award

It's the last day of January, thank god. I know I've been complaining lately, but I'm starting to feel trapped... I need to sit outside. And I need to be able to turn my face to the sea and stand for a while and not get frostbite. In short, it needs to be warmer.

Today I'm going to finally respond to an award I was tagged with weeks ago (apologies) by the lovely Oh, French! Her blog is very pretty and I admire her thinking so I'm very honored she chose me :)

Ok, the requirements are that I tell 7 things about myself and tag 7 other bloggers, so here goes:

1. I am totally and irrevocably in love with the sea outside my window. I was born into it and now it has me, I'll never be able to leave. I could never live somewhere landlocked because I couldn't live without the smell of the salt on the breeze and the wind whipping my hair around my face. It's a part of me and I'm a part of the sea.


2. Sometimes I get a little too detached from reality and I... I sort of create worlds for myself. Have you ever seen the movie The Science of Sleep? My life's like that sometimes. When I see something that touches me, I put it in my world. It's full of strange things, like these for example. Maybe I'll tell more about this world sometime.
3. This morning I had a delicious variation of a croque madame for breakfast. Sort of made it up on the fly, but it turned out incredible!

4. I'm obsessed with this video by Sigur Ros- it's so beautiful
5. I have a rather important track meet today and I gave blood yesterday (kind of a dumb move) so I hope that doesn't affect how I run!
6. I often stop to think about how lucky I am to live in the present. Many people let their lives go by wishing that they were older or younger. I remind myself that 5 years ago, I wished I would be 17. Now I am, so I better be happy about it. In another 15 years I'll be wishing I was 17 again so I'll enjoy it now
7. None of my friends know I have a blog.

Hope that wasn't too rambling!!! ok, so the seven people I'd give this to are the seven lovely people who have chosen for some reason to take an interest in this blog. Thank you so much, you are all very wonderful!

xoxoxox

allez allez printemps

lately I've been waking up and wanting to stay in bed with the moon. the moon is my friend these days- I go to sleep with her watching through the window in my room, and I wake up while she is still in the sky. I hardly ever see the sun because he can't find much time to stay these days and when he's about I am locked up inside the school.

spring should get here as fast as possible, oh I do wish it would, because I miss the sun as much as I love the moon. Here comes the part where I struggle to get out of winter- happens every year. Time move faster, will you, won't you? So we'll pretend it's spring and I'll go make some cake I think. This cake in fact (thanks to Darjeeling Dreams)

For the cake:
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp. grated lemon zest (I use Meyer lemons, which are great for zesting)
1/2 cup canola oil
For the glaze:
Juice from 1 lemon
2 tbsp powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch round cake pan.
In a bowl, combine the yogurt, sugar, and eggs, stirring until well blended.
Add the flour, baking powder, and zest, mixing to just combine.
Add the oil and stir to incorporate. Pour and scrape the batter into pan.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
Cool cake for about 20 minutes. Then, remove the cake: place a plate over the pan;
hold the pan and the plate together, and flip quickly so that the cake is in the plate.
When the cake is thoroughly cooled, combine the lemon juice and powdered sugar in a small bowl
and brush it liberally onto the cake. The glaze should be thin
and should soak into the cake like a syrup

*eat it before it disappears into someone else!*

photo's from weheartit and flickr

slowing

it rained today and the library leaked. my mind leaked too a little, but the windows sprang open and the wind carried the sea. the downpour was incredible, the world turned white from pelting rain. did you know that the Earth's rotation slows a little each year from Dust in the atmosphere? one day it will stop entirely. we would spend six months in darkness and six months in light. from something as tiny as specks of Dust.

I ran up to the third floor of the school today and climbed out the window onto the roof. you can see the sea and the smell hit me harder than the droplets of rain and the wind caught my hair and tried to run away with it. the clouds tossed and turned but I hid behind the bell tower and nobody saw me in the midst of the tempest. it was easing up out over the water and patchy sunlight struck the waves, sending up a brilliant, blinding light. I was safe until the sun struck me. then I got down and went to class.

les reves en francais

recently I've been dreaming in french. I've been thinking in it too... this morning I made pancakes (a new recipe that was quite delicious, perhaps I'll post it) but as I was moving through the quiet morning kitchen, I found myself thinking my sentences in french.

I'll tell you about the dream.
It concerned the boy I was in love with for a solid two years.
I was walking through the halls of my elementary school- a hundred year old brick building with secrets only children could discover- it had a beautiful library. Circular, with a dome and tall french doors that looked out into a circular patio and courtyard. It was autumn and I was wearing a white dress with a blue ribbon in my hair, like I would have when I was 5, but I was older. It was afternoon and the sun came through the red and yellow leaves and through the french doors to me on my window seat with my book. Boxes and bookshelves were all around me, tall and crowding over me comfortably. I was alone. And I was safe.

Then he came out of nowhere and I jumped up. I told him it was time for me to move on and his eyes turned down at the edges. He told me "Mais, je t'aime maintenent. Comment pouvais-tu ne voir pas?" and he held me. But I didn't look at him. Only at the sun through the window through the leaves and how the whole world was yellow and warm. And then he left.

this song was playing

the long road back

I haven't posted in a while and I'm sorry about that.

My good friend's father died very suddenly and tragically last Thursday and we were all left in shock for a bit. He was a very good man. So getting back to where we were before has been a journey.

You never know when you'll be picked up by fate and deposited somewhere else. It takes so long to get back to what you thought you knew. Sometimes you never really make it back, but you settle somewhere else and that becomes comfortable until you are picked up again.

It makes you think- if you were taken by surprise, where would you wake up the next morning?

If anything could happen? If you could be anywhere?

(Movie from here)

Where would you wake up?

blueberry love

I still remember that summer we met.
It was the time I first found a voice of my own.
You might have had something to do with it, or you might not have.
I'll never know. Do you remember me at all from those blueberry months?
I saw you on stage that first night-
I misheard your name- but you always stood out.

Did you see me? I'd show off in front of you.
Glance over and blush when you only walked by.
If I happened to sit near you by chance, by lucky accident,
I could feel you like electricity through the humid air.
Every part of me was aware of you sitting close enough to reach out and touch.
But I doubt if you ever saw me.

I was so so in love with you that summer we were 12 together.
And every summer after that. Each and every summer.
Did you ever know? I imagined you did and you'd come sweep me off my feet.
You never did, but did you know?

You beat me every bout, but did you ever see my face behind the wire mesh mask? I can still remember how it felt to want to speak with you so bad. Just to want your look. I think I became friends with everyone around you, your sisters, but never you. Funny how that worked out. Now we're the best of friends and miles away. I won't second guess things. I'll just wait until I can tell you. If that's another 5 summers, so be it. I'll be right there with blueberry stains on my knees.

(photos are mine from that summer)

easy as spotting

(photos)

I am sick again unfortunately, but the sickness is preferable to a double period of physics which I would have had today, so I don't hate it with all my heart (just the part that wants to dance)

you know who the dancers are because they may be too sick to go to school, but never too sick to go to class. Now the attempt will be to convince Maman that I do have my priorities straight after all...


Sitting in my bed, my sky is silver like an old man's hair- somber, not sad. The bare trees wait and if I look at the ivy, not the melting snow, I can almost convince myself that it's the end of March and I've made it through the coldest, darkest months.

It's a trick I have to play with my mind- a simple parlour illusion, like spotting a turn in ballet. I hang on to the dregs of autumn for as long as I can look back as the world spins, and then when I can reach no further- release- and snap my head around like an elastic, and there we are in spring.
With this I can trick time.

...it might just work...

dear dorian

I'm in the process of reading A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, have you ever read it? I've taken to carrying it with me wherever I go (a bit silly, no?) but I cannot release it.

I wish I could crawl into the pages of the world he paints
oh Mr. Wilde will you take me away into the labyrinth of your imagination?
We could get lost, you and I, in Basil's garden

and kiss the bees as they slumber past.
We'd never get old because
you would keep me immortal in your mind
and though I should end up jealous of a portrait,
we two could conquer the world with words and flowers.



"Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty, It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! . . . Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you."

photos

January 2

January 2

come back come back to the world today- I didn't quite want to, but figured now was as good a time as any...

the tripping piano downstairs will make it a bit easier.
watch the fingers tumble and play back and forth back and forth.
they are confined to such a tiny space but
how many different melodies come from these restrictions?

I brushed up my room today- finally hung those shadowboxes I made a while ago... and fixed the ribbon on the typewriter in the corner. do you like?

photos are mine

you and me

Happy New Years!!

Where did the days go?
They danced away on pretty patterned feet and you and me
we watched them turn into thin pink clouds on the horizon
that day the stars came down.

We've grown older you and I and the pretty spiral shells under the tree
are cracked with cold but in the corner of the sky
is that piece of sparkly stone you gave
me still shining shining shining.




You and me we'll dance through this new year
and the boats way out at sea will slip back to us across the ice
before we sleep so we'll always know.



I know it because you told me I never had to cry.