Home Life
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A Christmas Tree Tale
Once upon a time, there lived an evergreen tree. He grew up on a farm beside lots of friends of similar stature. They grew big and tall until one day a team of people with chainsaws came along and chopped the no-longer-so-little fellows down. For our friendly hero, this startling development only became more alarming when he was wrapped in twine, stacked into a rather large covered truck and hit the open road for Denver, Colorado. When next he saw the light of day, our tree was being unloaded into a semi-covered pen at a home repair store. Before long, families and small children started filtering by his new little section of the world.…
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adventures in recycling
I have had a personal triumph. Just now, this very morning, mark the date. This triumph? I remembered to collect the trash and recycling bins from the alley before a diabolical stranger filled them with his own garbage. This stranger has become something of an arch-nemesis this summer. Several months back, the city of Denver changed up how it collects our throw-aways. They took away the big dumpsters placed every few dozen feet along the alley block and issued everyone new bins (brand-new black ones for trash, to accompany the grape-hued tanks we already filled with our recycling). They asked us to move these bins back and forth from the alley behind our homes…
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a cottage patio
I have this dream about buying bushel after bushel of lavender and creating an entire fort made of flowers. As a child my mother cultivated a small parcel of sunflowers on the lower level of our backyard to make us kiddos such a getaway. The idea has lingered with me ever since. Perhaps you never outgrow such beautiful notions. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time with the Anne Shirleys and Jo Marchs of the literary world. In lieu of my lavender-built fort, there is this other place that I know. It’s surrounded on two sides with wooden fencing covered in vines. On the third side sits a gate that leads to a poppy-covered…
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I went to IKEA for a bookshelf and instead bought a cactus
My inability to keep plant life living has been fairly well documented. It’s a bleak history, and though they say history is written by the winners I’m going to keep it real here today. I am horrible at nurturing plants. They all die. It may take a whole month a little while, but inevitably I kill them off. Dead as a doornail. So that’s why, on a recent visit to IKEA to track down a bookshelf, I instead walked out with a cactus. And a throw pillow. As one does.
