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Dear People of the Web,
I’m falling into my hibernation period and snuffling around for something new to keep myself occupied in the cave until the world thaws and the crocus sprouts. So I’m wondering, how do you do Christmas? If you would be so kind, please pick a question or two and share your answer in the comments below:
What holiday songs do you have on repeat?
What Christmas movies are you binge-watching?
Are there fattening recipes you’re making that we need to know about?
What wish-list books are you gifting or re-reading or hoping Santa brings?
Δ My Answers Δ
Δ Music Δ
As for songs, I can’t help but love The Murdering Crow’s version of the Snow Miser Song:
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Δ Movies Δ
I haven’t made it through the movie The Year without a Santa Clause yet. Maybe this is the year.
The Nightmare before Christmas gets played nearly every year. Lines are quoted; songs are sung. “There Goes Christmas” is what we tend to say around here in a cartoonish voice at the slightest disappointment or provocation. It never loses its funny. I’ve also been known to mechanically chant, “Making Christmas. Making Christmas. Making Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiiistmas….” with a blank stare while wrapping presents.
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Δ Food Δ
I don’t cook as a general rule, but when I get a wild hair around this time of year I make my Kiki’s banana bread. When inspiration really strikes there could be pumpkin pie or banana pudding.
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Δ Books Δ
“It makes one’s mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.“
–David Sedaris
David Sedaris’ Crumpet the Elf from Santaland Diaries is fun and available on NPR.
Last December, my near-and-dear read me nightly bedtime stories from one of his childhood books, The Animals’ Merry Christmas. Published in 1972, its pages had a rich and musty scent and were embellished with drawings, dialogue, and musical notes from his 7-year-old hand. 
My favorite character was Pussy Cat Smart.
It was a super sweet gift.
For the last six years, the ladies of Shimmy Mob Memphis have joined women across the world in danced to raise funds and awareness for local women’s and children’s shelters to help end domestic violence.
We invite you to join us this Saturday, May 21, 2016 for a fundraiser show and silent auction at Club 152 on Beale Street at 7 p.m. Admission is $15. Proceeds go to the Family Safety Center of Memphis and Shelby County.
Our performers will include the beautiful dancers from Alima Tribe, Tribal City Bellydance, Pyramid Dance Company, Sahar, Mystic River Dance Company, and of course Shimmy Mob Memphis.
There will be presentations about the Family Safety Center and a silent auction with lovely items on the auction block.
(Bring cash or a check for the auction!)
Please join us for a fun and sparkly evening in support of a great cause!
Buried beneath warm blankets, in the quiet shifting shadows just before sunrise, there arises an urgent need to share…
Me: Ostriches look like they have a lot of pent up anger with no adequate means to express it.
Him: That’s what you’re thinking?
Exhibit A. Hiram, circa 1913
Clearly, I come from a long line of distinguished goat people. It’s written in my DNA. If you don’t believe me, refer back to Exhibit A. That is my grandfather Hiram, Goat Wrangler Extraordinare. My cousin, The Elitest Jerk, sent me the above picture. She came across it yesterday while sorting through family heirlooms.
Recently, as I have dilly-dallied about the yard, I’ve been hearing the distant, but happy sound of goat bleating. The song of my people is in the air! My neighbors two doors down have made a recent acquisition. I struggle to catch a glimpse, but to no avail. The summer foilage has grown too thick. There is some comfort in knowing that goaty goodness is getting closer and closer to Peace.Love.Home…
In a world where color-coded tampons represent a gesture of affection just think what testament of love could be expressed in the gift of a goat…
Remember, it is the Year of the Goat.
This weekend I was in the kitchen minding my own business, when he walked in and announced, “I organized your pads by size and color…”
Perplexed, I stood at the sink trying to blink some sense into his utterance. Nothing about those words or their arrangement fit into our normal everyday existence. This is not a man to organize anything by size and color. We share a closet, you see, and I took over laundry duty years ago for the sake of my sanity. Under his charge, if clothes were lucky enough to make it from dryer to closet (and rarely were they ever), they were hung all willy-nilly, coat hangers askew, pants cavorting with shirts in an unholy way, with no thought given to color or context. This is the man whose shoes I pick up and return to the closet multiple times throughout the day. Flip flops and dress shoes and Birks and not one but TWO pairs of work boots. All in the bedroom, but not the closet. Who puts on and takes off this many shoes in one day?
But there he was standing in the kitchen Sunday showing me proof of deed. In his hand was a Tupperware container he had commandeered for the purpose. T’was a veritable rainbow of feminine hygiene products tucked neatly inside this cornucopia. I stared dumbfounded, mouth agape, as he followed up with, “…just in case you ever forget what love is.”
This is the first time in the four-year history of My Little Spacebook that I’ve gone over a month between posts. There’s so much to report!
In August El-D and I celebrated our 20th anniversary.
El-D & Lunar in the Pirate Phase of our Youth
We have seen each other through many faces, phases, places and lives…not to mention various hats and corsets. Whether leaving for the house for dinner or the grocery store, we continue to ask each other “Who are you going as tonight?” There’s Country Gentleman and Woodland Fairy, Monday Night Bowler and YoginiTini, Mickey Mouse Man and Bag Lady, The Professor and Mary Ann. The odd pairings seem to be endless. It’s great fun.
Also in August, I turned 40. My wonderful family made it the best birthday ever! The party was dubbed “The Redneck Shindig” and featured Slip’N Slides, Italian cream cake, a million baby crickets, and family members trying to one-up each other’s tales about the fires I’ve started in their homes and wrecks I’ve had in their cars. Good times. Thank you, dear family, for loving me in spite of the havoc I have wrecked in your lives. I love you and your terrible singing and zany presence.
Forty is fabulous!
One of the highlights in September was a six-hour kayaking trip on the Wolf River. Things were going great until I rounded the bend to enter Ghost River. At that very instant Nature got all up in my business. Plant life reached out to caress me in a creepy-uncle sort of way and two big spiders – one fat and hairy and one little-bodied with long skittering legs – leaped simultaneously and aggressively into my kayak.
Before I go on, I want you to know I can appreciate spiders when they spin their string art and sit around calmly eating less superior bugs. In fact, I appreciate them so much I take pictures and wax poetic about them (see Centered Scribe Spinning, Spinning ) I can even appreciate momma spiders when I disturb their peace with my weed pulling and they take off running with their egg sac full of future spiders.
See? I know this spider and her progeny. We coexist peacefully on the farm!
However, when spiders jump in my tiny kayak and proceed to run AT ME despite my flailing paddle and panicked shrieks, I will fight them until death. It was a long, hard battle – and I had doubts about who would paddle or skitter away the victor as the kayak tilted precariously this way and that. After all that, I thought I was done with kayaking for awhile.
Wolf River
So it was a bit of a surprise last week when I found myself back in a kayak, this time in the bayou, on a soul journey with nine strangers. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how that happened and what it was all about. I’ll let you know when the pieces come together…
Altar on Deer Island
This time of year I think a lot about my grandmother. She was born into this world and left it during the summer months.
Kiki was a fabulous and funny lady. She taught me lots of things: the names of flowers, my first prayers (“Dear God, Bless Roy and Cathy and Carey…”), how to multitask (she would exercise in the den during Wheel of Fortune), how to drive with my elbows, how to be independent (“It’s my money and I’ll wipe my ass with it if I want”).
She taught me beauty secrets such as taping your face at night to prevent wrinkles. And on that last note, when I came across this funny video today, I immediately thought of her….
Dear Far-Flung Family & Friends:
I am alive and well despite my lack of digital communications. I’m having difficulty facing the screen when there is so much presently unfolding “out there” in multiple dimensions that is demanding attention. Nonetheless, I miss you! You really should come for a visit.
This month marks two years since we arrived at Peace. Love. Home. I continue to be awed everyday by the largest and smallest things. Eggs for instance appear daily, as if by magic, in the dog house. I could build a pyramid large enough for all four of the chickens to live in with the eggs they laid this month. How do all these eggs fit inside these fluffy feathered girls?
this is not even a quarter of my eggs in one basket
The chickens are comical in so many different ways. When I go around the barn to tend to the ducks, they try their hardest to spy on me. They cram themselves in the corner between the doghouse and the fence practically on top of each other as they vie for the best view. When I walk back around the corner into their line of vision, the chicken totem pole disbands and they scatter as if those nosy girls couldn’t possibly be interested at all in anything I could ever do.
Apparently, word has gotten out that this place is “bird friendly” because we’ve been visited recently by interloping fowl trying to figure out how to get IN on this domesticated action. The two wild mallards below have been touring the property regularly, checking out the ducks’ pen and the chickens’ digs.
Myrtle, Pearl, and Gertrude bow respectfully as they bid the interlopers adieu.
There’s also a lone Canadian goose who drops in to check everyone out. He wanders around in the mornings honking incessantly for hours at at time. One afternoon last week I spotted a coyote who was drawn in by all this birdy action.
Perfect strangers (of the human variety) have also dropped by this summer to share stories and cry at the kitchen table with me about things that matter, which turns out is quite a lot.
My Little Spacebook 