Airs Above the Ground

Okay, so here are Jenny's horse blocks, all laid out and ready to be stripped together. It took a week just to get the strips cut, but first it took a lot of thinking, which accounted for most of the time. I thought about sewing the quilt top together, then taking it to a quilt conservator or something to get it cleaned without wrinkling the horses or disturbing the embroidery. But I'll probably just finish the top, put it together and quilt it, then spend a day hand-washing and smoothing until it gets dry. There won't be much quilting on the horse blocks, so it should turn out all right. I want to embroider something on the sashing, inspired by a quilt of Joe W.'s, maybe a piece of one of the designs on the horses' blankets.

Also this week, I finally got the tag for the truck, but that was just yesterday. I don't remember everything I did before that. When I presented all our paper work on the Tracker and said, for the third time, "I want to register my car," the courthouse lady studied everything, then said, "Did they inspect your vehicle when you were here before?" She noticed the blood draining from my face and the tears springing to my eyes, and laughed. But she took care of that computerwise, instead of telling me I had to make a fourth trip.

One quasi-UFO I got rid of was a bagful of old bed and table linens that wouldn't allow me to close the drawers of the chest in the foyer. What you bet that I'll eventually forget that I donated them, and wonder what happened to Mama's old red tablecloth with the cigarette burn in the corner, or the beautiful set of napkins and placemats that never got used in the 15 years that I owned them? Not to mention four new ready-made dining-chair covers that Jed gave me (sorry about that) because they didn't fit his chairs, and of course didn't fit mine, either.

One reason I didn't get to the courthouse until Thursday:  I was reading The Commodore by Patrick O'Brian, and lines in it kept inspiring germs of poems that I had to write down. And think about. And mull over. Something in the book made me think of what "mad" Nijinsky said, in perfect iambic pentameter: "I simply leap into the air, and pause." And that made me think about the horse quilt, which looks to me like the Lippizaner stallions in their dance.

I'd give a pretty to have my old photo program back, that would let me brighten the pictures and Photo-shop them a little.

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About Big Baby: Before I start torturing myself with years of trying to find an agent and laboring in hopes somebody will publish the book, I've decided to enter it in River City Publishing's 2011 competition. The winner will get published and receive a pittance of an advance against "royalties" (yeah, right). I'm aware that Big Baby is not your great American novel, and if it could get published some easy way, I'd feel that I had fulfilled Betty Smith's (or some woman author's) instruction on how to live the full life: "Have a child, plant a tree, and write a book." Even if it doesn't win, maybe somebody will read it, and maybe somebody will comment.