Libraryidealist - Dried Flowers And Art

part of what makes tragedies tragic is the story being preventable from the outside but unpreventable from the inside

The older I get the more I admire people who are earnestly, genuinely into whatever their thing is. I know it sounds like an annoying cliche but unless you're being cruel or hurtful there is really no need to be normal about things. The dude with the bad fake accent at the renaissance faire is having the time of his life. The people having photoshoots with their fashion dolls are loving it. The old lady with a yard unreasonably full of tacky ass lawn ornaments is having a blast, HOA be damned.

Don't waste your time being too cool to have fun, y'know?

I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

Burning Your Boats The Collected Short Stories, Black Venus, Angela Carter / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / Unknown / Tell Me No Secrets, Joy Fielding / Stop the World and Get Off, Peggy Toney Horton / Grief, Barbera Crooker / Unknown / A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / William Stanley Merwin / Maurice, E. M. Forster / Dear Would be Wife, Gala Mukomolova / Unknown / Anne of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery / Anvita Bhogadi / Peace Like a River, Leif Enger / Unknown / Unknown / The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare / @honeytuesdy / October, Robert Frost / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot / Georgia Grace / Alexander Smith / Unknown / Insta: sarahkjp

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

running with my dress unbuttoned

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea