, 
we talked about our worries for the future. 
All legitimate, very real pitfalls--finances, health––all certain to fail in various ways.

And I heard myself say to her, 
"I am going to trust that good things will happen."

She was silent, and I felt this statement hanging in the air like a fart.
What a foolish Pollyanna thing to say! I thought.
It's been bothering me that I said that, so baldly.

My mother raised me on tales of the Holocaust. 
It was her model of human psychology:
You are a villain, or you are innocent. 
(A perspective very much in vogue right now.)

It's untrue, but anyway, believe me... 
I KNOW bad things happen. 
I have seen us, my species, do bad things up close and personal (and not forgetting nature).
I do bad things.
ENTROPY WINS.

And yet, I am standing by this: 
Good things have happened, do happen, and will happen.

And maybe the best Good Thing is that I (we) will be able handle Bad Things, 
in whatever way suits us best.

Bands take "The Turn" at the Rose Bowl Parade in many ways.

Here (1 minute), below, Stanford band members run around the corner–– 
a fun and funny mad scramble:

BELOW: 18 seconds. 
And the complete opposite--Ohio State U executes a super-tight geometrically perfect turn in formation:

I am definitely in the Mad Scramble & Reassemble band camp. 😄

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I'm exchanging postcards with a couple of the needleworkers I've met at the library group. 
I addressed these yesterday.

The flowering cactus on the right is glass--
one of more than four-thousand glass botanical models in the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants in Harvard's Museum of Natural History. 

You know these glass specimens? I've never seen them in person.
Father-and-son Czech glass artists, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, made them over fifty years, from 1886 through 1936--for study, at the behest of Harvard prof George Goodale, founder of the Botanical Museum.
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This morning a friend texted me this photo of little green army men I'd altered for her years ago.
She said she puts them out every Christmas.