⚡ March 19, 2019
Everything Gets a Sockit 🧦
I am taking a momentary break from The Lovable Adventures of Harvey to announce a fun new wardrobe item: the sockit. I have three canvas bags of discarded socks: black, white, and mixed. I use them to make new sweater cuffs or a very comfy sock pillow, and now I’m putting sockits on my various lounging pants. Additionally, I’ve discovered these nifty plastic snaps that are really fun to add to an otherwise normal garment.
There is great pleasure in being able to stay home, pick up a needle, and thread through your own sunny day. I realize that I’m living my mother’s ideal life … and I wonder if it’s right for me, or if it’s just inevitable. My mother wanted to stay home, she said, and do her ceramics. She was brilliant at painting greenware, and she actually made a little side business selling to friends and going to conventions and picking up big blue ribbons for First Place. We, her superior children, merely tolerated all of this, pretending to care but really anxious to get out of her cramped workroom and get on with our own important careers and projects.
Ironically, those projects are now just dust and memories, molding away in the attic, but her artwork is prominently displayed and even useful, because the egg opens up and holds any trinket you might wish to cradle there. Hello, Mom. You were right about many things, and I am enjoying your life.
I have masterminded many ways to stay tucked in and comfy, creating masterpieces and chatchkees, mending work pants and jammy bottoms, concocting medicines from coconut oil and whatever grows by the stream. It’s really blissful, and my own kids shouldn’t worry, but they do. They look for signs of disease or dementia or despair because many of their friends have stories of woe … and they worry. We all worry, all the time. Understood. We are all in motion and time creeps in and steals everything. Dully noted.
Once I get back to writing again, everything will be good. My focus will come back, along with my confidence. For now, the Happy Hippy Hut must be torn down to the rafters and rebuilt, so that’s an excuse. The roof is leaking, termites can be heard chewing and frisky ceiling critters run between the stories, giving Harvey something invisible to believe in, just like me. I’ve organized the attic and I’m now going through all our papers, Kon Mari be praised, and trying to figure out how best to tell my grandchildren what they should know about us without devolving into a person covered in glue and glitter, cutting out felt with pinking shears for a series of mute dioramas full of mysteries and keys to secret boxes hidden behind scarves.
Meanwhile, we have a nice harness for Harvey, who has already broken out of it and raced around the house and back into the open door, thank goodness. Thus the new plastic snaps, which should hold him securely unless the big circling bird in our side yard is a hungry hawk … in which case I think he’s going to be staying inside forever, living my mother’s perfect life. 🐔