vintage woman

"That was a car from the nineties," my grandson observes, turning in the truck to look out the side window.
"From the nineties...how can you tell?" I ask.
"They just look different," he kindly explains. "They're an older style."
I do the math.
"When I was your age," I say, "an older style was a car from the fifties."
"The fifties!!" he exclaims.
"That was more than fifty years ago."
"They would be antiques now," I muse.
"Grandma, you're an antique.
Because you're more than fifty years old."
"Well," I bluster.
"Not an antique. I'm not antique. Maybe vintage..."
A vintage woman.
Sure sounds better than an antique one.

spectator sport

It's Garbage Day today; the crows favorite spectator sport.
They arrived early to get the best seats.
They're loud and pushy already.
Down the street, the Concession is open and they are elbowing each other out of the way.
It's all about the food.

like a leaf

There was a hummingbird in my yard the other day. It zipped from the late delphinium blossoms to the top of the plum tree. My eyes were not as swift, but there it was, right at the tip of a branch like a curled leaf. A bird, like a small green leaf against the October sky.

thin air

I love how crows just step out into thin air

  and drop to the ground

    as light as a feather.

laughter

It looks like a game of hide and go seek. A mourning dove is perched on the street lamp with its back to my yard. Robins are diving recklessly out of the Juniper trees along the driveway as though rushing to their hiding place....10...9...8...7....The air is full of the laughter of birds.

lapkin

"Why are they called napkins," my grandson asks, smoothing the expanse of whiteness out over his lap. "They should be called lapkins because they go on your lap."
"Yes," I say, my eyes brightening. "That would be perfect."
"But I imagine the word napkin in very old and probably borrowed from a French word, like nappe..."
"Borrowed?" he says, puzzled.
"Lots of English words are borrowed from other languages. I'll find out."
And it turns out to be true.
Napkin is a Middle English word. So it's old.
And it was borrowed. From the Old French word 'nappe' which means tablecloth or table covering, which had been borrowed in kind, from the Latin word mappa. Then the diminutive, 'kin' for little, borrowed from the Dutch, was added for good measure. Interestingly, the Old French already had a diminutive. It was naperon from which apron later emerged. A small covering.
So 'napkin' means, a small covering as well.
I love how words change over time.
I love words.
I always loved that page at the beginning of the Readers Digest. I think it was called Testing Your Word Power or something like that. It was a multiple choice word test. The part I liked best was reading the origin or the word. Seeing the Latin. Seeing how the word was made up of bits and pieces, cobbled together.
I always wondered who the first bright soul was that coined a word.
And marveled that it caught on.
And lasted.
Like Lapkin, a little covering for your lap.

mostly

I rifled about in a bin of my stationary odds and ends. Mostly odds.
Here for your entertainment are three cards-

• a watercolor cat-As children, we had a cat that looked sort of like this one. We imaginatively named it Kitty.
• a pencil sketch-based on a wonderful salt shaker
• a paper cartoon bird-was part of a set of six I made once upon a time. Some of the others had eggshell halves included. Good for baby showers that way, or spring.