(image by Todd & Barbara)

I want to go and feel the real heat, none of this 80-one-day-55-the-next Oregon summer. I want to see the giant Saguaro cacti and trip over a prickly pear, be paranoid about meeting a rattlesnake or a scorpion, visit pueblos and get sunburnt. Drink a diet cola and feel the ice condensing around the glass in a place that gets less than a quarter the amount of rain I consider the ‘norm’.

But this post isn’t about that eventual trip, really. I’ve realized in that last few months that I really, really, really like cacti. And succulents. Succulents are really neat, shaped like twisty-orby-jointed-creatures, bent over and leaning against each other like drunken friends or something out of a Doctor Seuss book.

My family thinks I am crazy. (This is not different than any other day of the week, just a fact.) I keep looking at all the cacti in stores or in stranger’s yards and talking about how I want some. I want an aloe vera plant, I want a theolocactus and a Arthrocerus rondonianous and many, many, many, Sempervivums!

I recently bought a little pot of assorted cacti. I love it. I named it Horatio and smile whenever I see it around my house.

I like to think of Horatio as “a collective”.

I just figured out that my favourite part of Horatio is actually an aloe aristata, and that makes me very happy. I don’t know why. I just love little cacti.

This week, I almost turned into one of my beloved cacti.

It started out with attending a class with a professor that set me off in any way and I immediately started growing prickles. My roots expanded, absorbing all available water during the three-hour-class that I ‘endured’ and when I left, I was prickly and puffed up with my frustrations and loathing.

I tried to let go of my irritations and my anger, but every day I walked into that classroom a giant bloom grew out of the side of my face and I lashed out sarcastically at everyone around me, a little prickly pear of hatred.

It culminated on Thursday. I called my Mom after class (like I had the last three days) and we ended up getting into a completely unrelated argument. I realized then, that a four-credit class isn’t worth turning into a cactus.

So I dropped the class, and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d like to think that there was some romantic image associated with this, the cactus revealing the true desert flower or something romantic and disgusting and cliche, but really, nothing happened. I’m still pretty prickly about the entire subject, but my prickles are smaller and more like feathers than jagged edges, and I’m letting go of my frustrations.

But I still like cacti, even though I don’t want to be one. I hope that next time I can recognize the cactus symptoms a little bit sooner, though.

I say that of course, realizing that it is completely usual in it’s unusual-ness. My family is really not that strange and confusing, and just like everyone else’s family, it is filled with random members that collect hurricane shelters full of tinned yams and horde wood for y2k. It also has (just like everyone else) a quartet of organ-players, a banjo-soloist, a tarzan impersonator, a unicyclist, a zebra collector, a fraud specialist, and some Australians.

The thing about my family is that we really don’t have that many heirlooms. Some people have heirlooms up the yin-yang! Some people have hutches and desks and cabinetry built by their great-great-grandfer on the prairies of Oregon and hand-crocheted cat-ear cozies crafted crazily for a crotchety kitten who crankily crammed their cute meta-carpals into his craw.

It’s not like I’m jealous.

But my family is severely lacking in heirlooms. We haven’t been close to my paternal Grandparents in my lifetime. My maternal Grandmother began suffering from Altzheimer’s when I was about seven, so even my memories of her are tainted with memory loss, both of hers and my own.

I was twelve when she died, and not old enough to understand the desire to preserve trinkets and memories. I am left with photographs of her as my heirlooms. I love them! Seeing her as a young woman makes me feel like maybe I did know her, in a somewhat metaphorical way.

My Grandpa remarried a few years later, to an old friend of the family he reconnected with at my Grandmother’s death. I never identified with her, but now I wish I had tried harder to get to know her. She passed away this spring, and we have been slowly helping Grandpa weed through her possessions and send them off to her relations.

The entire time they were married, she had a collection hanging on her wall.

A collection of spoons.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. In fact, I thought the same thing when I first saw them. “Oh my gosh. SPOONS. How typically old-lady! What a silly thing to collect. I mean, SPOONS.”

If I knew how to triple-underscore and draw skulls and cross-bones around a word like I would in the notes I’d pass around school in the 7th grade in HTML, I would do so. That would fully-articulate the true disdain and hatred I felt whenever I saw them hanging on the dining-room wall.

Spoons.

I hated them. And honestly, as a 16 year old whose Grandpa re-married to a woman who had never had children of her own, no-less, I found that woman and her spoons to be-less-than-fantastic.

When she died earlier this spring, and Grandpa started sorting out through the last of her possessions, I knew the spoons would end up at a thriftstore.

When I visited his house, Grandpa would trot out many items of hers and offer them to me. I turned most of them down. He finally offered me her collector’s spoons.

They stared at me. Silver and tarnished, covered in plastic, embossed and emblazoned with words and names of places. I realized that she had travelled the world with her spoons, and had no one to look after them.

I hadn’t recieved anything from my grandmother, so it’s not like I had an issue with competing storage space. And the spoons… the spoons with their windmills and tarnished silver camels and necks covered in wildflowers… they were kinda cool.

In fact, oh hey! That one has a windmill that spins! And a cuckoo-clock that dangles! Oh wow, yeah I forgot she was a missionary in Bolivia… and she even went to Vatican City!

I suddenly was overwhelmed with this strange and fulfilling need to keep her heirlooms, as a substitute for my own. As a collector and a person who finds happiness in collecting things, the concept of leaving behind my favourite items without someone to value them too is pretty heartbreaking.

So I agreed to take the spoons, to everyone on the planet’s shock and awe.

And I love them.

The collection is rather large (to me!). I think I am now the proud owner of 30+ spoons from various places around the world. These are just my favourites to share right now.

I love seeing all the places she has been, and have even… started collecting a few of my own.

Here and there, you know, to commemorate big trips. Not anything… excessive.

They are spoons, after all.

Just spoons.

taking the same photo I take everywhere I go,

finding jeweled seashells,

being a tourist,

and standing in the mouth of an exposed sea-cave as the tide came in.

.

It’s so hard to return to normal life after such a fantastic weekend. I’m trying to hold onto the hope and fun between those blue seashells as I stumble through my last two weeks of this term.

Me: “Don’t you have some golfing to do?”

Dad: “Well, YEAH. I mean, you’re right. I need to golf every day so that I can be a pro.”

Me: “Trying to cram in a few years of training, right?”

Dad: “Well, I need to train a lot if I want to be the golf champion at Wimbleton.”

Me: (stares at my father) “…”

Dad: “Maaaaybe this is why I suck at golf.”

Golfing doesn’t run in the family, but pursuing silly things sure does. I can’t wait for this term to be over so I can increase my pokemon to sleeping ratio. Or maybe antiquing to writing essays ratio. What does ratio mean anyway? Maybe this is why I suck at them.

Mom: “Oh goodness, how embarassing. Look at your sister, her jeans… so baggy!”

Me: “So, I take it Angel was complaining about her new jeans?”

Angel: “YES. They’re brand new and they’re supposed to be tighter! (pulls at excess fabric)”

(Mom & I roll our eyes)

Angel: “But you know, if I wash and dry these? They’ll stay baggy and shrink five inches in length!”

Mom: “Well, you’ll just have to eat an extra piece of birthday cake tomorrow.”

Me: “That’s another way to fit into your jeans by Friday!”

Wow, that’s like the vaguest and most Hallmarky thing I’ve ever said, eh?

My aunt passed away last Friday. She had been fighting cancer for the last 12 years, and we are happy that she is in a better place, and no longer in pain, but we’re still all a little shell-shocked at her leaving, and the anticipation of the upcoming memorial service has us all speaking in hushed voices.

My Aunt and Uncle from Australia are here, serving us wine and keeping us chipper (as they always do), and we have begun our recovery process in the only way we know how.

By going shopping.

On Saturday we went to Macy’s, on Sunday, Old Navy and Ross, and today we hit up the antique stores in a neighboring city (and of course, Goodwill!). I love antique stores, mostly because every find truly is a discovery, entailing searching through piles of unsorted jewelry, a thousand china cups stacked on a shelf, and similar other oddities, not to mention the artistic way dealers arrange their sections in the big antique malls. Today I brought my camera along, to demonstrate to the uninitiated how absolutely charming antique stores can be.

How about these two little ladies? A pair of salt and pepper shakers for $25; I see them as friends, waiting to adorn your table.

I love bunched up jewelry displays, I can’t help myself. I’m rather fond of the blue rhinestones, but I think my favourite ones are the silver cowboys on the right.

This little corner seemed very quiet and solemn, the way the angel was sitting in the corner was just too perfect! Sometimes it’s hard to shop around in fear of disturbing the wonderful arrangement of objects.

How about these little blue pitchers? I love the way the doe is eyeing them.

As for me, I came home with two items: This lovely rhinestone bracelet, which I shall wear to the next wedding I’m invited to.

And this funny little contraption, which I hope a few of you will be able to identify: it’s a walnut grinder!

My mother inherited one from her mother, and I associate many days of my childhood with this tool, chopping walnuts for a pie or cookies and such. My sister, being the eldest, has claimed priority on inheriting Mom’s grinder, and I’m pretty excited to have one of my own to add to my hope chest!

Antique stores remind me of the silver lining in history: Tragic things happened, wars went on, friends grew sick and died, but there was still a cup of tea at the end of the day, and a friendly pair of salt shakers on the table. It’s nice to have little familiar things in times of grief.