Jaci Dawn

I have no “prompt” for tonight; I am merely going to recount my day. I am going to take a few days off from the nightly post (wait for NaNoWriMo, when I will type out my 50,000 words here on my blog, open to your real-time review, beginning November 1st!).

Today was a wonderfully typical Autumn (Winter or Spring) day here in the Pacific Northwest: it rained. Non-stop. They’re predicting 3″ by the end of this particular trough of storms passes through, which – while it isn’t entirely normal, is not, by any means, not normal. This is the weather where people from out of state carry umbrellas; Oregonians (and Washingtonians) merely put up their hoods or don hats, and slosh out into it.

I wore my dressy blue rain boots over my jeans. Rain boots are fun nowadays, not those simple black (and practical) boots you buy at the local feed store, rain boots are something you buy off the shoe shelves of the local Target, WalMart, K-Mart, Fred Meyer, or whatever. They come in arrays of designs and colors. You can still get ducky yellow, but paisley blue is more my style, and that is what I have.

My girlfriends picked me up around 10:30 and we took the backroads to the Old Aurora Colony, more commonly referred to as simply, Aurora, Oregon. There was a quilt show in the Aurora Museum. The girls are into quilting; I barely uncover my sewing machine to repair things. My great aunts and most of my cousins on the Scots’ side of the family have all quilted (or still quilt). It is a sewing gene that skipped me (I have made a couple of quilts, but they were simple things, and I never felt the desire to get artsy with fabric in that way).

I like to look at quilts. I like to pick out the hand-quilted vs. the machine-quilted. I love the patterns. The textures. I may not sew much, but fabric still lures me in. There were a lot of nice quilts, and a handful of them were hand-quilted with exacting precision.

There was also an herb garden and store where I got lost in the heavenly aromas of lavender and sage. My friends walked off on me at this point, less interested in the herbs and plants than I am, but I lingered long enough to inhale deep breaths and to rub an aromatic salve into my hands. I may look into joining the Willamette Herb Society.

I have lived in this area since 1983, and I stopped in and walked around Aurora a handful of times. I’m sure I’ve been to the museum at some point, but it may have been in the 30-years ago range. I’d forgotten about the long barn with horse implements and grist stones. Of course, it may not have been open like it is now when I was last in the museum.

The last building was the original log cabin, full of people’s discarded sewing notions, quilting squares, knick-knacks, and vintage patterns still in the original envelopes. A waft of nostalgia blew over me here: my mother could sketch like the artists who designed those 1950’s and 1960’s pattern envelopes. The 1970’s patterns reminded me of my mother. The sewing, in general, reminded me of mom, and of her oldest sister, who just passed last week at the age of 89. I felt their presence with me as I scanned old buttons, binding tape, and sequin pins. I could see them: Mary Lou and Phyllis.

I know where to donate all my sewing notions that I will probably never use, but which I could not leave in the house in Ely when Mom died.

We left the museum and made our way across Highway 99E to a hole-in-the-wall diner my friends knew about. Mom & Pop kind of deli, only 4 or 5 tables, and a ton of paintings of varying degrees of age from floor to ceiling. The best corn chowder I have ever had. Personal service. Christa’s Café and Antiques.

The rain never let up, and we sloshed back out into it. The debate: to wander around to all of Aurora’s many antique shops, or duck into the Main Street Mercantile? We opted for the latter, and it turned out to be a three-story antique mall, not a “mercantile” at all. How did I never know this was there? I thought I’d been to all the antique stores in Aurora as recently as 2015, and – yet – here was this hidden treasure of an antique mall so jam-packed with other people’s junk that you couldn’t turn around?

My feet were cramping by the time we decided our eyes were getting bleary and all the vintage and antique items were beginning to blur into one. The smells that overwhelmed me when I first entered – old spices, dust, old books, age – were now all blended into one scent, and I needed the rain to wash it away from me, along with the wish to spend money I don’t need to spend (because, dammit, I found the perfect buffet/hutch for my house and it was marked down to $315).

And there was this.

I don’t know what the hell that is, but I want it. I don’t care how ratty it is, how faded the little marble eyes are, or that the antlers are broke: I want this. The earless grizzmoo or Moogrizz or whatever bizarre cryptid this is (maybe it’s a Bigfoot? I’ve never seen one. Have you?), I need this in my life.

Sadly, I didn’t think there was room in my friend’s car for it, and I wasn’t sure where I would hang it in my house that a dog wouldn’t be able to reach it to chew on its nose (even Harvey, with his cataracts, would be able to locate this and find it – um, interesting). No one visits us anyway, so I wouldn’t be losing any Good Housekeeping points that I haven’t lost already. I’d freaking have THIS.

But I left it behind.

We hydro-planed north to Canby, where we stopped and had coffee to round out our day together. Then my friends dropped me off.

Don and I rounded out the evening with dinner at Feckin’ . We ran into friends and enjoyed our favorites with them. Came home and topped the evening with a Jackie Chan movie that is more “China meets Bollywood” than anything else: Kung Fu Yoga. I highly recommend it (if you are a Jackie Chan fan, which I am).

Now I am heading to bed. I’ll post before I start NaNoWriMo (my user name is jacidawn,  so if you want, we can pal up and write our novels together). And I promise to open my closed little self off by posting my daily writings right here, on this blog. (Go to the NaNoWriMo link to read more).