Day 237
How many of us, as kids, would lie on our backs in the grass, faces toward the sky, searching for animal shapes in the clouds?
My guess would be a lot. Though I don’t have even one single recollection of ever doing that.
I do, however, see faces in textiles. It’s one of those odd things that I’m sure other people also do, but to me, it seems rather … weird.
I remember long hours on the kitchen telephone when I was in high school. Gone were the days of the party line – where another household shared the phone line with our home. (And if you were really bored you could stealthily pick up the receiver and listen in on their conversations! Not that I EVER did that … Mrs. Gilbert was not that interesting!)
Anyway … gone were the days of the party line, gone were my siblings (off to college) and there I was – yakking away with whomever for hours and hours and hours, night after night after night, on that phone. (I’m sure my parents just LOVED that!) I look back and wonder what we had left to talk about because these were the same people I had spent all day with at school!
In any case, we had an extra long cord on our wall phone and I could stretch it far enough so that I didn’t have to sit at the kitchen table and talk. I could lie on my back, in the hall, legs up on the paneling that ran the length of the hallway from the kitchen to the back bedrooms. I’d lie there facing that paneling and find faces and animal shapes in the grain and whorls of the wood.
To this day, if allowed back into that house and if by some miracle they still had that wood paneling up, I could go directly to all of those shapes and faces … but mainly to that sideways triangular monkey face that eerily finds its way into my dreams sometimes as emblems on shirts or patterns on a dress.
At my old house in Colorado I had beautiful peach and gray ceramic tile that had a marbling effect running through it. I’d wash that floor and find saber tooth tiger profiles, Pokemon, the big bad wolf and demons. There were primitive cave drawings of deer and striations that resembled a summer sunset. It was a very interesting floor!
Today, I was polishing my toes and in the purple rug in the bathroom I saw a bear, a mountain lion, and a tornado. There were so many images in that rug that I began to wonder if the polish was causing me to hallucinate!
And in our old neighborhood there was a pine tree that was the perfect likeness of Mrs. Butterworth (the syrup bottle). Through the years the kids and I would always remark about it. Earlier this spring, Sam and I were out walking and the tree was still there but it had finally grown out of the Mrs. Butterworth shape. We both felt kind of sad about it.
Well, I’m off … hoping not to dream about triangular monkey faces or bears or demons that might be in the rug next to my bed but instead of nice, puffy white clouds that look like … well … clouds.