HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DARLING, DEAREST, MR. BRADBURY!

I know it's been a long time since I've posted, it's been a long, eventful, tough though blessed, couple of months. The new baby had some health problems, and I had to go stay with my sis for a while to help her with him. He had surgery, he's doing much better and hopefully is on the mend with no further complications, though there is a 40% chance (where do they get these numbers??) that he will continue to have some issues throughout his life. But we will continue to pray and trust and live and love.....

Many other things have happened but too much and not necessarily interesting enough to post blog pictures about...but finally I come out of my hobbity-hole because there is something we need to discuss.

RAY BRADBURY!

It's his birthday, I adore him, I wish I could meet him and hug him and kiss his cheeks and cry on his shoulders and thank him for all the loveliness that he has filled my life with over the years. Sentimental, YES, nerdy, ABSOLUTELY! But seriously, I wish I could go to comic-con (yeah, that's right, I just said it!!!) if for no other reason JUST TO MEET HIM AND THANK HIM!

If you haven't read any of his stuff I suggest you go do so, immediately. He tales of love and sorrow and terror and magic and rockets and martians and murderous skeletons and wonderful ice cream suits and electrical grandmothers and fortune-telling tattoos...and alien mushrooms and dangerous nurseries and criminal pedestrians and shoes that make you fast as a cheetah and heart-beats and tears and blood and sighs and time machines and butterfly wings and that horrible thing chasing you on the stairs............
I could go on and on and on.

I love him. I really, really do.

Dandelion Wine was the first book of his I ever read and it's been a passionate love affair ever since.

Get your mitts on one of his works...the man is 91 years old today and STILL putting out at least one book every year!

You will not be sorry.

Lovies and lovies and lovies and lovies,

-K

ps. you may notice that several of the books are duplicates...because I'm a nerd and I try to pick up extra copies just to lend to people and not have to worry about getting them back. Seriously. I love him.

Transition

"And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hooves in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness...."

Dandelion Wine By Ray Bradbury

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Today, Chris has fallen into the light. But I feel it must be something like this, all tears being wiped away, perhaps because all of the pain of this life is forgotten in the great overwhelming beauty of finally being home.

Glad you are finally free of pain...fare thee well.

My Heart Is Full

The cousin's wedding is in one week and I can barely contain myself with excitement but am worried too because I still have so much to finish (pennant garlands to finish sewing, hair extensions to finish sewing, an outfit to find, the fan/programs need to be printed, stamped and glued)

I have been working on the garlands again this week and have been enjoying finding the little hearts we cut out from some of the pennants (we grabbed some before the sweeping commenced and stuck them in a baggy) and I keep finding them hither and thither about the house.

So i guess this is a week for hearts because I have since found this tomato...

this banana chip...

The Mr. found this lovely little note in our mailbox. It's a thank you from my neighbor for the little seashell owl statue I gave her for her birthday earlier this week. (should have nabbed a pic of it, doh!) Isn't it lovely?

All week long I have been noticing this little heart on the steps outside and assumed it to be yet another of the tissuepaper hearts from the garlands. It must have stuck to someone's shoe and traveled outside but last night I thought to pick it and I am so glad I did..... It's a LEAF?!?!!?
I don't know where it come from, but there it sat while I walked over it all week (that must be a metaphor for something ;-)) It is now living inside of my favorite copy of Dandelion Wine. (that book holds my heart in more ways then a heart-shaped leaf)

Soooo, let this serve as a reminder to you two that there is love all around us and how often do we take it for granted because we think we know what it is. Take a second look and it might be something deeper and more lovely than you imagined.

Look for the love in world, you'll be happier for it, I promise.

Fire Balloons and Ray Bradbury...ahhh summer!

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Magic!

As you may have known I am madly in love, in deep smit with Ray Bradbury and have been so ever since my mother gave me a copy of Dandelion Wine to read when I was in my teens. If you haven't read it, DO IT NOW! (Just lent one of my copies to the Alliecat, yes, that's right I own multiple copies of his books)

In 1974 Mr. Bradbury wrote a preface for the book and I will now share a portion of it with you...

"A final memory.

Fire Balloons.

You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.

But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a forth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers and up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as the life itself.

I see my Grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn't they? And that one is me.

The wine still waits in the cellars below.

My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

Why and how?

Because I say it is so."