Clothing lines, while marketing more and more grown-up clothes younger and younger girls, still as a whole have shifted when it comes to the clothes marketed to pre-teens and early adolescent girls. Short skirts, platform shoes, stilettos, low cut tops all emphasize that the only point of girls’ clothing is to show off what they’ve got. And our movie stars and music icons underscore this point by appearing to gala events in increasingly daring and skimpy pieces of clothing, clothing that draws my eye in horror wondering how they even keep it on at times! I saw one actress who was wearing a dress that was so completely backless as to fall in a small drape that revealed the top of her behind, and a skirt so high that it barely covered the lower end of that same part of her anatomy. There was no way she could have sat down, which means she either exposed herself before the night was over, or crippled herself standing all night on those four-inch-plus spikes she’d paired the outfit with.
And while an example like this is more extreme, the message is plastered everywhere a girl looks: sexy sells, and if you don’t look sexy, you’re not worth anything.

I remember the awkwardness of 12 and 13. I had my share of the post puberty baby fat look, and obsessed about the size of my thighs, especially when compared to other girls with smaller connections between their hips and their knees. I used to sit with my legs either tightly squeezed together or with my heels propped up on the legs of the chair to reduce the thigh spread. I just so badly wanted to fit in, but I could only feel good about myself if I was near someone bigger than I was, but I certainly didn’t want to be classified with them either. Feeling socially awkward and overweight (I wasn’t overweight if you look back at the pictures, though I don’t really have good explanation for my hair [sic]), I wrestled within with wanting to shun another girl who I was sure was socially awkward and had bad hair to boot, and the concept that I was supposed to be nice to people. Only I just wanted to be nice to people who didn’t make me look bad. And ultimately, the latter won out.

One spring I thought I would experiment with growing flowers from seeds, and drawn in by the seed packet’s representation of continual bright colored flowers, I planted cosmos along with morning glories and alyssum in the same bed.  While the cosmos were only supposed to be 12-14 inches high, I must have gotten mutant seeds, for mine were now nearly as tall as I was and had completely choked out the much smaller alyssum in the front of the bed.  At first I thought they’d choked the morning glories by the fence too, but despite the persecution of these monster plants, the glories were steadily working their way up the cosmos’ stems and twining themselves around the pickets on the fence.

It all seemed like a very cozy arrangement and I certainly couldn’t complain about the constant display of bright showy flowers from the cosmos that lasted about four or five weeks during the heat of the summer.  The morning glories, however, were always a thrill to see because you had to remember to go look for them in the morning for that was the only time you can catch them open.

Morning glories attract me perhaps because they reflect the many moods of the morning sky.  But only the morning sky, for they won’t share their glory with the intrusive gaze of the noonday sun or the brassy afternoon skies.  Perhaps it is their elusive displays that make them so intriguing and so precious to me.

My morning glories met a sad fate about the middle of August.  The cosmos were spent, and starting to fall over, for, despite the great heights these flowers had reached, their roots were very shallow, only going a few inches into the ground, and they had been falling over ever since the last good thunderstorm had blown through, and now they were pulling at the glories’ vines.  I thought I could get the cosmos out of the bed, but their stems were very strong, and instead of breaking off, they pulled out of the ground.  But the tops of the glories roots were entangled with the shallow, fibrous cosmos’ roots and the vines couldn’t be saved.  They would have kept blooming strongly for many weeks more if they hadn’t been wrapped into the cosmos shallow roots.

I thought of this story as I was reflecting on adolescent girls’ journey through adolescence and what it means to be a girl today.  I have to think that morning glories probably wouldn’t be very popular with our culture for they won’t bloom on demand.  And our culture doesn’t seem to prize beauty that won’t conform to its standards of timing and degree.  Our idea of what is beautiful has become so narrow as to almost rule out any actual living girl and instead present her with only fake, bony, airbrushed models that are impossible to emulate in life.

For instance, American’s apparently spend 450 billion dollars on Christmas each year.  No wonder they start marketing right after Halloween. Thanksgiving’s just not that popular.  If they could, they’d probably start shortly after January 1st, but I think that many renditions of Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer would have such an adverse effect, it might eventually drive sales down.  Maybe.  Anyway, I digress.

The other interesting fact from this site was the price to bring clean water to all the people that don’t have it.  Want to guess? 10 billion.  Huge number? Well, yeah, but not as big as the 450 Billion  we spend one gifts for other people to try to return or Ebay later on.

Check out the video:

Perhaps it was from thinking about him after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it may exist, though it must lie all around us everyday, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

–Wendall Berry, A World Lost, p. 62.

A poignant quote, something I feel I am discovering to be true as I talk with people around me, even people that I’ve known for a long time, and yet I still look at them at times and wonder what it is that really makes them tick.  Because so long as you haven’t expereinced all the expereinces of another, you can never really know what has formed them.

It seems that as the Craftsman revival, well, revives, hardware that can be labeled as “craftsman” is now running a premium over other kinds of hardware made from similar materials. Now some of it’s worth paying for and some of it isn’t.

For example, as we built our house, we decided to spring for a solid oak front door, stain grade, labeled “craftsman” yes, but the art glass was to die for, and something that requires more workmanship, thus worth paying for, at least in our opinion.

Read it all here.

Creating that New Old House

It may sound strange but my favorite compliment that my husband and I have received several times on our new home is: “I know it’s new, but it looks like it was built in the 20′s!”

Thanks, that’s actually what we were going for.

And here’s a link to read it all!