. Spinning .

THIS JUST IN:

At age 50+ I can still do an almost-full split. Damned ice.

(This news brought to you by the “Dig Deep for the Silver Lining Club”)

Things that make me miss my mother: A friend pointing out the cleverness of putting an elastic band over the two handles of a pot to keep the lid on in transit; sewing curtains; the recipe for churst; the strudel she made once that she rolled to such thinness that it hung over the table edges; the way she laughed at my ballerina dance and my Polish rendition of my 8th grade graduation song; her perfectly pointed fingernails; someone calling me “Zuzia.”

Well, everything in the house has been ironed flatter than a pancake and put away. What hasn’t been ironed has been sucked up into the vacuum or wiped up along with the dust by the magnetic magic of Pledge Dusting Cloths. Except, of course, where I couldn’t reach to clean. Like underneath the two or three computer chassis’ and their various parts (I can’t tell if there’s two or three there, but there’s an extra monitor, printer, two keyboards, three mice and two power supplies available should I choose to rebuilt everything into one big P.C. Frankenstein). There’s also a broken adding machine which I keep finding once a year and have learned to dust around as if its being here for five years grants it residency, and two Rowenta irons to fix because they’re too good and too expensive to just discard, and because my sister now depends upon me to make them whole again since I fixed one for her a while ago.

And the bookpiles, which have by common use established themselves as nouns and rearranged themselves into library standards of order to serve double duty as side tables in every room. These I need not dust because I do read from the top book of each pile on a regular basis so particles of life dancing about in the atmosphere cannot settle upon these islands to create static colonies of cohabitating dusts.

I can look at my life as being surrounded by literature and learning, or I can view it as just plain messy. Here’s where I can attempt to claim artistic rationale and settle in comfortably amidst my towers and plains of ongoing creativity. Life is good, except for the minor kinks that cause me to scowl in contempt at my husband who is wearing a crisply ironed shirt and Dockers as he leans to kiss me goodbye this morning, and at my protest points out that I’m the one who’s wrinkling his attire by hugging him too tightly.

Friend Neha has commented on my odd hours as noted by my posting times, and I must explain that winter does seem to throw me off routine a bit. With my December harried work schedule and my semi-free January ways, I tend to sleep in bits and pieces only to rise at strange hours and find something that I feel guilty enough to stay up and do. Combined with my belief that I am doubling my life span by attempting to always be doing two things simultaneously, this is one of those times.

In four minutes The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) is on AMC and I will finish the last of the ironing while watching this (thank God for bifocals). Most of the day they ran war movies and the only ones I ironed by were Stalag 17 and The Inn of the 6th Happiness so I didn’t get all the way through the pile.

Talk to you later…