remember

a little book for raleigh

i apparently made this for raleigh at some point. on the first page i suggest that he try to read it, but then i get distracted on about page three and turn it into a psychedelic design booklet without any words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

snugglee

when i was five, our dog blackie had puppies. each of us in the family had a favourite from the litter, but ultimately we voted democratically which one we should keep, and mine was the winner. i named her snugglee, spelled intentionally this way because i wanted her to have the same middle name as me.

snugglee was, true to her name, snuggly, with long black fur. she was an outdoor dog and not terribly well groomed, but what she lacked in beauty she made up for in character. she lived for fifteen long years, dying of old age while i was living abroad in russia during university.

[written 29 august 2007; posted 1 september 2007]

hi stephanie!

each summer throughout my childhood, my sister (technically half-sister) stephanie went to visit her father "daddy bob" in new york city. while she was gone--often times for a full month or longer--my brother raleigh and i waved at every airplane that flew overhead and yelled "hi stephanie" until it passed by. i think we knew she wasn't really on the airplane the whole time, but we associated them with her and it was our way of remembering her until she came back home to us.

[written 28 august; posted 1 september]

good cheese

one time my grandpa came to visit our house, and during dinner, he cut a big slice of butter off the block on the table. while we were watching, expecting him to get some bread to spread it on, he bit into it and said "this is some good cheese."

[written 27 august; finally posted 31 august]

night-time journeys

as parents of four children, my mom and dad were probably quite wise to do most of their long-distance car travel at night. this was long before the days of car seats and mandatory seat belts, so they made comfortable beds for us across the back seats and even in foot wells, and we set off after dark. i never really understood how they could stay awake.

i loved these car trips. i remember seeing the flashing of street lights through the window above me and feeling the rhythm of the car moving along the highway. i found the closeness of my siblings comforting and the car journey exciting. but my favourite thing about these night-time car trips was listening to the drone of my parents' voices, sometimes combined with a stranger from public radio, as they talked to each other in the front seat. i never could hear what they were saying, but the timber of their voices and the knowledge that they were right there helped to lull me to sleep.

i chose pompeii

in sixth grade, we had to write our first "term papers." we each selected a topic, did research in the library, wrote facts on index cards with source information on each, wrote an outline, then organized the information into a research paper  complete with a bibliography. as a twelve-year-old, it seemed like a huge undertaking, but i think the final paper was only about five hand-written pages long.

my classmates wrote about ferrari, the dallas cowboys and breeds of horses. i was fascinated by a book my parents had about lost worlds and selected pompeii.

quisp

sugared cereals weren't allowed in our house, but whenever we went to visit grandma peters, we each got to pick out our own box. it turns out that mom never liked this, but i never realized that as a child.

raleigh and i always picked quisp. i think it was the bright blue box with an alien on the front that attracted us but it might have been the resulting sugar rush. quisp is still being sold today, and in fact i found it as recently as last week, but the distribution seems to be quite limited.

wood processing

wood processing is core to the finnish economy, and rauma has a large pulp mill. the smell of timber processing and wood pulp permeated everything in the area, and when i smell something similar now, it reminds me of saunas and nature and snow.

solo jogger

during my summer in new york i went jogging along the east river most evenings.

sleeping on the floor

when i interned in new york city for a summer, i lived at 88th and york  with my older sister stephanie. we shared a tiny studio apartment and i slept on a fold out chair on the floor. most times steph's then-boyfriend-now-husband david stayed there too. stephanie had two cats, and one, a kitten named shadow, went crazy every night and ran across my face as i tried to sleep.