The Weather Report from Bed

I live in a caboose. It’s been raining for three days and three nights. I hear up the hill, (which is a small mountain, really) it’s snowing….Capt’in, the tuxedo cat and I have been in bed all this time. I have been sick since January with small intervals of health. The cat is being just cat, an animal who sleeps between snacks and a quick step outside in the winter. In the spring and summer, he takes long naps under the rosemary tree. I have a church pew under an awning I can nap on with cushions and quilts and a large endtable to hold glasses of iced drinks , a pitcher, books, gardening tools for when I can actually get up and sometimes that “getting up” turns into three hours of delicious gardening, which also puts me back in bed for a day or two. There is no winning here, or maybe if I look at it upsidie down, it’s ALL winning. I’m alive and I have a grin on my face most of the time. I have a fever right now, so I look maniacal. I go from hot to cold and back again so I am wearing a black slip past my knees, a black Tshirt, black sox with Rastafarian stripes at the top and a black velvet hoodie for when the chills hit. I found at an strange little shop that carries clothes for people in their twenties and old beautiful Afghani jewelry, a polished sea snail shell cut in half, polished to such a high degree it shines, set in silver that holds a beautiful tear drop shaped jewel the color of celandine. I took forever on “lay away” to buy it and then I strung it with large pearls the color of the shell which I had also bought somewhere else on lay away. When you live in an area for thirty five years, you know the shop owners after awhile to the point they can even leave you in the shop while they run to the school and pick up a sick child. I’m lucky that way.

A man I know who used to own a used bookstore gave me a boxful of McCall magazines from the fifties to the mid sixties, right before he sold the store, so of course, being of the generation I am, (I was born in ’55), I quickly turned to the last few pages to see if the Betsy McCall page was still there. YES! A child had not purloined my little treasure-girl back when I would have also or a grown up for me. And not only that, but the FIRST page introducing her was in the stack. Because I live in a caboose, I had to do a terrible thing, but space is space. And no space is like entropy, an ugly thing. Except for the first mag introducing the paper doll, I had to carefully tear out the doll pages of the rest of the mags and toss the magazine. I simply have no room. If I had any sense, I thought later, I ought to have color copied all of them and sold the originals on Ebay to someone as silly as I am about paper dolls and Betsy McCall in particular. I grew up poor, so there was a series of time when my mother who is an artist, or used to be,
would pencil me extra clothes, using Vogue mag models as inspiration. It’s a shame I still don’t have those. I didn’t care for the era then, I wanted a little girl; but I was so grateful for the kindness. The fact that I didn’t care for the fashion era all that much I’m sure is the reason they’ve been lost. I have a box of paper dolls that my husband’s mother drew with a myriad of “outfits” based on Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. She’s made the dolls look like Rita Hayworth. They really are amazing. She married Dan’s father when she was in her very early twenties, had two children and died of leukemia in her late twenties. She had one of the first degrees in modern dance from UCLA. So talented, so many directions.
It’s women like this who inspire me to keep on being creative. I’ve figured out a way to work my own art in bed by loading up a large engraved silver tray with exotic hand-made papers, glue, colored pencils, needle & thread, scissors of the tiniest dimension, and a compartmentalized box of tiny weird objects. I make books from scratch, starting with pasteboards usually from the eighteen hundreds and sew papers into a spine I’ve made of black silk velvet or some other kind of gorgeous fabric glued onto the pasteboards Usually I use a Singer featherweight machine, or a treadle to sew the pages in, but if I’m in bed, I sew by hand, the tiniest stitches in the centerfold of the book. I told my husband just because we’re poor doesn’t mean we have to have ugly in the caboose. I’m fortunate: I have a thrift store right around the corner from my caboose, even though it appears the caboose is in the country. The lane it’s in is covered by two cork oaks, a holly tree and a flowering May. The ruts and potholes discourage anyone from driving through, so it’s our little secret. Since moving into town from a three hundred acre plus ranch, I need, absolutely need, this privacy. The front door opens onto a slim porch on the alley side that goes almost the length of the caboose and one end has a small picket fence gate to keep the neighborhood dogs off the porch. Those pickets are my only concession to middle class living.
I wish it would stop raining. I have about twelve from seed plants to get into the earth. Russian red kale. Bok Choy, mixed up lettuces and spinach. Which will put me right back in bed if I’m not careful. Careful Bones, one of my girlfriends calls me. But I am so tired of being in bed. And greens are so nice to eat with quinoah and tamari. And now I believe it’s time to go to sleep.