MAXIMALISM AND ME

You've heard of the minimalists, meet a maximalist. Spell check likes minimalist, but not maximalist, though there is such a word. The first definition of maximalist that comes up on Google is “(especially in politics) a person who holds extreme views and is not prepared to compromise.”  Well, that’s not me at all, at all. (Well, maybe sometimes!) But Google goes on to quote Wikipedia and say “In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an esthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more."

Less is more at this house. I’ve been downsizing for years, and I’ve got several cupboard and closet shelves that are empty. Empty can be a great concept. There is one area where more is more: on my walls. On a lark, I took a count of all the items hung on the walls of this house, Current, never final, count: 210 - 52 in the kitchen alone. Frank and I never set out to collect any one thing, we don’t have a lot of dust collectors in this house, but it seems we’ve amassed quite a number of things to decorate our walls. They range from handed-down prints and etchings, to W.W.II postcards, to prints, photos, and souvenirs we’ve collected for ourselves. There are several quilts, and lots of needlework done for us by one very special person.

The website Houzz talks about gallery walls – I have several of them. One nice thing about wall-hung things is that you rarely have to dust them. The other is that just a glance at them, in the same way you’d glance at the title on the spine of a favorite book, can evoke a small wave of memories and delight.

DID SOMEONE SAY IT WAS SPRING?

DID SOMEONE SAY IT WAS SPRING?

Here in northern South Carolina this morning, it was at the freezing mark. Up in the Northeast they are suffering their fourth nor'easter in a month. Though the vernal equinox happened this past week, you couldn't prove it by the weather - it's crazy all over the country. (Yep, Mr Trump, there's no global warming effect.)
I found this poem in April last year, on the now defunct The Writer's Almanac. The cadence of the poem reminded me of that of one of my favorites, Barbara Frietchie, by John Greenleaf Whittier. John Greenleaf Whittier. As a kid, I was intrigued by multi-syllabled triple names like his and Robert Louis Stevenson's, and I loved their poems that danced - as this one does.

Greeting to Spring (Not Without Trepidation)

by Robert Lax

Over the back of the Florida basker,
over the froth of the Firth of Forth,
Up from Tahiti and Madagascar,
Lo, the sun walks north.

The first bright day makes sing the slackers
While leaves explode like firecrackers,
The duck flies forth to greet the spring
And sweetly municipal pigeons sing.

Where the duck quacks, where the bird sings,
We will speak of past things.

Come out with your marbles, come out with your Croup,
The grass is as green as a Girl Scout troop;
In the Mall the stone acoustics stand
Like a listening ear for the Goldman band.

At an outside table, where the sun’s bright glare is,
We will speak of darkened Paris.

Meanwhile, like attendants who hasten the hoofs
Of the ponies who trot in the shadow of roofs,
The sun, in his running, will hasten the plan
Of plants and fishes, beast and man.

We’ll turn our eyes to the sogging ground
And guess if the earth is cracked or round.

Over the plans of the parties at strife,
Over the planes in the waiting north,
Over the average man and his wife,
Lo, the sun walks forth!

SHELTER SITES

Just as there are shelter magazines like Architectural Digest, Southern Living, and Better Homes and Gardens, there are what I call shelter websites. Depending on the frequency of their emails, or perhaps I’ve bookmarked them, I check at least one every day. My favorite is Houzz, but I get updates from The Spruce, Real Simple, and others. Every once in a while I save an interesting picture or idea from one of them. One never knows from whence inspiration will some, do one?

But lately I’ve been shutting down on these websites. My house is probably in its last decorating scheme. I’m not going out to get a new shade of paint for the walls, or to reupholster my couch. I’m not going to rearrange my living room. So except for being able to admire some beautifully decorated rooms, genuine eye candy, I really don’t need to take up time at my laptop to view such shelter sites. Besides which…

I am an organized person, and I don’t need 10 Ideas for Decluttering Your Kitchen, 10 Tips for Using Leftovers, (I rarely have leftovers) or 10 Hacks for Paring Down Your Wardrobe. That last one – hacks – really annoys the heck out of me. A hack is a hackney, a cab. Or it’s what you do to cut down a tree. Maybe they use hack to cut down a problem, as they do for cutting into someone’s computer. Anyway…

One of the most annoying things to me is the concept of a “retreat.” I’ve blogged about this in years past, and the concept still annoys me. Houzz has oodles of articles on bathroom retreats. Just search for “retreat” on their website, and you’ll find over a thousand of them. I usually get a chuckle visualizing the poor, harried folks who must retreat from their fraught, stressed lives and beat a hasty retreat from it all.

So that’s my rambling for the morning. I had nothing pithy or clever to post on today’s blog, so I thought I’d do a minor rant.

Next time, the curmudgeon in me may take on the subject of the strange hairdos many of the gals are sporting these days. They look like they’ve been in a high wind, or they wound their curlers wrong. Maybe next time…

THE IDES OF MARCH

Here's another one I wrote for the community magazine. They did publish it, but with a bit of de-personalization. Well, that's o.k. This rhyme is one that has stuck with me for all the year since I first learned it - and that's over sixty years ago. It's amazing how poems or phrases, even advertising jingles, stick in our minds for ages. 

“In March, July, October and May, the ides fall on the fifteenth day.” That little ditty is courtesy of my high school Latin teacher, Mr. Matthews. Later, I was told by one of the magazine editors that the full rhyme is

"In March, July, October, May,
The Ides are on the fifteenth day,
The Nones the seventh; but all besides
Have two days less for Nones and Ides."

In this day and age, we occasionally hear references to the ides of a month. What really are ides? Or, what is ides: the word can be both singular and plural. The ides were one of the Roman ways to keep track of the days of the month. From their name for the first day of any month, kalends, we get our word calendar. The Romans went along with a more ancient way of calculating the days, and that was basically a lunar system. They had “full,” or 31-day months, and “hollow” months that were less than full. That makes some sense. In Latin, the word for full is plenas. The word for hollow is cavas. From the Roman plenas and plenum, and the like, we get our word plenary. From cavas, cavus, and cavum and the like we get our words cavity, and cave.

They used the word nones to designate a day within the month, usually the seventh or fifth day, if the month was full or hollow. (Ecclesiastically, nones are the fifth or seventh canonical hours, usually the ninth hour of the medieval day that started at sunrise.) The nones were nine days before the ides. The ides were the day before the middle of the month. Got that? They didn’t seem to be too interested in the rest of any month, though they did mark their calendars to know on which days certain activities like assemblies or the initiating of law suits were permissible, or which were public holidays. In times before that, the distinction of the phases of the moon and the months and days were certainly important for plowing, planting, and harvesting.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar, Caesar is told by a soothsayer to “beware the ides of March.” An ominous and ambiguous warning if there ever was one, but emphatic and fitting for the drama nevertheless. That sayer of sooth should have said “Caesar, your buddies are out to do you in.” There were, of course, other reasons for Caesar’s pals to do him in, but perhaps one of the causes of their discontent that he messed with tradition and moved the New Year celebration from March 15 to January 1.

So now you’ve increased your trove of trivial information – aye, the ‘ides’ have it.

EAR TO THE GROUND

Someone I know who was asked what was going on in the neighborhood replied that he’ll keep his “ear to the ground.”  I got a “visual” of that: someone with his ear to the ground. Then I added eye on the ball, nose to the grindstone, hands across the water. The guy would have to be a contortionist.

Silly.  

(But I kinda like the picture I found when I googled for an image to go with this quickie post. I say, I say, I do like those glutes!)