Tag: memories

Tiny Tuesday!


Eva, weighing in at under six pounds, looks so big compared to Delta in the distance, who weighs twenty pounds. Perspective…

However, this week’s theme is craftiness, not dogs. I watched something on Netflix that I won’t disclose; the very name connected to it is triggering to some people. I found it relaxing, and it made me think of this past weekend, when we gathered at Houndstooth Hall to belatedly celebrate Lindsey’s and Debby’s birthdays. For Lindsey, I usually bake a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Debby’s favorite is coconut, so she usually gets yellow cake, white frosting, and coconut. I decided this year to bake cupcakes and put out Duncan Hines Creamy Milk Chocolate and Duncan Hines Dolly Parton Creamy Buttercream Frostings, along with a bowl of shredded coconut and spreaders so everyone could choose and use their own frosting choices. When Lindsey saw that was my plan, she said, “AND SPRINKLES?” To which I said, “Yes! I have lots of sprinkles.”


It went so well that I think this may repeat for future birthday gatherings. I also keep a large assortment of cake candles in that cabinet, so we’re covered.

Back to my Netflix viewing: One focus was on ways to make a guest/friend/visitor/relative comfortable in your home. That made me think of one of my characters who lives in France, for whom a guest’s comfort has always been important. I flipped through my French Countryside Coloring Book because I remembered something specific about it.


Here’s the page I liked. On the property in the Neverending Saga, there are no vineyards, but there is an olive grove. I imagined Madame arranging a table outside on a pleasant afternoon, setting out breads, wines, cheeses, and fruits for friends. But today is TINY Tuesday, and that’s a big coloring page.

Fortunately, this book provides an option. Mini versions of all the coloring pages.

Voila! A scene I colored that measures less than three by four inches.

Whether you call it Tiny Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Shrovetide, I hope you find your place of comfort and celebration.

Photo Friday, No. 949, part 2

Current Photo Friday theme: Lopsided.


The metal horned lizard in Aaron’s Garden also fits this week’s theme. I spotted him at Buchanan’s Nursery in April of 2023 and hesitated about getting him until I realized he was missing a foot. After working in animal rescue, I know “tripods” make some of the best companions and teach us about stoicism, adaptability, and the refusal to let joy be taken because something’s missing. Years ago, after a drought, I put this old dog bowl in the garden so the lizards would have a place to take a bath and drink water. I don’t keep this guy in the water all the time as pictured here–he’d rust–but as we’re starting to see lizards now that the weather’s warmer, he’s nearby as a lopsided guide to refreshment.

Sunday Sundries


I don’t think I’ve ever featured this book on here before, though I see it’s in a shot of a group of journals and other books I took in June of 2021, so it’s been around a while. The Magic of Mindset is a journal, by Johanna Wright, to be written in, so if I had filled in any of the pages (I haven’t), it’s likely what I wrote would be too private to share.


That’s still true with the page I’m featuring, where under the title “Expect Resistance,” a girl meeting a dragon says, “Oh, hi.” The text on the accompanying page says, “RESISTANCE is A NORMAL PART OF THE PROCESS. LIST all of the REASONS WHY IT FEELS impossible TO LET GO OF YOUR OLD MINDSET AND MOVE OUT OF the stuck PLACE.

Those little items on the plate are like small talismans (crystal ball held in cupped palms; a wee dachshund carved of wood; a soapstone container, lid off, to show a variety of tiny stones; a small river rock in the shape of a heart; a sunflower incense burner holding a stick of sandalwood incense) that are either from or reference people, all a part of my history, who at one time or another were a force that could either subdue my voice or inspire and encourage it.

Relationships are complicated, and more than once, I’ve allowed them to block the flow of my creative energy. This time, I want to face that dragon and make a choice truer to myself.

This week’s theme may be arriving organically on each new day.

Thursday thoughts

One interesting thing about revisiting these books I haven’t read or read about in a long time is remembering why I once deliberated about whether to write my Masters thesis about the fiction of either Tom Robbins or Larry McMurtry, and in no small part, it had to do with their female characters. Though I relished the language of one author, and the narrative skills of the other, I intended to address how they wrote women characters, and my points were not all valentines toward either writer. That had little to do with enjoying their novels nor any sense of conventional “morality,” and also considered the time and culture in which the novels were written.

I think it’s an important part of reading that nothing should become “truth” to us at the expense of accessing our brain, our senses, our instincts, our better feelings. It’s wise to question even those books we’re told are indisputable truth. As a writer myself, with a deep love and understanding of stories and storytellers, I believe there’s no.such.thing.

I don’t have the energy to tackle a discussion of the means used to indoctrinate and control humans. I’ll always believe that the more we read, from the contrary and challenging and unsettling to the comforting and amusing and entertaining–all of it–the better off we are.

Oddest of all to me is the way book banning movements so often begin with people/readers believing the lie that “no one is banning books.”

How do we make love stay?


Let’s begin with this photo of my Dan Fogelberg 1983 Greatest Hits album that was lost in the Harvey flood. I’m pretty sure I have all his work that was drowned on the CD collection I bought, but it’ll never be the same as lying in a candlelit room and listening to the albums, staring at his photo on the cover, and traveling through all the journeys he took me to all the places in my imagination.

Though it was an album of greatest hits, it also had a couple of new songs on it, and one of those was “Make Love Stay.” I wondered from the first moment I heard it if it was inspired by Tom Robbins’s novel Still Life With Woodpecker. Of all his novels, this is one of two that I’ve read so many times they have a permanent residence in my brain. Because of this book, for years, I kept a sealed pack of Camel cigarettes in one desk drawer after another in every home, school, and business office I was in.

From the novel, this excerpt:


“Who knows how to make love stay?”

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Though I can in no way approach the kind of writing Tom Robbins creates, I know with every fiber of my being that the heart of one character I created would sing when he read this–and he’d read it over and over.

I think that passage probably had that same effect on Dan Fogelberg. In his own words:

Fogelberg later described “Make Love Stay” in the liner notes to a retrospective album as a “sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker”and as “a musical question that, unfortunately, eludes me still.”

Tiny Tuesday!

Today, Debby and I had a couple of errands to take care of, but we got a late start. My brain had spent all the time I should have been sleeping last night rerunning old conflicts and disappointments, among other things–until 5 AM. That left me dragging all day, having had only around four hours of sleep.

By the time she and I pulled back into Houndstooth Hall, we were caught in a torrential thunderstorm. We sat in the driveway, talking and listening to music. Finally, the rain abated enough that I could use my umbrella to keep from getting drenched while I opened gates, backed the car into the carport, and we could both hurry inside our homes.

From the Tiny Pleasures book (above right), this page reminded me that the smell of rain was indeed nice, though the dogs were more than ready for their hemp chewies that keep them calm during thunder. I had to change into dry clothes–my third outfit of the day–and dry my hair. The whole thing, from errands to dodging rain, made me late to compose my Black History Month post to Instagram, though I think I actually did my Blue Sky book-cover post sometime in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

This evening, I was thinking more about author Tom Robbins. It will take me a while to get through Another Roadside Attraction. Since Robbins and his books have turned into this week’s theme, I decided to let my mind wander and see where it took me. One place was the memory of a 1987 movie called Made In Heaven. The principals were Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis, as star-crossed lovers who had to find themselves and each other during lives on earth and in heaven.

This was not the cover of my original VHS copy, which was dreamier and more romantic. When I got rid of my VHS tapes, I bought this DVD. It still has the shrink-wrap on it. The reason I thought of the movie was because it’s filled with cameo appearances: Debra Winger, who was married to Hutton at the time, made an uncredited appearance as a character named Emmett. Others who popped up in the movie included Neil Young, Tom Petty, Ric Ocasek, Ellen Barkin–and one character called The Toymaker was played by none other than writer Tom Robbins. I remember how that delighted me the first time I saw the film.
ETA: I finally had time to watch the movie on Saturday. Except my little DVD player that works with my laptop had stopped working. Tom tested to make sure it worked in the big TV player, but in order not to cheat him of his TV viewing, I asked for and he picked up a new player. I cried through a lot of the movie, which is fine. I’ve been trying to cry since last summer with little success. I figured I needed it.

When I googled “Tom Robbins” and “Made In Heaven,” besides the movie, my search pulled up a quote from his novel Skinny Legs And All. I took this photo back when Eva was our foster fail because one of her endless nicknames was “Skinny Legs.”

The quote: Some marriages are made in heaven, Ellen Cherry thought. Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at K Mart.

I’m sure that quote always made me laugh, because our dog Pete LOVED those squeaky plastic pork chop dog toys. Maybe I even have a photo of him with one somewhere.

Tom Robbins’s prose always delivers on many levels.

It’s too late to rewatch Made In Heaven tonight. I’m hoping when I shut down the computer and crawl into bed, I get a full night’s sleep. I need it so much.

Sunday Sundries


Photo of a much-loved novel; a gift (the ball with swirly paint) from the person who got me reading Tom Robbins; mushrooms and a butterfly that connect me to the book’s cover; the “magic” star, because there’s always something magical in Tom Robbins’s writing; and that lovely gold book pin because books are magic, too, and will forever link me to the writers who create them and impact my life.

I mentioned how on my recently-joined social media account, I’d been doing a book-cover challenge, posting a photo a day of a book that impacted me, but NO WORDS or EXPLANATIONS. Just the cover. On February 7, I posted the cover of Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (his first novel from 1971). Yesterday, I found out Tom Robbins died on February 9. I’ve decided to reread all his books in order. I’m not really sure yet what my week’s theme will be, but I arranged those items because they made me feel connected to the novel/its cover/Tom Robbins.