I never stop thinking about how to get more beauty. When Henry and I were walking in the Roxbury Cemetery around Christmas, I noticed a flat, round stone disk, about fourteen inches in diameter and two inches thick, lying way over on the side. Was it a perfectly circular tombstone? (In old cemeteries, broken tombstones do sometimes get tucked out of the way.) But how could you have a completely round tombstone? And this disk was just lying on a pile of dirt under some weeds.

Of course I wouldn’t want to take a tombstone away, even a broken one. I mean, of course I would want to–a house near here has a path made of old gravestones, and it’s really cool-looking–but I wouldn’t do it. You don’t want to take something away from a dead person. But if no one wanted this disk, think how great it would look covered with moss and…placed somewhere… nice. You know, like a focal point. In the–in the yard somewhere. A moss-covered fairy stone with violets growing all ’round! Everyone would admire it.

But I was still a little bit worried about stealing it, even after a subsequent visit when I noticed that it wasn’t really stone. It was concrete. “Just some kind of old, useless concrete thing,” I told myself. “I’m doing them a favor by cleaning it up.” Anyway, if fairies are careless enough to leave their circlets of enchantment in an old pile of dirt, they don’t deserve them in the first place.

So I asked Dave to come with me and give his honest opinion about whether this stone was okay to steal. We went at around 5:30, because it gets dark early in the winter.

“I think you can take it,” said Dave. “But you’ll never get it into the car.”

“Yes, I can!” I said. “I can roll it!”

So while Dave and John went over to another part of our location (they didn’t seem to want to be near me), I rolled the circlet of enchantment over to the car and hoisted it in.

When we were about halfway home, I wondered aloud what the stone had been.

“It’s the lid of an old septic tank,” said Dave.

Why did he wait until we’d left the cemetery to tell me? Now I have this ugly old piece of concrete sitting out by the garage, and it would be so annoying to return it. But when it’s covered with moss and set into a scenic part of the lawn, I will call it The Runic Tablet.

Honestly? It left me cold – and wondering if this were the same guy we put into office three years ago. Like many of you, I was pretty shocked by the part about school nurses. Now, are school nurses are important? Very. But why in the world does that mean we should pass legislation that binds them to operate under certain circumstances – especially when those circumstances have yet to be elaborated?

Maybe the “Book of Guidelines” the President kept mentioning will be a sensible, well-reasoned document. But with the sort of legislation that’s being pushed out by both parties these days, forgive me if I’m not convinced. (Can you tell that I didn’t buy the story about finding the book in a cave?)

Maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But as I re-watch the moment in the speech when the camera pans to the nurse sitting next to the First Lady, I’m convinced that the way she’s urgently shaking her head isn’t just a nervous tic.

And that in Washington, it’s politics as usual.

I just changed some lightbulbs using a ladder that smelled so bad I had to take a shower after.

Today the gray vest I’d ordered came in the mail. As I was opening the package, I thought, “Wow, they sent a free travel bag along with it….Oh no, they sent black instead of gray….Hey, these are pants!….Wait, I’m not a size six!”

“Long story short,” John, the yoga pants you got Laura for Christmas finally arrived.

I’m sorry I had to use the word “pants” in this family forum.

Could they not have waited two more seconds to take the picture? (article)

Haste makes waste, I hear.  This is good to keep in mind when you have to prune a cherry tree that suffered a lot of half-broken branches in the big storm.  When you don’t take the time to get the ladder and saw out of the garage, and instead hop around with a pair of loppers vainly trying to reach high-up branches, and then finally you drag out the ladder but don’t read the directions (printed on the ladder itself) about how to prop it up, and you don’t set its little “feet” so they can grip the ground, instead letting them bobble around in the air, and then you lean its left side against a good strong bough but let its right side rest against some strong-looking twigs, and you don’t bother moving the ladder around the tree but instead saw branches at increasingly difficult angles, sycophantically murmuring “Poor tree, poor tree” in case the tree senses your irritation and decides to die–well, then, when you’re done, you’ll realize that it took you about an hour longer than it needed to.

And all because your husband never took the time to buy you an axe.

“Hodgman designed and manufactured the world’s very first wader, and has carried this same innovative spirit into the production of hip boots, wading-wear, rain-proof outerwear, and foul-weather clothing.”

Everyone knows that, of course.  But not everyone knows that the original Hodgman Rubber Company made condoms for horses.

Think about it the next time you see a horse.

Remember a few posts ago when I put up that picture of all the Abba-Zaba wrappers?  Since then I’ve eaten so many more Abba-Zabas that this morning, when I emptied the Abba-Zaba wastebasket into a garbage bag, I hid the bag inside another bag before I put it into the trash can.

Abba-Zabas aren’t easy to open.  There’s always an edge of “Zaba skin” that gets stuck to the paper.  But in the same way that squirrels learn how to crack nuts efficiently (which everyone my age knows about from reading our parents’ Time-Life science books), I’ve become skilled at both opening and eating the small-size Abba-Zabas.  With monkeylike dexterity I rip open one side of the wrapper, flip over the Abba-Zaba, and tear off the other side of the wrapper.  I “then” bite the Abba-Zaba in half, “laying” the second half onto the wrapper so it won’t stick to whatever I’m reading.  Recently, I’ve been reading books about moss.

I wish I could replace our whole lawn with moss, but then I’d have to weed grass out of the moss,  which would seem too crazy.  So I’ll concentrate on mossing up our stone walls and so on.  There are certain kinds of moss that if you Elmer’s-glue them to a rock, they’ll spread!  Or you could stick on the moss with Abba-Zabas.

“Look at those striations, Henry.  Granite is a nice rock.”

–Make sure he’s named Henry first.