Buttons

Victoria girls collected buttons on strings. These “charm strings” were filled with buttons given to them from, perhaps, an aunt’s wedding gown or a soldier’s uniform. “The 1000^th would be given to them by their Prince Charming,” says button fanatic Sandra Schaitberger of Pines-N-Tiques antiques shop in Minnesota.

Flea Market Style (2015)

Scribbling the Cat

In 2003, I spent 6 months working in Banff. When I left in June of that year to head back to the east coast, I was given a book as a good-bye present from one the Librarians at the Banff Centre. This book by Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is a memoir of life with her family living in southern Africa and has since become one of my favourite all time favourites. I have given it as a gift to many people and have re-read it, which I almost never do. Last year, I asked for her book Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness. This year for Christmas, I asked and received Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier. I loved this book. I always enjoy being taking on a journey I know I will never experience myself. For me, it is always fascinating to read about the journey that people’s lives take them on – especially when they are so vastly different from my own.

Two quotes from Scribbling the Cat:

It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are the most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.

I don’t think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don’t think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don’t think any of us can sit in judgement of another human being. We’re incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. It is possible – from the perspective of this quickly spinning earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin – to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don’t know if it is even useful to try.

Alexandra Fuller

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

Old Grey House

How many hands have touched your doors?
How many feet have walked your floors?
How many hearts are longing for this old grey house?

Old grey house down the road,

You have the saddest eyes I've ever seen,
And the wild morning-glories grow

On your shaded face where once you were green.
Sepia pictures on your walls
Long-ago secrets in your halls
Are still as the autumn leaves that fall

‘Round this old house.

Old grey house down the road,

You have the saddest eyes I've ever seen,
And they're wide open to the winds
That can take you travelling to where they've been.
Tattered white curtains flap and fly,
Waving to summer friends gone by.
I cannot pass but I feel and cry

For this old house. 

I remember we were dancing on the lawn –
We drank hot tea after midnight.

We were staying up till dawn –
There were stories by the firelight,

Warm friends on a winter's night
And swordfights with the icicles that clung

To this old house.

Old grey house down the road,

You have the saddest eyes that I've ever seen.
Now they're boarded up and blind
To the life that was and what might have been.
Old apple trees root deep in sod,
Reaching their naked arms to God.
Forgotten fruit will bud one day

‘Round this old house.

- Margie Carmichael

And My Name Is...Stories from the Quilt