crooked house

Drink the Wild Air

Ralph Waldo Emerson, found on Lauren Cerand's How I'll Spend My Summer pinterest board. (It's way more fun to plan how you'll spend your summer than to recap it once you're back "in school.")

Fairy Door

There are a couple of trees in our yard just crying out for this Fairy Door. You can buy the accessories -- the little windows with the flower boxes and the lantern, which LIGHTS UP AT DUSK AND TURNS OFF AT DAWN -- but I'm wondering if they're overkill. I should've ordered this for Easter but I didn't and now May Day is tomorrow. Perhaps for the summer solstice? (Also, don't you think "Fairy Door" would be the perfect name for a gay bar?)

Rite of Spring: Mayflowers

Nicholas Roerich, Kiss to the Earth.

On Sunday we went looking for mayflowers. They're called mayflowers but they come out in April here in Nova Scotia, at the tail end of winter. Their tiny pink and white blossoms, so delicate in comparison to the thick hairy brown stems and broad rusty leaves that protect them, smell heavenly -- sweet, wild and, beyond that, indescribable. Finding them -- and you can only find them in the wild  -- means that it is definitely spring.

Luke, unconvinced that mayflowering would be very exciting, brought his Lego Ninjago sword, which he used to fight off a number of invisible monster skeletons he happened upon. He also explained to me, as I peered into the underbrush looking in vain for tiny pink and white buds, that just the sight of his sword would be sure to terrify any bears we might stumble across, as surely at least a few of their ancestors must have been killed by swords. I nodded and kept looking for mayflowers, wondering how the bears might've communicated this ancestral fear of swords to their children. Sylvie, pushed along in her stroller by her father, bounced over tree roots and babbled about owls.

After some fruitless searching, we came out onto the hiking trail that has been made out of a defunct railway line. Luke and Vivi, who by now had tumbled out of her stroller, started to lag behind and to complain. Grampa's sharp eyes managed to discover three tiny unopened mayflower buds on the side of the trail. "Maybe it's still too early," I said and suggested that we make a quick detour to the nearby town graveyard, to see the children's grandmother's grave, before going on to the playground.

Luke's grandfather's name and birthdate are inscribed to the left of his grandmother's but of course, as Grampa is still with us, there is only a smooth empty space where the date of his death would go. "Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?" said Luke cheerfully, as  he pointed one by one at the blanks where the month, day, and year will be.

Vivi caught sight of a small gravestone carved in the shape of a teddy bear. She ran off toward it. I went after her, to make sure she didn't take any of the flowers away. It was the grave of an 8-month-old baby. "We love you, silly bird" was inscribed along the bottom. Sylvie giggled and stumbled away in her bumble bee boots. I followed her, looking down at my feet, my eyes suddenly filled with sunlight and tears. And there, in the dead brown grass all around the children's grandmother's grave, were dozens of mayflowers.

 

Thank you, Gramma Linda.

On My Wishlist: A Visit to The Versailles of the North

I am happy to be able to say I have visited the actual Versailles -- now I want to take the kids to the "Versailles of the North," an amazing modern garden built by the Duchess of Northumberland on her estate, which is also the home of the castle used in the Harry Potter movies. The place sounds ridiculously over-the-top and apparently kids love it. I'll just have to watch them like a hawk around the Poison Garden because if there's a way to ingest something there, I'm sure one of them would.(Via the always fabulous Lux Lotus.)

Polly Gaillard's Reframing: Motherhood, Memory and Loss

Photographs by Polly Gaillard that seem to capture those gorgeous or funny moments you think you'll remember about your children but probably will not. I love this kind of family photography -- not saccharine or posed.

Snow Day

Not much school this week for residents of the crooked house. First there was the annual twenty-four-hour stomach flu vomit-a-thon on Wednesday, then the early lunch-time dismissal on Thursday due to an impending snow storm, and now school is cancelled today while they clean up the streets. We just made the obligatory snowman. He looks like he is bleeding because we tried to use red smarties for his mouth but they proved to be too irresistible and had to be eaten, leaving nothing but red dye smears across the snow. We replaced them with uncooked rotini noodles, which aren't as palatable.

Nothing says "fun" like a giant fake smile.

See, she actually does have a normal face.

"Ah yes, the 2010s," future photography historians will say, "when the likes of hipstamatic made even joyous childhood activities such as the making of snow angels look bleak and ominous."

The angry birds are quite pissed off about it. Well, the red one is. The green pig is mildly annoyed, the blue bird, concerned.

 

Everything Here...

is wonderful.

That looks like an old road map, doesn't it? I haven't been able to credit this image so I don't know if it's vintage or new. It would make a great paper placemat and/or napkin for a diner, don't you think?

Starry Sky

Photographer Thomas Zimmer (thats him up there) got some astonishingly beautiful shots of a starry sky over the North Sea. Via My Modern Met.

Amazing Mystery Baker: Chocolate Caramel Nut Torte

I don't know how I stumbled upon this mystery baker's photos but I've been drooling over them for a few days. That's her chocolate caramel nut torte above. Check out her autumn pastries set. And then check out everything else. And then, if you're me, go scarf down some stale Oreos and three mini KitKat bars leftover from Halloween.

Crooked Forest

The mysterious Crooked Forest in Poland. Maybe the people who did this to the trees were planning on building crooked houses with them. In other crooked house news, the ceiling in Luke's bedroom started leaking heavily onto his bed last night during a rainstorm.