Happy Birthday To My Brother

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It’s my big brother’s birthday today! Before I started therapy  a year ago, I always assumed my brother wasn’t anxious because he’s so gregarious. He got my mom’s extrovert genes and, because I couldn’t talk to strangers without agony, I assumed Alan was just a fundamentally happy guy.

Now, of course, I realize that he got the family anxiety as much as I did, but it comes out in different ways. He is a happy guy, and so loyal to the ones he loves, generous and kind–but he also feels things deeply, worries as much as any of us, and just wants things to be perfect. (Brother, I feel you.)

He has the added worries of being a parent, which I honestly can’t imaging coping with, and he does such a good job with his son, who adores him. He lives much closer to my parents than I do so he took on the lion’s share of visiting them over the years, especially now that Mom is gone.

He has the mind of an engineer and the curiosity of a historian, an encyclopedic knowledge of anything mechanical. He does all the cooking for the family and is a better chef than I am, much more patient and willing to try new things.

My brother is a remarkable man who’s doing a great job and I’m proud to not only know him but call him family. Happy birthday, Alan. I love you.

Thursday Essay

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I get the newsletter from journalist Anne Helen Petersen and this week’s was so good, it’s hard not to excerpt all of it. I’ll let you get the gist from the paragraph below:

Are you willing to embrace that truly slight inconvenience—and maybe pay a few dollars more—so that a person’s job is significantly less shitty? Think about in practice: are you willing to wait five more minutes for an Uber so that, when you get in, you know that your drive has health insurance and is making a living wage? […] Are you willing to have slightly less so that others can have significantly more? Or, as I like to think about it, do you actually care about other people?

Read it all (and subscribe yourself) here.

Did You Know?

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I’m a little late but there’s still time to enjoy Palindrome Week

Tuesday Project Roundup: The Fine Line

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There’s a fine line between “cool art teacher” and “clown from the 70s” but I think this jumpsuit just barely falls on the right side of that line:

This is from my 2019 Make Nine list (ha, remember that?) and it’s a vintage jumpsuit pattern that I’ve made before. This time, I added some elastic to the back casing to give it some shape so it would veer more art teacher than clown pants.

The fabric is sold-out-everywhere Kokka “Keshiki” twill that I bought from Stonemountain in 2018. I love it (it has all the Bob Ross colors!) but I just barely had enough for this–and the scale of the print repeat means it looks like I used a different fabric on the two fronts.

I was afraid that that would steer it into full clown territory, but I love the finished product. I got the sweetest compliment from coworker when I wore it to work–she said she wanted to “stand up and applaud” when she saw it. I think that means it’s a success.

Thursday Poem

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As I drive around town, I’ve been seeing fruit on the trees–first peaches, then pears and now apples. This is a dense one but it’s lovely.

 

A Sweetening All Around Me As It Falls
by Jane Hirshfield (1992)

Even generous August
only a child’s scribblings
on thick black paper, in smudgeable chalk –
even the ripening tomatoes, even the roses,
blowsy, losing their fragrance of black tea.
A winter light held this morning’s apples
as they fell, sweet, streaked by one touch
of the careless brush, appling to earth.
The seeds so deep inside they carry that cold.
Is this why some choose solitude, to rise
that small bit further, unencumbered by love of earth,
as the branches, lighter, kite now a little higher
on gold air? But the apples love the earth and falling,
lose themselves in it as much as they can at first touch
and then, with time and rain, at last completely:
to be that bone-like One that shines unleafed in
winter rain,
all black and glazed with not the pendant gold of
necklaced summer but the ice-color mirroring
starlight
when the earth is lonely and dark and knows nothing
of apples.
Seed-black of the paper, seed-black of the waiting
heart—
December’s shine, austere and fragile, carves the
visible tree.
But today, cut deep in last plums, in yellow pears,
in second flush of roses, in the warmth of an hour,
now late,
as drunk on heat as the girl who long ago vanished
into green trees,
fold that loneliness, one moment, two, love, back into
your arms.

 

Fall Feelings

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I posted about The Dry Down–a newsletter about perfume–a couple of years ago and I’m still enjoying it (I’m enjoying it so much I’m a paying subscriber). Yes, it’s about perfume and I’ve found a couple that I really love through the authors’ guidance, but what I enjoy most is how Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald use writing about perfume as a way to sum up big feelings.

Like this, for example, and fall, which is breathing down our necks:

This time of year is a huge dose of feeling with little recourse to action. Golden leaves are connected to an activity, leaf-peeping, a hideous out-loud term that I learned about in my twenties on the East Coast and couldn’t believe anyone actually said with a straight face. But even this archaic-preppy-bourgeois term is about a kind of longing and nothingness, reaching for something that offers no landing point, no destination toward which the reach can extend. “Let’s go and look at the leaves” is very silly but also kind of sad and poignant. I feel so much and all I can do about it is… drive by some trees?

This empty destination is the crack where capitalism gets in, of course, which is why those of us who love–or just feel something big about–fall often associate it with things we can buy, sweaters and lattes and boots and pencils and soups and produce and decorative gourds. Buying stuff is always there, lurking in the places where we feel too much and don’t know what to do with those feelings.

Little Cats On The Prairie (Skirt)

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Since I’m all about volume and skirts and dresses and ruffles now, I guess going full petticoat was only a matter of time:

I completely impulse bought this fabric after a trip to the dentist, which is right next to the new and fabulous JoAnn store in town. I mean, resistance was futile, right?

Then I got it in my head that the little cats needed to be a button-front skirt with a ruffle and lots of volume. None of the modern patterns I looked at had enough fullness so I found something vintage on Etsy (I’m guessing mid-80s, about the time Out of Africa hit theaters?).

The pattern delivered on the volume–to the point where I wondered if I’d gone past “stylish retro Madewell” and right into “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” But I wore it yesterday and all the younger women at work loved it, as did the Whole Foods cashier, so I think it falls into the “stylish” camp.

I’m pretty sure I had a kid-sized version of this pattern circa 1986, made by my mom in a pink and blue plaid. I know some people hate it when the fashions they remember come back in style, but I, for one, love it.

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