the busy heart

Henrietta, in a field by my parents' house, doing her funny little slumped-shouldered, overwhelmed run.  Last night, as Sam and I put Henrietta to bed, I noticed a pair of silky, light-purple pajama pants on Henrietta's floor. They were handmedowns from cousins, which I had sorted out of her dresser the other day because the elastic waist was shot, and I thought, picking them up to find a place for them, "I should just throw these out." And my next thought, sponsored by the mean, Pinterest-saturated voice in my head was, "Throw them out?! Are you kidding me? How shamefully wasteful. You really ought to turn them into a pretty little purse for her. Yes, yes, that's it, sew the fabric into a pretty little purse. She'll love it forever. You say you don't have time? Absurd. Sewing them into a purse is really the proper use of resources and time. Just make time for it. It's important. You have to. It won't take long. If you care at all about ...

As it turns out, jumping off a cliff together is terrifying, especially when a few of your parachutes don't open. We've had, since we've moved, a string of bad luck. Our house still hasn't sold, and the opportunity to make a good bit of income has dried up. That income was meant to carry us through the next few months and give us a bit of cushion and allow us to move into a place of our own. Stress? What stress? Luck is a funny thing. I've been thinking of it that way--as a string of bad luck. A month or so before we left, on a picnic at the park, Sam found a five-leaf clover. He wasn't trying to find it. We were in the middle of a stressy conversation about money, and he looked down, and there it was. Our Clover, pressed and preserved in a book about Paris gargoyles. I did a quick Google search to see if five leaf clovers are good luck, or if it must be four, and Google said they were even rarer, and therefore luckier. We're not people partic...

Dear Target; I'm considering the very real possibility that you're evil. Or, in any case, that you and I can't be friends. I love you too much; that's the problem. Today it was the little dolly you see above. She called to me as I walked by, and I picked her up and thought about Valentine's Day, and how I'd been thinking about getting a gift for Henrietta, but I told myself this was silly, since she's four months old, and will not know a gift from a burp cloth. So I hung her back in place, and carried on toward the humidifiers, which I actually meant to purchase. But I kept thinking about the dolly, and how Henrietta doesn't have a single baby doll yet. She has several bunnies and kitties and a stuffed broccoli with an orange bow-tie I made while I was bed resting, but no baby doll. And don't little girls need baby dolls? I put her back in my cart. I didn't end up getting the humidifier, since I looked up the one you carry on my phone...