The Burrow

There are two garden beds - one filled with veggies and one filled with soil.  After the kindergarten planted their toilet paper tubes filled with soil and nasturium seeds along one edge,  I never got around to creating a plan for the rest of the bed. It's turned out to be a fortuitous set of circumstances.  Little kids like to dig and I was happy to provide them with trowels and reminders to be careful not to fling soil into one another's eyes.  The digging has been confined to the kindergarten and first graders until today. The clouds covered the sun when the fourth and fifth grades came out to the garden.  The younger scholars and I shared lettuce and radishes and chives today.  The big kids wanted to dig. There were serious conversations going on.  There were very deep holes being dug.  Grandma stayed far away and let them occupy themselves with a mindless task as they pondered the world.

She is one of my favorite authors. Her oeuvre includes several series, all of them set in in Victorian England.  Like with Hilary Mantell, I've learned a lot about English history from her.  She paints a vivid and gritty picture of life without proper sewage, wages, and opportunity, let alone a social safety net.  Whores and Winston Churchill, spies and poachers, street urchins and royalty populate her novels, and I've cared about every one of them. Anne Perry is not her birth name.  Her easily searchable history starts after her conviction and incarceration for participating in the murder of her girlfriend's mother, when she was 14.  Five years later she left Australia for England, changed her name, and settled in America.   Her past wasn't a part of her present.  It was never mentioned in articles or interviews.  I'm not sure how I came to know about it.  She was a presenter at the Tucson Festival of Books one year.  My written-a...

I bought the card because... well,  how could I not?  Now I have to decide where to send it.... or who needs it more than I do.   Those trying to get a recalcitrant 5th grader out of the car and into the school? Those consoling the wrongfully rejected college applicant? I can think of a few political uses, a few places in my past where this would have come in handy, a few spouses at the ends of their proverbial ropes.   I've been having lots of smiles imagining being some one else's flying monkey.  For what or whom would I do battle?  All this from a $5 card from  Melbek Studio  found at a local art fair this weekend.