this

~MB~

couch love

a:

b:

c:

Now you know how I really feel about you, little couch. 

~MB~

efflorescence

effloresce: verb (thank you dictionary.com)

1: to burst into bloom

2: a. to change either throughout or on the surface to a mealy or powdery substance upon exposure to air, as a crystalline substance through loss of water or crystallization

b. to become incrusted or covered with crystals of salt or the like through evaporation or chemical change. 

No pictures shall accompany this post.  You're welcome. 

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It was the Friday after New Year's day.  On Monday, caught up in the adventure of searching for little hidden treasure boxes with the children and some friends, I had gone plunging into woods laced with leafless poison oak vines.  It had been too long, I suppose, since last time I spent a month oozing, crusting, itching, throbbing, and finally flaking, and my memory of that misery had grown dim. 

Now, as I say, it was Friday, and for a week I'd been paying in a drippy, itchy, curse-mumbling way for my folly.  It was also the day of the company holiday party.  

The company holiday party is an annual formal event for which we dress up fancy and meet everyone my husband works with.  There is theoretically no pressure, but when you know he's been talking about you at work for years and people are waiting to put a face with a name, well...I wanted to look nice, is all.  I hadn't been to the company party since we returned to California, and had therefore met almost nobody.  

Problem is, I was covered from wrist to elbow in something I'd rather not have associated with my name.  Something...leaky.  Everything I had to wear that was formal or could pass for formal was, of course, short-sleeved.  My chance of going and standing in a department store dressing room and drawing long-sleeved things up over my disgusting arms in order to buy something new had been cut off by said disgustingness.  I was stuck with what I had.  

There were two events that evening: a family, church-dress function, followed (swiftly) by the company party.  My caring (but horrified) husband had brought me the biggest bandaids he could find, and I pasted them all over my arms, rolled the sleeves for the first event down, and went.  I looked like a burn victim without the sleeves, but with them, I passed quite well for normal.  

The first event over, we raced home, collected the babysitters, and got the children situated.  We were late, we were late, my date kept reminding me.  I put my fanciest earrings on and put my hair way way high up.  I pulled on a swishy taffeta skirt and a black sweater.  And there were those burn-victim arms.  In a moment of inspiration, I cut the feet and tops off a pair of black tights and pulled the legs up to my armpits under the sleeves.  And it...wasn't bad, it looked like a thinnish layering shirt.  It was a little steampunk, and it was the best I had at the moment, so it would do.  We gave the babysitters final instructions, and a cellphone, and barrelled out the door. 

It was only as we were waiting for the valet to park our truck (it always amuses me when a valet parks our truck) that I realized that the bandaids that had held out so well through the first event weren't going to do it through a second.  Pivotal to the story is the way I was treating the itch, which was with table salt.  This sounds horrible, I know, but I'd found that shaking a good coating of salt onto each of my rash patches stung so badly for a few minutes that I neither stung nor itched for a good several hours afterward.  And pain, you can ask any poison oak victim, is loads better than itch.  So the salt was there along with the ooze. 

We sailed in, checked our coats, and found a place to sit, at a dinner table among well-dressed strangers.  I glanced down at the inside of my left wrist and was horrified to discover that the leaking my arm was doing into my non-absorbent "sleeve" was carrying dissolved table salt, which was then drying on the outside of my sleeve in lovely, crystalline patterns.  I was, in effect, efflorescing.  I was like that wierd place in the cinder-block retaining wall, where the white powder always grows.  Only I was a person.  At a formal dinner.  With introductions still to come.  

Every time the waiters set a new plate on the table in front of me, I prayed that the food wouldn't require cutting.  I'd have to raise my left hand then, and it was wrapped nonchalantly in my big dinner napkin.  I tried to remember whether, and then just hoped that, cutting things with a fork is acceptable, and kept my left arm firmly in my lap.  

After dinner, there was much "this is my wife", and "oh, you're Erin!" and shaking of hands and so on.  I thanked everything thankable that my left arm was the one doing the crystallizing, and wondered how many of them noticed that I kept it clenched against my side like I'd had a stroke and lost the use of it.  

Before long, I began to notice that the efflorescence had migrated, and was now blooming on my dark-red taffeta skirt as well.  Now my arm had to stay in precisely the same spot to cover that up.  I also began to notice that most of the guests were mercifully a touch inebriated, and I grasped at that straw as the only comfort to the situation.  (We had not been drinking, because we are, as my husband always tells people to amusing effect, "teetotalers".  I'm not entirely sure that word didn't fall into disuse around the time of Prohibition.)

We ate dessert, standing sideways against a wall, we spoke to a few more friends, and then, thankfully, we were on our way out.  There was a little bit of a line, waiting for the valets to bring cars back to guests, and I was given a moment to reflect.  It's not always, I thought, that we're shown immediately how much worse our situation could be.  Usually we have to bumble along knowing it could be so.  That evening, however, we stood in line behind an older lady who was talking animatedly to the people with her.  She was a little flushed, laughed a little too easily, and her long evening skirt was completely tucked into the back of her pantyhose, leaving her exposed from waist to high-heeled shoes.  I almost said something, but no one in her party seemed to notice, including her, and I didn't want to cause her embarrassment when she was having such a good time.  Before I'd made up my mind, she was helped into her car by a blank-faced valet, and whisked away.  

Man, I thought.  It could have been so much worse.  And I wondered, as I saw our truck pull up, would she have thought the same thing about me?

~MB~

proof

...that once upon a time (today, in fact) she was small enough to fit in the back of her brothers' toy dump truck and be whizzed around the house.

~MB~

reading

-My Dearest Friend---He's the ultimate business tripper, she the quintessential faithful wife.  They're parents, sweethearts, farmers, thinkers, counselors and supports for each other, dreamers, lovers, friends.  The book is a collection of their letters to each other while he was away (which was a lot, for weeks, months, and sometimes years) during his career as a lawyer and during the founding years of our country.  As I read I fall in love with their humanity, ache for their loneliness, and am made to think by their discussions.  They are, by turns, so much like me, and so much like I want to become.  

-Three seed catalogs-(because why just read one?) Baker Creek, Teritorrial, and, always, Johnny's.  If the last frost date is supposed to be in mid-March, and we're supposed to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc. indoors 6-8 weeks before that, well, it's time to be reading seed catalogs!  That is, if...you ever...quit.

-Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything---No photo of this one because I'm reading it, in between the rest of life, on my phone.  I'm simultaneously encouraged, chastised, patted on the back, and overwhelmed by this book.  I find myself saying, "Yes! Precisely!" to a lot of the explanation of why we (the author and I) homeschool, but so many suggestions are offered that I feel very small and limited in what I can actually do.  Maybe when I finish I'll go back through the suggestions slowly and it won't feel like drinking from a firehose. 

-Plutarch's Lives--Plutarch deadpans the wacky doings of famous men.  An oldie (couple millenia) but goodie.  I say, to the cold, black words, "REALLY?" and there is no one but Plutarch, lips pursed, not explaining, waiting to continue on with the story.  

Finished recently:

-Hunger Games--Good story, a bit too grisly to recommend to my oldest reader (at ten years old).  I hear the trilogy goes downhill after this, becoming less of a good story and more of a preachy treatise on why war is bad. 

-The Giver--Read by me, oldest son, and husband simultaneously on three different Kindles on Christmas day.  Haunting, and lovely to discuss whilst lazing around during those cozy holiday days.  What if nobody had to make any serious choices?

And you? What words are filling the empty corners of your mind these days?

~MB~