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AMY SMITH LINTON

Fashion Statements

1/25/2023

10 Comments

 
Why have I made more than one petticoat this autumn? 
​
​Is it texture? Volume? Swishy-swirly goodness?
​A latent Miss Kitty* crush?

​An elaborate plan to avoid writing?
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Nothing. To. Wear.
​ 
*Oh Lawsie, do NOT –– as you value and respect the variety of human experience and preference –– DO NOT google "Miss Kitty" + "crush" or "fetish" or "kink."


​True story: I was once a 21-year-old editorial assistant in Manhattan. I worked 70 hours a week for a pittance (the word derives from people given money from pity -- which is not actually a stretch for independent book publishers at the time).

I was in the office with William Dang Golding, Susan Freakin Sontag, Roald BFG Dahl, Holy Moly Madeleine L'Engle, Czeslaw Eyechart Milsovic, Polly Amazing Horvath, Maurice Himself Sendak, and Rapmaster Seamus Heaney, to drop but a few of the lifetime's worth of literary rockstars I met. 

​I loved that time of my life.
​
My coworkers included people who were famous in literary circles in their own right, as well as actual Guggenheims, a genuine English Lady Somebody–– the kind of folks who habitually went not just to the Hamptons for the weekend, but to Morocco.


A country church-mouse, I was just that tiny bit too poor to afford the subway for trips less than 40 blocks (my rule so I'd hoof it between Penn Station and Union Square daily).

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Here's me in a Sears purchase. Shoulderpads or throw-cushions –– I can't even.

Fancy-schmancy college had exposed me to the other, very wealthy side of the tracks, but still––!
Bonus side-benefit of scholarshipping my way through school: the crippling flush of envy had pretty well burned all the way through me. 

And as for blending in to the trés chic Manhattan publishing scene?

Errrm, even a minty-fresh
 Sears chargecard wasn't gonna godmother me to that ball. 
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​I embraced vintage. ​
​
There was a gorgeous Pendleton plaid suit, an old Chanel number from a garage sale, a handful of thrifted cashmere sweaters. I wore my riding boots with skirts, sported stacks of fake pearls from my grandmother, and sometimes I put together outfits that swooped past the line of "costume or not?" with joyous abandon.

Today, fashion historian Morgan Donner might call my choices "history bounding." Or as the cool kiddies put it: #Historybounding
​
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Okay, too much history, not enough bounding.

Still and all, fallible me at 21 or 22 saw a tourist descending the escalator to the tracks in Grand Central Station on sultry August day and was struck DOWN with want.  She was wearing exactly the item of clothing I coveted. Of all of the many MANY desirable commodities available in the big city, I wanted what she had. 

A full, pale, ankle-length skirt with an antique, Edwardian vibe.
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Pass-a-Grille Beach around 1915. My gr-grrandparents are the couple on the right. My grandmother is the kid in the white dress. Those are Edwardian walking skirts.

That skirt! Lacking that kooky booty seen with late Victorian bustles, this item of mere clothing managed to be curvy but straight, with a sensible, workable air.  I thought it made the wearer look interesting and self-confident. It was perfection.

I looked high and low for that skirt. For actual decades. Chasing an ideal.

And even after I had been sewing stuff for ages ——I'm on my third sewing machine, for the love of Captain Pete Obvious! —— it only came me to this year: "Yo! Self! Why not make that skirt yer own dang self?"

​And so, dear Reader, I am. 
After a rush of creative energy, snipping of threads and hacking my way through historical methods of pattern-drafting, I have what I have longed for: a long skirt with pockets deep enough to double for a handbag.

A few of my YouTube mentors: Bernadette Banner, Morgan Donner, Rebecca at Pocket Full of Poseys, Ora Lin, and Marika at Enchanted Rose Costumes. 

I made one walking skirt from denim. I'm making another from a single thrifted yard of pretty plaid wool and the remains of –– as God is my witness –– velvet curtain panels from Ikea. 

And under the skirts, a wealth of swirly, swishy petticoats in flannel and cotton lawn.
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Still pairing outfits with riding boots.
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Advertising

1/7/2023

2 Comments

 
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Really, Planters Peanuts? This is the new packaging.

​https://www.killingussoftly4.org/
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Thanksgiving: Orphan Dishes

11/20/2018

2 Comments

 
Yes, of course there is so very much to celebrate on a daily basis.

Waking up, for instance. Highly underrated.

Also the ability to walk about. Coffee (Or Mountain Dew, for those so inclined). The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth like the  –– Wha?

Shakespeare, really?  

​Truth be told, I am grateful for this rich cornucopia of memory sending me so often  off topic.  Then I can loop it back again...
​Not that any of us should wait for a special day to recognize the good fortune and lucky stars that has got us this far so far.  

But tis actually the season for this sort of thing. Plus feasting.  

Ah, feasting.  We have missed a few years of Thanksgiving in the States. So the groaning board seems novel this year, despite its familiar elements. 
And those less familiar ones. What I think of as the orphan dishes, left from another time, fossils of past iterations of the family.

You know to what I refer...the things made only for one Thursday in November (or maybe for a midwinter feast). 

Perhaps enjoyed only by one of the people around the table, but it's the item that ensures that THIS is the feast of family tradition.

Oh, the outcry when an orphan dish is forgot!
 

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Recipe box. Before there was a Google.
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Orphan foods I have known:

Creamed corn. Corn souffle. Corn pudding. 

Aspic and Jell-o based salads, especially the ones with shredded carrots or mayo.

Green-bean casserole with canned fried onions on top. 

Dilly carrots.

Candied yams with mini-marshmallows.


Parker rolls.

​Creamed pearl onions.

Giblet-mushroom gravy.


Ambrosia salad (aka white people soul food).

Baked quince custard –– or was it persimmon?


​Let alone the vast category of foods Mr. Linton refers to, bracingly, as "wet breads."

What we might call in normal parlance, stuffing*.

Traditional sage stuffing, chestnut or pecan stuffing, cornbread-sausage stuffing. Be it ever so savory, we know it as "wet bread."
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In England, I discovered that treacle cake was in point of fact, a too-sweet syrup-drenched wet bread mess. Such a disappointment after all those jolly British boarding-school novels!

​Wet breads.  Gah.

*In strict honesty, I know some people make stuffing more often than once a year. I dated a boy who made StoveTop at least once a week. For himself. Still, there are stuffings and StoveTops, and the latter does not make or break Thanksgiving.
​
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My childhood Thanksgivings –– set out on a white tablecloth, with my mom's Friendly Village dishes and the polished silver cutlery (I can still almost taste that odd polish-and-silver flavor. Yuck-yum) –– started for me with a series of sneak attacks on the pickle and olive plate.

She'd dash out from the kitchen and replenish the crystal dish with a sort of mock-annoyance. I might be adding the mock part. 

Anyhow, Mumsie also served mincemeat pie. Hey, don't judge. It's like a spicy apple and raisin pie. She skipped the suet and beef component. As do I.

Anyhow, the single element that proved it was Thanksgiving in Mumsie's house? Oyster stuffing. Technically a wet bread, the recipe includes saltines, "dots of butter," oysters, milk, salt and pepper, all baked in a casserole.

Mumsie's cousin Shirley (Hi Shirley!) continues to make this family dish for Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania.

I haven't had the heart to make it  –– or mincemeat for that matter –– absent my mom.


Well, that and my casein intolerance thingie. Making oyster stuffing my orphaned orphan dish. 
One day, I imagine, the idea of a roasted turkey itself might seem quaint and Betty-Jo Crocker-ish.  

If not, you know, for the oddity of roasting the flesh of a formerly living creature, than because the means of cooking seems so rustic and old-fashioned.  

A couple of years ago, we switched over to deep-frying the birds. Nope, not greasy. And three minutes per pound!

Nowadays, we all show up at the family feast bearing our various contribution (pies from my kitchen) plus a whole uncooked turkey to take home.  

The element of danger –– open flame! boiling oil! –– plays well with the boys, and there's zero squabbling over the leftovers.

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Plus, we get our money's worth out of that bubbling vat of peanut oil.
Perhaps as time marches along, I'll see the evolution of the meal go farther yet afield.  Tofurky maybe, or into the funky Cajun science of the turducken.  Both of which appall my Yankee sensibility even as the latter –– wet bread filling notwithstanding ––does pique my curiosity.  

​Well, I promise to be thankful if I have the chance to see that.
 

​
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A Ghost of Bestsellers Past

5/28/2017

4 Comments

 
One of my favorite nephews was helping me shuffle boxes of stuff from one place to the other recently. With that mix of patience and impatience native to the under-20 crowd, he did not express the slightest flicker of curiosity.

Still, his doubtful expression as he slid the carton (Marked "A-16") into the back of the Honda made me want to explain a little.

"I haven't unpacked that box since before your Uncle Jeff and I got married," I ventured. Which would make it the equivalent to the Jazz Age to him. 
"Toss it!" he said, then, reluctantly, "Why?"
"Because there was space?" I said. "Because I never got around to it?"
"Huh," he said. "Welp, that's the last of the pile. Anything else?"

There wasn't, except my continuing impulse to explain.  And of course my own curiosity.

​I hadn't unpacked the box -- or possibly even peeked into it –– for a very long time.

​Under a layer of yellowed St. Petersburg Times packing paper, an old acquaintance gazed back at me.
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Wide Wide World was the first real bestseller in the U.S. Published in 1850, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then, for a couple of solid reasons, it disappeared from most people's memories.

Why was it forgotten?  Here's the short list:
1) It's a "woman's" book, which critics and scholars later tended to dismiss. What's a "woman's book"? Well, the short form is that, like Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford novels, The Wide Wide World is focused on a heroine within the limited sphere of house and hold.

2) Like 
Little Dorritt or The Shack, the book offers a lot of weeping. Sentimentality is all well and good, but like unhappy families, I think every generation needs its own sentimental novel. Bridges of Madison County, anyone? Jonathan Livingston Seagull? 

It's almost as if the reading public wrings the emotion out of a popular book, leaving a dry husk for the next wave of readers. Or not. It's just a theory.
3) The novel is long and it's deeply and relentlessly religious –– 592 didactic pages about Christians and their duties.

​Our pre-teen heroine's duty boils down to how her sufferings are the will of God and how she needs to submit to the will of the men in her circle in order to find a happy ending...Think just a touch of Shades of Grey mixed with all the light-hearted fun of Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress. 

Goodreads reviews are sprinkled with phrases like "patriarchy by proxy" and "accepting male dominance"  and the book is described (fairly) as "preachy," "stifling," and "horrid."

Sidebar data:
The author Susan Warner collaborated with her sister Anna on several novels.

Thanks to one of those collaborations, Say and Seal, we have the hymn "Jesus Loves Me," so popular with the Sunday School crowd. 

​
So it's not a book that is going to have a revival, like Beryl Markham's West with the Night*. It's not a book I'm going to read again, ever. But I don't want to forget it. And so it has waited in a cardboard box lo these many years.

Wide Wide World essentially fired up the country's book publishing industry. The novel was huge. It outsold David Copperfield in England.

But Susan Warner did NOT make a fortune from it.  She and her sister started writing after their father lost all the family money in the panic of 1837. The girls were poor and writing was their best option to keep body and soul together. They managed, but they did not enjoy the life of bestselling authors. Susan went on to publish a book a year until her death at age 66. The Warner sisters have been mostly forgotten.

Mostly: they did manage to pass along their family property, Constitution Island, to the US Military Academy at West Point.  The island is part of the campus, although their house (Warner House, natch) is presently in a state of disrepair.  

​Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Resources:

*A quick essay about West with the Night.

What Katy Read: Feminst re-readings of "classic" stories for girls, by Shirley Foster and Judy Simons, University of Iowa Press, 1995.

Child brides in present-day US

Goodreads page for Wide Wide World

https://www.enotes.com/topics/wide-wide-world-susan-warner

"Loving The Wide Wide World: a novel, its fans, and their fictions" essay by Jennifer L. Brady, Harvard.

Margaret Atwood on "Women's Novels."

http://www.inspirationalarchive.com/1730/the-history-of-jesus-loves-me-this-i-know-song/

Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, Susanne Lebsock. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies by Susan K. Harris, Cambridge University Press, 1990

"Panics, Gifts, and Faith in Susan Warner's Wide Wide World" in From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-century American Fiction, by Hildegard Hoeller, University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.

Susan Warner and "The Wide Wide World" by Mabel F. Sltstetter, The Elementary English Review, Vol 14, No 5 (MAY 1937), pp115-167.
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This Space Intentionally Left Blank

4/7/2017

0 Comments

 
A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle. 

This week has thwarted me.  

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Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.
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Musical Selection: Show Tunes

5/31/2016

2 Comments

 
Special musical requests...

For every lone soul at the back of the crowd calling out, "Freebird!" at a concert, others of us have different wishes.

For instance, I'd like to hear Leonard Cohen's sultry, deeply melancholic take on something like "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 
Flower Drum Song.  


Not being disrespectful to any of the artists, seriously. And while the topic is pure piffle, I am quite sincere in wanting to hear a gruff, aware, and ironic version of lines like "with my eyelashes all in curls" such as he might produce.


Plus, I am thinking it might be fun for Mr. C. as well as for me ––  I imagine he'd be up for a dose of yang to work against his habitual yin.    
​

​And then again, I'd pay good money to get to hear David Bowie cover "Wrecking Ball."   
Too late, I know, but if Buffy has taught me anything, it's that a girl can dream. 
2 Comments

Thanksgiving: A Short List

11/24/2015

4 Comments

 
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Given that it's turkey (or Tofurky) time here in the States,when we are encouraged to eat a lot and give thanks, here's a short list of Thanksgiving call-outs: 
​

1. My sweet mother-in-law is the heart of the holiday, keeping tradition and changing to make it work for her children and theirs.  

Among other things, her nearly endless enthusiasm for photographing the gang every Thanksgiving offers a time-lapse photo record of the shape of the family and our sometimes astonishing hairdos.  

Honestly, I won the in-law lottery.
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2. Pie. When nobody else was willing to step into those big Betty-Jo Crocker shoes, I became the pie maker of the family (less adorable than Ned the Pie Maker, not so romantic as Jenna the Pie Maker* but versatile). 

*Oh squee! Bonus: a Broadway version of the show with music by Sara Bareilles. Sara Bareilles! Interview here.


It's proven to be an oddly empowering body of knowledge –– not only do I make a steep pecan pie and an indulgent chocolate cream pie, et cetera, et cetera –– but it feels like some kind of ninja move to boss this pre-feminist womanly skill-set.  Owning it. In an apron. 

3. Junebug, the dog who ate most of a bucket of used turkey-frying oil, stoically yarked it up, and then cheerfully recycl––oh, you get the picture. She taught me a lesson or two about gluttony and optimism. In the interest of truth, I admit it: others remember the incident differently. It might have been pork fat. It might have been another holiday. I like my story better. 

4. Activities that OSHA does not approve.  We used to schlep our feast to a park to avoid the whole televised sport issue. There were rattlesnakes, squirrels, gators, big spiders, canoeing, and a solid –– but unrealized –– risk of food poisoning.

Nowadays, we rendezvous at Jeff's brother's place. There have been horses (and some tumbles, but I bounced. booyah!), dogs, power tools, bocce tournaments, and vats of boiling oil bubbling over an open flame. No maimings, disfigurations, or mass trips to the ER yet. Knock wood!

5. The frozen half-gallon of Burrville Cider that I say I'll bring to the Thanksgiving feast, but will actually forget at home. Junebug's example notwithstanding, I'll end up polishing it off myself, thankful and replete.  ​
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Pink as a Value Judgement

2/6/2015

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As a kid, I admired storybook heroines who rejected embroidery in favor of swordplay. 

Disney princesses had not yet begun to paint little girls into that garish pink corner, but still –– traditional feminine pursuits just seemed feeble. The relentless focus on compliant behavior, fussy clothes, and elaborate grooming rituals, plus the very long wait for rescue –– it seemed like pretty thin gruel. 

I pictured myself as a tomboyish adventurer, Peter-Panning my way through adolescence. Bucking the system. You know, being the hero, not the princess.
 
But the world of boys –– threading worms on hooks, making blackpowder to burn, hammering and sawing things –– didn't seem complete either. 
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Even though I wanted to spurn and revile all the domestic arts, I also wanted to cook the odd batch of cookies. 

It felt unkind, having learned a little about carpentry, to turn my back on the careful measurement and handwork involved in making a quilt or brewing a batch of soap.

Because I get things backwards on a regular basis, it only later occurred to me later how unfair my youthful judgement had been. As if the world splits neatly into two! Or that one side is better than the other.

It's not black-and-white, our world, with yin versus yang, feeble versus fierce, pink the opposite of blue, them against us. It's not a competition.  

All the various qualities add up to something more like a big turbine, or something mechanical with multiple sets of meshing gears and cogs, constantly in motion. Hmm. Maybe that metaphor doesn't quite work...but still, the world is complicated and overlapping. 
In any case, I'm okay with Disney pink these days. 

Wear pink all you like, boys and girls, but please learn to change the oil in the lawn-mower and don't turn your nose up because some skill set seems to belong to the other half of the world. That is all.  Carry on. 
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(These images lifted from Arthur Rackham's wonderful illustrations for Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Alfred W. Pollard's abridgment of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.)
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Shame. Shame. Shame.

12/5/2014

3 Comments

 
So I've been caught up in the story about Time magazine suggesting that "feminism" is a word to ban for 2015. Evidently they are tired of having celebrities announce their affiliation with the concept of equal pay for equal work.
Wow.
So I went to make a pot of tea to take my mind off -- no WAY. My tea is right in the middle of  the controversy. 
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Hey, why should we be bothered if this tea chooses to be loose or bound? It's nobody's beeswax but the tea's. Transgression? Misbehaving? Societal norms? 

What's up with the unkind judgements? Oh, that's right: because it's human nature to categorize and set things into a hierarchy. To judge and label. 

 Even a tasty traditional beverage is subject to this nonsense. Gah.
3 Comments

Piecework

9/12/2014

8 Comments

 
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The special vocabulary of sewing can be confusing –– as with so many skilled fields of endeavor, needlework has its own way of using familiar words.

I freely admit to not paying attention in Home Economics. I was obliged to attend it in high school (girls WERE allowed sign up for Wood Shop, but only those from the first half of the alphabet in my year. Dash it all.). 

Being fortunate in my friends, I skated through most of Home Ec with minimal hands-on work. Cooking –– well, there was no escaping the assignment to make from-scratch biscuits. 
The biscuits I made were used as pucks in a hallway floor-hockey pickup session. And they made it undented all the way back to study-hall. A proud moment for me then as I was determined NOT to buy into the traditional gender-role responsibilities of home and hearth. 

But later –– a decade or more later –– a friend patiently showed me how to sew a straight line without attaching my hand to the fabric. Later, my sweet mother-in-law took me under her domestic wing, providing a sewing machine and some gentle tutelage. The language came to me slowly, with nothing meaning what I first thought: basting, batting, bearding, blocking, backing, taking a tack (plus bar-tacking!).
Anyway, all this dithering on the way to something like a point (a word which also has a sewing-based meaning, natch)...Quilting.  

Technically, "quilting" is the process of stitching fabrics together with some sort of fluffy middle layer. Like anchoring the layers of a big fat club sandwich with a frilly toothpick.  Quilting makes the difference between a down pillow and a down vest. 
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I am not particularly interested in the frilly toothpick part of making a quilt. Instead, I like the part known as piecework (not the same as a union-organizer's "piecework," oddly enough) where a person gets to pick colors and figure out designs. 

Despite this u-turn toward the domestic arts, I didn't budget much time for the hobby: the first quilts I made took ten years start to finish. 
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Such is the mystery of human nature: when faced with a big writing project a couple of years ago, I took up a couple of ambitious sewing projects. Why not an outdoorsy hobby instead? In a word: summer in Florida.  In a word: heat-stroke. In a word: avoidance.
I shuttled to the sewing machine as a break from working on revisions to that novel. Two hours of rewriting, a cup of tea, two hours of piecework. Repeat until both "The End" and a 96 x 76-inch fabric creation were achieved.  It's astonishing, really, what a bit of stick and carrot can make a person do.

I completed the revision (that story another day) but after finishing the piecing, and sending it to a talented mother-son-operation to get quilted to some cotton batting and a backing, I didn't take the last step: binding. (Ironic vocabulary choice for an aspiring novelist). 
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Closure is another word with a variety of meanings.  In sewing, "closure" might refer to buttons or zippers.  

In mourning, it's the (alleged) last step, when the loss somehow ends.The desire for closure –– to finish things –– is part of our basic human aversion to ambiguity, so they say. 
My subconscious sends up this vision on the subject of closure: 
Mumsie, holding a paperback splayed in one hand, holding open the spring-loaded screen door with an elbow, saying in an exasperated tone, 
"Yes or no! In or out! Shilly-shally, dilly-dally!"  
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Anyway, the quilt –– among other projects, o novel of mine! –– has been lurking around unbound. So I sat myself down this summer and started stitching. I achieved closure in roughly the same couch-time as four World Cup matches.  
If only a bit of red thread and attention could stitch shut all the open doors in my life...
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