even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: falls church

imaginary outfit: falls church

This weekend: a car trip south to see my sister and her husband. On the agenda:

hotel pools
a farmer's market
a peacock room, the turquoise mountain and sky blue
air and space
lobster rolls

It's supposed to be cool, and I am looking forward to walking, walking, walking everywhere, and maybe sneaking away to see a movie in a theater.

*

I am not a seasoned traveller; and am hardly a seasoned parent (just 13 months on the job, and still learning every day), so I haven't got any tricks for long car rides or transatlantic flights or dogsled excursions with very young companions. I will say that I find a backpack key for corralling necessaries; a watch useful, so I can keep track of all the times (Nap, Snack, Running Around, Unexplained Crying, Wild Laughing, Irrational Aggravation, Story, Second Snack) without resorting to my phone; comfortable shoes and washable fabrics mandatory; and patience, humor and perseverance handy. Most ordeals transmute into hilarious tales with lightning speed.

Happy weekend.

*As ever, click on the image to find links to everything pictured.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: falls church

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