Isabella Bird Miscellany

I’m not real old, but old enough to remember learning to drive a stick shift.  The best friend of my now husband, then boyfriend, offered to teach me.  He had his grandparents’ indestructible, in theory, 1950 Oldsmobile 88.  I thought it looked like a lunker.  My boyfriend thought his friend was not-so-slyly trying to move in on his girl.  I think it’s sweet that he is retro-jealous. Not quite the one I learned in, but a cute pic Now it should be noted that I am not an auto aficionado.  I do like cute cars, fast cars, funky cars and I adore old-school muscle cars.  The car I learned to drive in falls into the latter category.  The ‘50 Olds rolled off the line as the first factory hot-rod.  Muscle-car-mania was born with a Rocket V-8 powerhouse engine…and three on the column. The hipness of the car itself needs to be set aside.  I didn’t know how to drive, let alone push a clutch in and make my way, totally clueless, with a column pattern of elusive hidden gears. My boy

Onions, water, cook, devour

Once upon a few years back, there was a girl who wanted to be a redhead for the night.  Why you might ask?  Because she could…and what a jolly surprise it would be for her husband for Valentine’s Day. The girl and her sister went to the store with one purpose in mind:  red hair dye.  Now, the girl knew pretty much nothing about coloring one’s hair.  She did know that Fanciful was a put-on, wash-right-out product.  Problem was, the store did not have Fanciful in red; every other color of the hair rainbow, but no red. So the girl and her sister began to read the boxes of shades and tints and dyes; permanent, semi-permanent.  It made their heads spin.  Reading more closely, a few stylist clues began to emerge, “Washes out in 6 to 7 shampoos!”  A light went on, the box was purchased and home went the girl and her sister.  Soon they would have lovely red locks.  Now remember, the girl knew pretty much nothing about coloring one’s hair. The package instructions were quite long,

I have been snapping pictures for as long as I can remember.  I have albums documenting vacations, holidays and the ordinary stuff that makes up our days, not to mention all of the photos that clutter and slow down my computer.  Note to self:  get an external hard drive. Rusted exquisiteness   The past few years, though, I have been taken by the not-so-lovely, the grit that encompasses; abandoned industrial sites with broken-out windows, graffiti scrawled across the face of a store front or discarded farm equipment in a mud-caked field.  There are stories behind the decay of crumbling edifices.  At one point in time, these objects were pristine, without a mark or scratch.  What happened between then and now? set in a field of mud I love this picture of an old truck-bed-turned-trailer, now abandoned in an earthy, water-logged field.  The pale robin egg blue, a very delicate shouting-of-spring color, is a sharp contrast to the reddish-brown rust that is devouring the c