So some things happened here yesterday. None of which may prove to be interesting to you but I’m going to put forth some effort to make them sound exciting and fascinating.
First of all, I received a box in the mail from my publisher and when I opened it, I saw six copies of this book inside.
I couldn’t figure out why they had sent me a book written in Chinese until I looked a little closer and realized it’s the Chinese translation of Sparkly Green Earrings. Apparently, Caroline is a red head in China and I would kill for whatever is going on with my hair in that drawing because it’s never looked better. Maybe my Chinese self gets regular keratin treatments.
But in all seriousness, it kind of blows my mind a little bit to see words I’ve written being translated into Chinese and I can only hope the good people of China appreciate all of my Sanford & Son references, which HOW COULD THEY NOT? Some things speak the universal language of love.
After I’d gone through the rest of the mail, I went outside to water the grass in our backyard. I believe I’ve mentioned that we are in the midst of a backyard project and, as part of that project, P laid new grass in our yard about two weeks ago. We had lived with what was basically a yard full of dirt (and mud when it rained which were the days that nearly sent me to a home) since we brought Piper and Mabel home almost eighteen months ago. It should come as no surprise that those two dumb dumbs had no regard for our landscaping and proceeded to turn it into a dog version of a fraternity house except with various chewed up remnants of things instead of empty beer cans.
And I told P at the end of August that the weather forecasters were calling for a wet, cold winter due to El Nino (that translates to “the nino” for those of you who don’t speak Spanish) and if he cared about my sanity then he would make sure we had grass in our backyard.
So it appears that he does value my sanity or at least my roast-cooking skills because he installed the grass about two weeks ago and, in the time since then, we have tended to that grass with more care and tenderness than Pa showed when growing the crops that ensured the Ingalls’ family’s survival in Little House On the Prairie. P has fertilized it, watered it, kept Piper and Mabel off it and done everything short of conducting a prayer service for it and I’m not sure we won’t get to that point.
But yesterday he was on a job site and the high temperature here was about 98 degrees (I CANNOT SPEAK OF THIS EXCEPT TO SAY WHY, GOD? WHY?) and so he called me and asked if I’d mind watering down the yard for him. And so I got out there with the hose and spent the next thirty minutes meticulously spraying down the yard like a woman who knows her very sanity hangs in the balance of that grass’s survival.
Meanwhile, Piper took this opportunity to cool off in the hose’s spray and maybe even occasionally actually drank some water.
Of course Mabel was having no part in such foolishness and wrote a haiku about it later.
Drinking from the hose
What are we? Just animals?
Have some dignity
After the yard was sufficiently watered, I checked the mail and saw that the denim dress I ordered from Gap had arrived. Do you remember the one I featured last week on Fashion Friday and said there was no telling how it might actually work out because Gap seems to find a way to screw up a perfectly good idea? Well, I’m sad to report that I am a fashion prophet because this dress. It caused me to write a letter to Gap in my head and I haven’t done that in a long time.
Dear Gap,
There was a time period from 1990-1994 when I believed no store could compare to you when it came to products made of denim. I had a Gap denim vest, a Gap denim jacket, and several pairs of Gap jeans. (I also had many pairs of your plaid knee-length walking shorts with front pleats but that’s a cautionary tale for another day.) Then came a dark day in 2003 when I ordered a pair of your maternity jeans and you sent me a pair of jeans made of such a hideous wash and texture of denim that I still remember it to this very day. It was a denim that was such a faded, sad shade of baby blue that it seemed only appropriate that the waistband of those jeans hit somewhere right below my underarms as if to announce to the world that my best days were over and life would henceforth consist of nothing but driving kids to soccer practice and packing lunches. As it turns out, this was true but I didn’t need your jeans to mock me for it.
Honestly, I thought that day was the darkest denim day I’d ever experience at your hands until I received this denim dress in the mail yesterday. I don’t even understand what is happening but it’s somewhere between chambray and ashes and sackcloth. Do better, Gap. Some of us still want you to succeed to the point that we just can’t quit you in spite of the fact that you insist on putting pockets that fall directly in the area of our hips. This is a region that no woman in the history of the world has ever wished looked larger. It’s why Eve put a fig leaf in front to cover herself and not on the sides.
I’d like to say it’s not you, it’s me. But that’s not true. It’s you.
With love and regrets,
Melanie
After I finished writing my imaginary letter to Gap in my head and folding up the denim dress in my return pile, I sat down to watch a CNN special I’d recorded a week or so ago but haven’t had a chance to watch. Have you watched Being Thirteen: Inside the Secret World of Teens? I haven’t been so afraid of something since I watched Pet Sematary my senior year of high school.
As I sat and listened to what these kids do and say on social media it was enough to make me want to throw all our phones in the garbage along with every computer in this house. Perhaps we could just go back to simpler times. Maybe send telegrams back and forth, move to the middle of nowhere and I could wear a hideous denim dress with pockets on the hips as I tend crops that will provide food for our family, as opposed to grass, just like we’re the Ingalls family.
I’m just kidding.
I’d draw the line on that hideous denim dress.