Choices

Do click on the M&M wall and enlarge.
Julie and I were talking last night and we got to laughing about how I like to have choices that I then never make. It started with my recalling going to the M&M Store in Las Vegas and seeing the wall full of tubes of M&Ms in all colors. Not just the colors in the packages, but all colors. Black. White. And I wanted that wall. I at least wanted a large jar of every one of those colors. Although, I seldom eat M&Ms.

The first example she could think of was when she was in fifth grade and reading Paddington Bear and Paddington had tea with marmalade all the time. She mentioned it to me, and somehow we ended up buying all these different kinds of tea and then different teapots to make them in. You know, for English Breakfast Tea, a fine English pot, for herb tea, a slab pottery pot.

And then, all sorts of marmalade. Orange. Lemon. Pineapple. Grapefruit. Lime. So, we were going to have tea and toast and marmalade. But, we seldom did, because as it happens, we don't really like tea and Julie doesn't really like marmalade.

This would be silly enough, if it were the only time I'd ever done anything like that, but it isn't. The first I remember began when Auntie and I went to a restaurant on our way to Berkeley to get me signed up for student housing. I had a wonderful fruit salad that came in half a pineapple shell and was served with a waffle. The great thing about that was the six bottles of assorted syrups that were brought out with the waffle. The idea of having such choices really must have impressed me, because three years later when I got my first apartment, almost the first thing I bought was a number of different kinds of syrup. Rather silly, since I didn't have a waffle iron and I don't remember making pancakes all that often.

I took that apartment over from Julie's future father, Michael, my future husband, Dick, and Michael's girl friend of the day, Kt. They moved to New York, and I moved in. On the wall they left Kit's thread board, which I think either Michael or Dick had made for her, which was a large square with ten rows of ten pegs. I immediately started filling the thread board. I arranged it so that each row was a different color, each color was arranged from dark to light. It took me a couple of years, and I seldom sewed. But, the board itself was an object of beauty for me.

Since then, I have done the same thing with embroidery thread and knitting wool. Although I neither embroider nor knit. I mean, I have done all of these things, but not much and never to the extent that I had the supplies. Right now there is a little mending kit of 100 small rolls of thread in my closet that I bought when I could no longer see well enough to thread a needle. I just love having the colors.

Julie says that when she and Richard have to deal with my belongings after I die she at least will know why I have these squirrelly little collections of things around. I don't use them. I just like to have a lot of choices of what not to use. As in, I'm not going to sew today. I think I won't sew in lilac.

M&M wall by Eagle.csd49
Teapots by Design Sponge
Marmalade by Pictopia
Thread by Always Quilting