Heaven in a birdbath

Today Sarah and I planted a garden. You know that concrete bird bath in the little courtyard outside out door? Well, it has been problematic throughout the years. It grows nothing well- except moss. Last year it was lovely thanks to Aunt Robin. This year it fell to my lot to fill it up. First of all I grubbed it out completely and filled it up with some Miracle Grow stuff that had jolly well better be miraculous. It cost a enough.

Sarah and went to town this afternoon to pick out flowers. We weren't really sure what we wanted. Sarah was tired. I was crabby. We wandered around the outdoor part of Agway in Keene, pushing a poor excuse for a cart through the thick gravel aisles.

Sarah: (going past the herbs) Oh! We could fill it with herbs!
Katie: That's a good idea!

We walk past the herbs, not picking any up.

Katie: We need something tall in the middle, and something to hang over the edges, and then stuff in the middle. What about those pink flowers?
Sarah: Those are too tall.
Katie: no they aren't! (She picks one up)
Sarah: not the red ones.

We walk away. In fact, we abandon the cart and wander around and around in circles, alternately suggesting plants and rejecting the ones the other person had picked out.

Katie: maybe we should have some cool grass in the middle.
Sarah: No.
Katie: Oh, okay.
Sarah: People would wonder why we didn't weed our garden.

We finally had a collection of possibilities on our stupid cart. Sarah was sure they were all way too tall for our waist-height bird bath. I was sure they would be lovely. I won.

We practically carried the cart to the gazebo that served as a checkout. The lady in front of us was buying 13 rose bushes. The cashier was trying to ring them in without moving them off her cart. I was dubious that it was going to work; he didn't seem to be moving in a very orderly fashion. Sure enough- the end count was 15, so he started all over again; only this time she put them on the counter one by one. Sarah went to the car to wait.

I stood around with my feet on the ground. When the 13-rose lady finally left I checked out my odd collection of plants, minus the one that I rejected at the 11th hour because it cost 3 arms and two legs (as the saying goes). On the way to the car I became convinced that they were all too tall and that it was going to look horrible and stupid. Sarah would be right and I would be wrong- horror of horrors!

We planted them right away. And they looked beautiful. End of story. Only that I nearly cried they were so lovely- just like a piece of heaven.

Rachel Baglietto nee Adams

I just finished packing away Rachel's wedding dress. It is now folded up, but not squished, into a large blue Roughneck container between layers of acid-free tissue paper. It hung in the door frame of one of the bedrooms for ages after the wedding. Then it was sent to the cleaners to get the mud off the front hem. That was acquired walking down the steps from the church to the van and from the van to the Dining Hall.

Slowly the last bits of the wedding and shower are being cleared away. The big poster board titled "Rachel's Brains" was pulled off the fridge, the last of the party favors made by Mrs. Sandford have been properly disposed of (yum!), the calendar no longer displays a carefully choreographed layout of the month of January with marriage counseling sessions, airport runs, arrival times, etc.

Maybe now that the details and reminders are disappearing, I can actually start figuring out what just happened.

My sister, Rachel, remember her? just got married. If you didn't happen to notice. Weird. And yet, so right.

But how did it happen? And will it really ever sink in? An Adams girl? Married? I guess we can ditch that idea of all being old maids together like the Bronte sisters.

Actually, that wasn't such a good idea anyway. I just read a quick bio of them- apparently there were 6 kids total- 5 girls and one boy. Eldest two girls died early, the mom died of cancer. Then the four remaining kids and their dad hung out together trying to piece together a living tutoring, pastoring, writing. Then three of the kids died inside two years. First the boy died of alcohol and opium abuse, then two girls of tuberculosis. They were all right around 30 years old. Charlotte, the one who wrote Jane Eyre, lived a while longer and even got married. But she died while pregnant with her first child. She was 38.

So... yay for Rachel getting married! Now we aren't doomed to writing novels full of angst or dying early of sickness or substance abuse. Thanks, dear!

Hello, hello? Anybody still here?

The sound of my small voice is swallowed up by the darkness in the room. I open the door a little wider and hesitantly put in my head. When was the last I was here anyway? I flick on the light and blink in surprise. It really has been a long time! Everything is covered in dust. I see the footprints of friends who have come and gone and not found me at home.

Oh well! A good dusting, a little beating of the rugs, maybe make a pot of tea for myself and a pot of coffee for everybody else. Put out the welcome mat, turn on the music, pull up the shades... maybe they will come back.

Hearing Glory- St. Anne's

Today I was hanging out at St. Anne's. How lucky am I- being able to just hang out in such places!

Anyway- I was admiring the way the light shines through the stone latticework windows, how the pillars are un-faced and have rugged seams in them, and the look of huge oak and black iron doors. There was an Italian (I think) tour group sitting in the pews (which, by the way, try to avoid them if possible- rare forms of torture calculated to keep tourists moving) in front of me. They were singing in Latin and enjoying the acoustics.

Remember St. Anne's? For those you who have been there it needs no explanation, but for those who haven't- you can practically sing three-part harmony with yourself because the notes echo around the dome so long. Very nice, as long as you stay on tune.

After a bit most of the group stopped singing. A few hadn't had enough and kept on going- a young man (in an exceptionally ugly hat), and sundry middle-agers with good voices. Fewer voices are really less confusing anyway, and I sat back in bliss to listen. How they sang! Controlled, slow Latin hymns with beautiful harmony. One exceptionally pure soprano would suddenly rise out of the steady flow of the harmony with a few notes of pure joy.

The young man with the ugly hat seemed particularly intent. He never got up and wandered around, and didn't even seem interested in looking around at the architecture. It wasn't until they all started to move out of the church that I saw why- he was walking down the center aisle arm-in-arm with an older man, and with a familiar rigid and focused gait.
He was blind.

As I watched him out the door I wondered what it must be like sight-see without being about to see, to tour and to need a guide for every step, to visit the Holy Land and not come home with a 1,000 photos to remember it by?

But what vividness some memories must hold- memories of sound, heat, the feel of the stones underfoot, the voices of people praying, singing, the Arabs on David's Street calling their wares.

No wonder he kept singing. All the rest could wander at will, and see, but oh how RICH that sound must have been for him!

Lucky man.

A Tale of Two Airports.... and Several Continents

I'm an irritated state of mind right now. I'm trying to finish a project. The project has a goal to be reached. It should be reached soon. Sadly the goal is difficult to define. The steps leading to the goal are difficult to define. Nobody else seems to be able to define them for me. I can't define them for me. So I am lost in a sea of rabbit trails, loose ends, computer issues and circular thought patterns. I hate this.

So now I am sitting on the floor with the sun on my back listening to Valentina Igoshina play Chopin and I shall tell you a funny story to help me forget my troubles.

Once upon a time I flew to Turkey. I didn't really want to fly to Turkey, but hey, whatever. The day before I left the travel agent called to ask me if I minded taking by an earlier flight. I didn't....

wait a sec, Valentina is buffering and I must go pause her.

Okay, as I was saying, I didn't have a problem with that. Mark and Liz were going to pick me up at the other end and I was pretty sure 3 pm was better than 8 for them.



"Same airport, right?" I asked the travel agent person.



I put that question on its own line with extra spaces to make it stick out. It is the crux of the whole matter. Don't forget that I asked it.

The travel agent allowed as how it was the same airport. Or, maybe she really meant that my leaving and returning flights both left from the same airport.

Anyway, I flew to Turkey to see the king, or at least the Stamps.

I landed in Istanbul at 3 pm. If you have a moment, look up a map of Istanbul. You will notice that the city has two sides separated by water. That water is called the Bosphorus. The two sides are on two continents! Isn't that cool?

So Istanbul has an Asian side and a European side. What does that have to do with my story? Well, there is a tiny airport on the Asian side, a bigger airport on the European side, and Mark and Liz live sort of mid-way between them, but on the Asian side.

Ahhh, we begin to see why it might be important to know which airport we are going into!

Anyway, I landed in Istanbul and scanned the crowd for a familiar face. I was really looking for a guy who looked like Matt without a military haircut, because I hadn't really seen Mark since he was a small lad. And I had no idea what Liz looked like.

I saw no Matt-esque men. Suddenly I knew what had happened. I wasn't in the tiny airport on the Asian side. I was really in the larger airport on the European side.
But Mark and Liz were on the Asian side. Holding down the tiny airport and looking for me.

But I wasn't there.

Funny, I had worried about lots of things involved in this trip to Turkey, but arriving at a totally different airport wasn't one of them. Guess I'm bad a worrying.

Anyway I didn't have time for worry now. I went to the nearest information desk to double-check my location. Is there any non-stupid way of asking, "Excuse me, but can you tell me where I am?"

Then I changed money into.... ummm liras? Somebody (that would be me) did absolutely NO research about Turkey before they arrived. But I learned a lot, fast.

I found a phone.

I found a post office.

I bought a phone card.

I called Mark and Liz's home phone. I'm not sure why, since I knew they were at the airport. Not MY airport of course, but AN airport, which isn't where they live.

Then I took the next logical step and called my Daddy. He called Rachel in NH to get Roy and Lee's number in California. Daddy called California to get Liz's cell number. It was an old one. So Daddy called Mike who was on a business trip in China. Couldn't reach him.


While Daddy was continent hopping via phone, I was looking at ways of continent hopping myself. Take a taxi? I nixed that without a second thought. I don't trust a taxi unless I can speak the taxi driver's native language.
Shuttle bus? Some helpful Turkish guy told me all about it and showed me a map and was so polite. But I wasn't sure of the exchange rate and it seemed an awful lot of money. I called Daddy and had him run it through a exchange rate calculator. $115????!!!? Ummm, I don't even have that much cash on me! Maybe I should just walk. In a foreign country, after dark, in a city. Ha.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or the airport on the Asian side, Mark and Liz (being smarter than the average bears) decided there was problem. Their airport was so small that there were only three planes in the whole place. None of them were from my part of the world. So Mark decided to stay at the airport and Liz when home. Whooo hoo! Good has been done here!

Lisa meanwhile sent them a message on Facebook on my account. In essence it said:

"Katie's in the other place!"

To make a long story end soon:
Liz saw the message, called the accompanying phone number (Daddy), and got all the gory details.

Then she took a ferry, a tram and a light rail to pick me up. This was simpler and cheaper for all involved. Really. Its was just more time-intensive. Poor Liz.

I sat at the airport taking boring pictures and wondered what Liz looked like.

Thankfully she looked at my picture on Facebook, so she knew what I looked like. She found me and we went home via light rail, tram and ferry. Arrival time: 9 pm.

Bless his heart, Mark had bought pizza. Pizza, pizza, love of my heart, joy of life.... when was the last time I had real pizza?

Moving on...

I have been involved in fiascos before. I have done many stupid and clumsy things and have had to be dragged out of multiple scrapes by sundry people. But this is the first time that I have involved all the following in my ineptness all at once: family, friends, China, Turkey, California , New Hampshire, Israel, long-suffering relative strangers,Turks, Israelis, trams, ferries, light rails and large bodies of water.

This, my friends, takes the cake.

the moral of this story is: Never travel.
ha.

"That MUST have hurt!"

Today in my English class we studied the various uses of must, may, might, and be able to. It was thrilling. Positively chilling!

Did you know that may and might mean exactly the same thing, but that may is slightly more formal? Does it mean that I am more formal because I frequently use the word may? How may times do you use may versus might?


On other fronts: I nearly met my death on the stairs this morning. Remember them? Those marble slabs descending in parallel order from the second to the first floor? Weren't they particularly cold and unforgiving? I came down them with my computer in arm, careless and unafraid. I even had socks with little sticky things on the bottoms to keep me upright. Was it enough? Oh no. It must have been a classically gorgeous fall- my feet flew out from under me just like Jon of Garfield fame, I came down hard on one hand and my posterior and slithered, bumped, fell down three or four stairs. All without dropping my computer, I might add. Good for me. But Oy Vay did I holler!

Okay, happy Sabbath to you all. I am off to an evening of laziness. :-)