Today is Andrew’s birthday. So I made him these cupcakes. He makes me all kinds of things: dinners and breakfasts and stories and crossword puzzles and laughs and books and adventures and makes sure I’m safe and happy and surrounded by music. He’s my guy and I think he’s pretty much the best.
Category: Happiness
Happy Father’s Day.
Oh happy day and thank you, Daddy, for teaching me how to drive a boat and tie the easy necessary knots and catch crabs with chicken necks and be safe (above all!) on water and land, to drive a little longer distance to get a coke in a glass bottle and make that extra distance be the special part, to go down isthmuses of land only known at low tide (and then how to back up at high speeds to get the hell out of there), to borrow Christmas Trees with a Flatt and Scruggs soundtrack, to sing, always, and always in harmony, that music needs to “get you off!”, how to do the nitty gritty: drive stick shift, shoot guns, change tires, jump cars, gut fish, set up the stereo just right, change the strings, make the grilled cheese, know the tides and how to catch the waves, get backstage and be cool, and the big stuff: how to measure happiness and time in terms of action, how to lose parts of yourself and come out the other side, what a marriage and a life should and can be, the absolute power of unrelenting positivity, that life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death, and, of course, always be master of your own destiny.
Indoor kid vs. Outdoor kid
An epic battle between what it means to be an indoor kid vs. what it means to be an outdoor kid: Slip’n’Slide on Gilt Groupe.
Hey, $13 for the Wave Rider Double w/ Boogies is a pretty good deal. Now: how much for the backyard?
The perfect summer dress?
How lovely, breezy, and utterly classic is this dress?
I’d like to wear it here:
And here:
And even (or perhaps especially) here:
1974 please.
The best thing in the whole world is when you look around and it may or may not be 1974. The second best thing in the world is when it is also summertime when that happens. It’s here. It’s fabulous. It’s time for adventures.
ps. (1974- put on your earmuffs) what is the best photo processor for Android? I used to tape a piece of napkin over the lens of my nokia, but now we’re grownups.
Good Advice.
These are my two best friends, dishing out some serious life advice. This is one in a serious of polaroids of accidentally perfect instructions for being a good grown-up, including:
I will see them in one week and I have the same-time wanderlust and heartache for them so hard it’s starting to give me goosebumps.
Vivian Maier=Robert Frank+Lady-Sartorialist
Get this: a man purchases a box of random photo negatives at an auction, inside finds the work of Vivian Maier, an unknown Chicago street photographer. The images turn out to be starkly beautiful, sometimes sensational like Weegee (but quietly, almost accidentally), full of humor and honesty and humanity. The whole story is wonderful, and I simply can’t stop looking at these photographs:
See more pictures here.
Lay down your sweet head
Found these pillows at Freshly Picked and lovelovelove them. I think I might get my own set, but they’d look something like this:
Ginger love.
Wearing Fresh Flowers
I went home to Virginia last weekend for a dear friend’s wedding and to deliver my mother some Ramps and Sunchokes from the Union Square farmers market (I’ve been obsessed with this pairing for the past three weeks and can’t believe that there are still ramps available- I read this my first spring living in New York and have made the yearly appearance of ramps at the market a New-York-specific-ritual for myself… but I digress).
I was getting ready to go to this wedding with my mama in what, now that I try to put it into words for the first time, is not just a bathroom but a full on dressing room with a chaise lounge (I have not realized the import of this until this second- I have always just called it “Mama’s bathroom”… well it does have a tub). Getting ready and being in here is always awesome, since I was little snooping around in her stuff has always been the best.thing.ever- the only difference is that now, if I am very nice, she will actually let me wear some of her jewelry.
So, my father comes in and we’re just lounging around looking at old photographs and talking about hair-stuff and he hands me a tiny parcel with this inside:
Immediately the stories come out- first thing you need to know: we are from Williamsburg, Virginia, as in Colonial Williamsburg. So, when my father was a small boy he and his two brothers went down to the CW silversmith and picked out this brooch for my grandmother for Mother’s Day. My grandmother is an amazing lady, a horticulturist and philanthropist, a mover and a shaker, and the grandest possessor of hats, scarves, and jewels I have ever had the good fortune to meet. She, at some point, loses this brooch and secretly goes and replaces it without telling her sons. Then FIFTEEN years later she finds it again out in the garden by the woodpile (because, of course, she’s the kind of lady to wear fancy jewelry out by the woodpile). By this time, my parents are married and now Gramma has two brooches- so she gives the replacement pin to my mother. By this time in the conversation, my mother has pulled hers out. Apparently, they don’t make them anymore, but Daddy has found one somewhere (perhaps out by the woodpile) and thinks that since Gramma and Mama both have them, Nan should too. How divinely amazing!!
As you can see, I filled my tiny vase-pin with water, went right out and cut a peony from the garden, and went along to the nuptials feeling fine, like a classic Virginia lady (albeit in an Abigail Lorick dress), and most importantly- very loved.
Here are some modern options (if you don’t have a southern woodpile that keeps birthing brooches on the world):
Oh, This Old Thing?
You know when you stumble across an image and you just can’t stop looking at it?? I feel that way (sort of inexplicably) about this shot of Dita Von Teese… I simply can’t stop looking at every detail…the huge bunch of lilies, the sparkly Louboutins, the reverse manicure with its ingenious little white quicks, the pink correspondence, the starry headband… it’s all such a perfectly curated world, and obviously full of intention- but somehow effortless (and how does a diamanted and tulle Sunset Boulevard couture gown seem like “this old thing”?). Love.
Feather By Feather 
