encyclopedic post : history meets mail.

{dancer with a bouquet of flowers : edgar degas}

About two years ago, I moved into a room of a hostel. Aside from sharing the kitchen and bathroom with backpackers and all the rampant earwigs brought by autumn, I didn't mind living there. It was a free place for me to be. (Plus I met my husband shortly afterward and spent most nights at his house.) When I moved in, though, during that dead dark of cold winter, the room was still being used as a storage closet. The hostel itself wasn't open yet.

What I remember most about moving junk loads into the room across the hall are the antique encyclopedias, burnt black at the edges and disintegrating. I flipped through their pages, their amazing pictures. Visions of framed word art and collage danced in my head. Alas, the owner of these books--whose previous house burnt down as the paper houses with shoddy electrical work are wont to do here--planned to restore the books. They belonged to her deceased father, who was a doctor on Tierra del Fuego. I handled her heavy heirlooms with care, and didn't nab any of the cool pictures I oh so wanted. I wrote about this ages ago here.

Fast forward... > hostel opens + the books are moved out to the weather, supine to Patagonia's beatings no joke > come end of summer, earwigs hatch; they invade everything, can't lift a sponge or touch a towel without shaking one or five out > the cleaning woman battles them every morning, crushes them underfoot, sweeps out their carcasses, cleans the now overgrown backyard + starts throwing away earwig-infested encyclopedias > I save as many as I can carry and stow them in multiple bags so the tijeretas don't crawl into bed with me at night. They really do that!

{another degas interlude (after the bath, woman drying her nape);
why? because the next package someone receives from me is from the degas page}

Now I use the pages to wrap presents. And every time I send a piece of mail wrapped in encyclopedia, I lament not mentioning (on the card already snug inside the package) where the paper came from. I imagine someone finding the book destruction offensive. Now I realize, the recipient might be scared to touch said package with all my tijereta rantings, but they're clean I promise!

And yet... there's some artful book maiming out there. Take Brian Dettmer's book sculptures for instance. Only a true logophile would create this masterpiece from Webster's Dictionary...

{i say it's synchronicity: webster two point oh}

Not that my ripping out pages and taping them to boxes is artful, but I do like doing it. And playing with the serendipity of the pages as they open themselves up to be torn. 

{anticipate the comfort : the new modern medical counselor : by brian dettmer}

OK, there's a lot of innuendo here, I hadn't anticipated. Not sure if you're catching it; the subconscious is a marvelous poetic thing. I think it's better to just end with some questions...

How do you feel about writing in your books? Or altering them in some way?

get calmer.

Don't get mad or grumpy or frazzled or fed up. Get calm.

S said this to me after I might have said something about him being my guru. I know that may sound funny, but he is the most present, patient and overall calm person I know. The fact that he sometimes has to deal with the flare-ups of this raging fireball phases him little. (Wish I could claim that those flare-ups never actually happen, but what can I say?: I'm a work in progress.)

{because everybody needs to be reminded to breathe sometimes}

The tourist season has started here, finally. It seems to start later and later every year. Not ideal if you work seasonally. But it also means that right now S is on one of his longer trips. This always requires adjustment, a wee transition to being suddenly sola. And after spending all winter almost inseparably together, it's easy to see how much I rely on him. It's bigger things, like sleeping with our baby's soft stuffed monkey instead of my husband. And littler things, like how S always asks if I have water. Or medium-sized things, like suddenly I can't remember how to put air in the tires.

Meanwhile, every day something else moves from the house. I clean out another cupboard. Set aside things to giveaway, find more items to put on the for-sale list. I shift the house around to keep it homey. A couple nights ago I created sound sleeping energy in our new bedroom. We sold our bed yesterday; and it does feel good to find less to get rid every day. While Serkan was still here, I imagined it would be impossible to move from our big bed to the little kid's bed that came with our mostly furnished house. That the room had been used too long for exercise and closet space. But it feels really good in there. It has the comfortable, safe feeling of a nook, because the bed space is pretty nook-like. It's where we slept the first month we moved into this house and where we (S+me or monkey+me) will sleep during this last month too.

In other festivities, some friends painted my belly for Halloween. While Halloween isn't near as festive as it is in California, I still like to try to dress up. We weren't even sure what we would do till the last minute. But it was fun getting ready anyway. I've always had a knack for convincing boys to wear skirts. Halloween night was no exception...

{impromptu dance party}

Eventually I was something akin to mama planet...

{circa 28 weeks}

We made Laura a mime and David was Heather aka me...

{happiness}

David's costume is really only funny if you live in this tiny town and see people wearing the same things all the time (like this puffy jacket + wool hat, sunglasses; the wraparound skirt on top of jeans works like a little extra blanket against the cold). Apparently this genius costume even fooled some people--immediately followed by their utter unnerving.

{scary halloween version of the movie: heathers}

 David's ultra smiley pose every time the camera shot in his direction completed the look.

a giveaway walk in the park.

We're off to what will likely be my last trip to Torres del Paine before we move to California. The weather has been beautiful the last couple of days, so we're taking advantage of still owning a car (which we will hopefully be able to sell before we go!), and driving up for some light hiking day-trip style.

In the meantime if you haven't already, you can enter my giveaway here.

{to win these hippie handmade stunners}

Do you hike or is there anywhere to hike near where you live? What are your favorite places to explore?

sometimes i wish.

I was as small as a bee--bobbing about flowers even smaller than myself + listening to birdsong much bigger than me.

{photo by serkan yalin}

what do you wish?

signs of spring.

Yesterday the Navimag (backpacker-style "cruise" and cargo ship that sails 3 days through Patagonian fjords and connects Puerto Natales with Puerto Montt in the north) arrived with some travelers and lots of food cargo. Suddenly way-too-expensive blueberries, California red grapes, arugula and boxes of fruit + veggie delicacies crowded the aisles of our local market. It's only in the last year or so (and then, only during the impending summer months) some locals have even seen an blueberry. The clerk asked us what they were called: uvas?; no, they are arándanos.

This morning S halved grapes into our cereal bowls. We went for a walk along the coast, covered in litter (as it always is) and in the yellow beginnings of dandelions. In town, red and happy yellow tulips abound and show their black inner bellies. Occasional snapdragons sidle up to the fronts of houses, and leaves of lupine sprout from the brown ground. There are even daffodils, which I've never seen before here. Daffodils. These may be my favorite flower, and, yes, they are even more endearing to me for Wordsworth and having visited Tinturn Abbey way back in the olden golden days of a college semester abroad.

For everybody cruising into spring, I hope it's filled with flowering greens. If you're enjoying the fall foliage or already feeling an early frost, I send you images of daffodils--you know, for your mind's pretty eye.

{daffodils by harold.lloyd}

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

--Wordsworth

If you haven't already, enter my giveaway here!

{grape photo : unknown : please let me know if it's yours}