PATCHWORK POST

Kicking off with a (slightly edited) patch from my 2008 archive:

Collective nouns can be fun and creative. For a collection of them, see here. From that list I like these deviations from the more common herd, flock, swarm: a congress of baboons, a scold of jays, an exaltation of larks, a nuisance of cats, an ostentation of peacocks, a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings.

Just for fun, I've chosen twelve new collective nouns - one for each zodiac sign, for descriptive use in a natal chart where a cluster (collective noun = stellium) of planets appears in one zodiac sign; alternatively these could be used by followers of Sun sign astrology, to describe a group of people who share the same Sun sign.

A rush of Aries
An affluence of Taurus
A chatter of Gemini
A nest of Cancer
A parade of Leo
An exactitude of Virgo
An arbitration of Libra
A collusion of Scorpio
A magnification of Sagittarius
An institution of Capricorn
A current of Aquarius
A mirage of Pisces

And to pull together the whole caboodle:
A cadence of zodiac signs!

Whenever we're out and about, on the road, and notice an old decaying house, husband stops to take a photograph. There are several of these in his Flickr section "Rust and Ruin". Three such photographs inspired him to write a few lines of suitably melancholy prose, which I especially admire. He's not normally a melancholy guy, but gazing on the houses in his photographs, what other reaction could there have been?

Here they are:

We Moved Away

We built our house, we made our home;
Of laughing sounds and cookie smells,
Of warming thoughts and gentle touch.
We had such lovely plans to stay.
And then,
We moved away.

Time Was.

She sat quietly a moment longer. His gaze drifted to a shadowed corner of the room.
The summer air shuffled the sounds of the day through the open window, somehow adding to the awkward density of the moment, adding to the pale silence between them.

Finally she stood, her hands dutifully smoothing the wrinkles in her skirt. “I must leave now,” she said. “I must go.” She forced a smile and turned toward him.

He continued to stare at a faded spot in the wallpaper.

In her mind she was already walking away.

Another day.

Dusty sunbeams filtered through the uneven window blinds beside his bed. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with his palms. There was a dark and heavy pain inside him. It was the loneliness he knew would grow and consume him before day’s end. He hoped again that this would be the last day, just as he had hoped yesterday and the day before and the weeks before.

As the edges of his reality warmed to the day, he told himself to think of something else; anything else. But he was already thinking of her.

The 2014 entry on The Arrow of Time is up now - if you haven't seen this from my links in previous years, take a look now - it's fascinating, and sweet.

Cute!

While snooping around husband's Flickr page I noticed this vintage photograph from his collection - it reminded me immediately of a painting featured in yesterday's Arty Farty post on Maxfield Parrish:

 Ecstasy

What a clever idea for passing on important messages/lessons! I'm wondering what else, related to modern technology (and otherwise), could be passed using variations of this idea..

Final patch ~ How do you know you're shopping in Texas?



Oops!! In my love-hate affair with Texas, one of the things I love about Texans is their ability to laugh at themselves.