Bustin' Out

Imaginary playlist:

"June is Bustin' Out All Over" from Carousel

"Get the Party Started" sung by Pink

"Just because it's June, June, June!" Yes, it's June 1st, and the day has begun with beauty, cooler than it was yesterday.

Still a dangerous storm season, as cold fronts hit warm fronts, and winds roll around over the ocean and land, but gorgeous, with summer coming!

Still reading Unless, by Carol Shields, with its reminders of the metaphorical storms that can suddenly ravage family life, human life, an individual life.

And this wonderful little quirky bit about the narrator's father: "He was a dealer in early Canadian pine furniture and as a sideline worked as a distresser; that is, he took modern limited editions of books and battered their pages and their boards into decent old age, giving them the tact and smell of history."

I am familiar with "distressing" costumes for the theatre, to give them whatever look of authenticity they need for a particular play. And with using books for interior decoration. I just didn't know it could be a "sideline," an actual job!

Oh, and of course there are distressed jeans, the really expensive ironic ones.

Anyhoo, it's also the hump of the week in the blog...and the week...and this novel has also delighted me, as did Megan Snyder-Camp's poem about pretending the ceiling was the floor, with reminders about how we thought about the world as children.

That is, she recreates the experience of a child lying underneath a peony bush, seeing the secret world of ants, and so on, and discovers that the moon follows her wherever she goes, and I remember these experiences, too.  The narrator learns that the moon also follows her friend Charlotte everywhere she goes, so she is alerted early that some private experience is actually shared, that the childhood world will turn out to be a different world in adulthood.

What I'm saying is I'm glad to find this in a book, someone talking about that. And also the chance to re-experience it by reading it. It might also make me lie down under my mom's peony bush.

Her peonies smell wonderful--that intense, nearly intoxicating sweetness. (I wouldn't be able to lie there too long). Yesterday I was wandering the gardening Internet, checking out the rumor/reasons that peonies don't have this wonderful scent anymore, that only "antique peonies" do. Some do, some don't--variety of possible reasons, including pollution, evolution/adaptation. As usual, some sources try to blame it on the person's nose, rather than whatever it really is, what conditions in the world or the particular variety of peony.

While I can still smell, and while peonies still have scent, I am glad of June, June, June!