So as it turns out, The Christ Child is bringing the Lovely kMara home to meet the Great Pacific Northwest. You can't have kMara is your house without a decent bathroom so I am taking The Christ Child's old bathroom and combining it with the linen closet that's the next door down the hall. Adding a claw foot bathroom, some glass tile, which by the way, will cost more than many, many cars I've driven in my lifetime, rounding the corner and heading to home base with a few stained glass windows, all the while hoping for an approved inspection or at least, a soothing of our rattled psyche regarding having kMara in the house. JoJo loves her people in the front of the house but in the back? not so much.

Anyway, this morning I find myself cleaning out my linen closet. In addition to literally dozens of cotton blankets and a half dozen new, never used down pillows, I am finding my life. All right there in the linen closet where I have been storing it for the last several years. There is the gorgeous long, linen dress from Italy that I have never worn because I don't know if American women show The Girls off, The Ta Tas, in polite company as the Italian women do. But I love that dress and no way is it going to Goodwill. When I get good and brave, maybe I'll wear it. In Italy.

Then there is the bedding and the pillows as I mentioned. I came across a wayward puppet; a bumblebee. We used to have puppet shows on Christmas when The Christ Child and his sibs were little; we have not had one in years. Now we play with the new cellphones on Christmas. There's the Vicks cool mist vaporizer which I always fired up when the croup was in the house; cool air is so much better than warm air on beleaguered lungs. Just what do you do with a good cool air vaporizer? Surely you don't give THAT to Goodwill; what if the croup shows up in the back of the house again?

I find the very first ever tablecloth that I owned as an adult woman; I think it's from JC Penney's. I let go of that while those newcomers from Italy, France, Ireland and India run wild through the place?

Then there's the crib bumpers and linen for the baby that's now 23 years old. Plays rugby with the roughest, toughest firefighters in the country and walks away from two taxis performing a fender eclipse in Manhattan traffic as he rides his bike in his lane between them; the taxis crush his bike but leave him unscratched. I made them. The crib bumpers, that is. My mother made the blanket. No baby ever had a better dust ruffle. What do I do with these?

What do I do with the drawings and the scraps of the material used to make the most famous soccer goalie jersey in the history of the Greater Spokane League? That jersey was known far and wide and comprised the stunning focal piece of a full length photograph of the goalie on the front page of the sports section, who of course, was making another freaking stupendous, physically impossible save. I found the fabric I used to sew lightning bolts on her shorts in the linen closet, too. Shouldn't this stuff be in a museum somewhere?

And so the bits and pieces of my life, a really good life, are pulled out and sorted. It's cold here this morning, I have not heard from my Turkish friends who are involved in a flash flood in the fourth largest city in the world that has killed 30 people so far and the universe continues to challenge me.

To be continued.


JBelle
Bellemaison
The 'Kan EWA