The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Help me find my hat.’Ī cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: ‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. And there were no birds singing they’ve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. ‘The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. ‘I knew it before I got out of bed,’ she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. Other people inhabit the house, relatives and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together – well, as long as I can remember. The person to whom she is speaking is myself. ‘Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘it’s fruitcake weather!’ Her face is remarkable – not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.Ī woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. A great black stove is its main feature but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.Imagine a morning in late November. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends - more now than ever before. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. ) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. But some new things I've fallen in love with - mismatched everything. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. It means I've just added more things to my list. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. “I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another.
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