Isabella Bird Miscellany

says it all - the grotto It sticks to your clothes and shows up splendidly on black, it gets caught on the screen in the dryer and socks elaborately decorate your toes with the stuff.  Yep, lint:  the fuzzy, ravelings of fabric that cling to everything; like Velcro, only different. Lint actually has a purpose.  By scraping it from linen it can be made into a soft, fleecy fabric.  Cotton staple – lint fibers – are spun into yarn.  While all of this is riveting, especially while staring at the lint in your belly-button, there’s more to Lent than its sound doppelganger. lint: fluffy, minute shreds of yarn lent: a season of preparation These two tiny words sound similar in our vernacular, but have massively different implications in our lives.  We clean-up lint and toss it in the trash.  Lent, however is a prepping time for us to realize we’re not great at cleaning up our own stuff. Lent was originally a season between winter and...

i do adore sweetly scented unpredictable yellow roses Ah, crap!  Valentine’s Day is Saturday - gotta make the reservations, grab the expected red roses, obligatory frilly box of cheap chocolates…dress-up, suck-it-up, put on the happy smile.  Sounds more like work or a sentence than a communication of feeling. Why do we think we have to perform to the beat set by media, the norm, the predictable?  I, personally find that a phrase of soppiness that is made exclusively for me, is sweeter.  The tagline, “it’s the thought that counts,” is spot-on. Let me give you a dirty example from a few remembrances back.  I enjoy being outside and wanted to create a new sitting garden.  It would be surrounded by heady lavender with a small gazing pool in the middle – and of course a bench to sit and well, gaze at whatever.  This was all in my mind’s eye, because the area was just straggly grass.  There were no pieces of muted slate marking a path, no s...