Swap, FAQ

Hi, all. I've got a couple more spots in the swap, and will update yesterday's post when they've been filled. UPDATE: ALL SLOTS HAVE BEEN FILLED. Based on some e-mails I've been receiving, though, I thought I'd include a little Valentine's Day Swap FAQ.

Q: I am not even crafty. I hate crafts. Crafts make me want to throw up. What about ME?!
A: The swap is not about crafting unless you would like it to be. Some people will craft. Others will not. Swappers can buy OR make their presents, with the exception of the valentine's card itself. If the thought of making a valentine makes you nauseous down to your toes, I hope you'll come up with a clever alternative.

Q: What? I have to make valentines for 25 people? Are you out of your mind?
A: Swappers only need to put together one valentine. That is all. One is not very many.

Q: Valentine's day is an *sshole. Why are you even doing this?
A: Ah! I'm so glad you asked! For me, the swap is less about Valentine's Day than it is about community and fun mail, for fun mail and community make me glad. Valentine's Day is a good, midwinter excuse for fun mail. Also, I am somewhat fond of paper hearts.

Q: You say I have to send you my blog domain. I don't have a blog. Can I still play?
A: I'm afraid this particular swap is for folks with blogs. If you don't maintain a blog, I hope you'll make (or not make, if crafting displeases you) a clever valentine (or unvalentine, if you'd rather) for somebody or something you love. I hope you'll cover it in hearts and stand in line at the Post Office humming a pleasant hum.

Wear Your Heart on Your Swap

UPDATE: WE'RE ALL FULL. MANY THANKS FOR RESPONDING!

Hello, dear reader. With the end of January nigh, it's high time for me to announce the second first milk Valentine's Day blog swappity swap swap. It is fun! It is heartful! It is like receiving a valentine from your bestest third-grade crush. Only better, because you won't have to wonder what "I think you're sweat [sic]" really means.

The swap works thusly: You e-mail me, and I e-mail you a swaplet. You send a small box of goodies, outlined below, to said swaplet and receive a package of goodies from a swaplet. Voila! The swap is complete.

Details:

1) Same rules as last year. Each Valentine's Day box should contain three items: a valentine, a small gift, and a little something (something little, lovely--a red pencil, a box of sweets). Presents and little somethings can be bought or crafted, but valentine cards themselves should be hand-made. Getting all gluey is just too fun, you see.

2) To sign up, e-mail me (firstmilkmaid@gmail.com) with your name, mailing address, and bloggity blog blog name/domain by this Friday, January 29th, and indicate whether you're willing to ship internationally. I'll contact you with your swappity person soon thereafter.

3) Please postmark all packages by Saturday, February 6th so they have a full week to make their way in the world. Ok? Ok.

4) I'd like to keep this on the small side of things, so will cut it off at 25 swappers or so.

For inspiration, a few posts on last year's swapped goodies around the Interwebs: here, here, here, here, here and here. Huzzah!

Count, Tack

Bought at the flea market this weekend, a set of numbered, barbed 1948 tacks that "keep track of screens, storm windows, drawers, lockers, etc." Among other features, they are "rustproof. . . with raised figures that remain visible even after painting." For counting things up and nailing them down. For meditations on precision, worth.

I like the old copy, the font and the dust.

Waxflowers, Bootstraps

Growing up, we at first milk were frequently advised to get up and get dressed and stop moping around. Core values, these. We hail from the Wild West, which means we have had occasion, hyperbolic or no, to hear about the key role of bootstraps in pulling oneself out, up. I will tell you, dear reader, that bootstraps are not always helpful. But sometimes, like in deepest January, they come in handy. For me, solace can be found in doing the things I know to do.

A yoghurt jar. A bundle of waxflowers, all pink and woody and smelling of bees. Reading Austen. Sweeping the floor, opening the windows, getting out-of-doors. Wearing lipstick, shoes. Eating breakfast, making the bed. Writing thank-you notes on good paper. Being polite. Watching bad TV. And slamming the occasional door.

{Photo, Me}

Wednesday Words: Peaches, Penumbras

The only questions I ever want to ask are these: "Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?" The others--How are you? Blue, perhaps? Must it be this way?--just don't seem worthwhile in comparison. For all the best questions, exclamations, Allen Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Monster, Green

The coloring book is pretty wonderful.
I like this guy's teef.
Be well, bloglets. I'll see you Tuesday.

Wednesday Words: Winter, Lack

Today, another poem from Nick Flynn's wonderful, haunting Blind Huber. The collection hums strong of queens and blindness and thick, capped wax.

Statuary

Our dying does not fill the hive
with the stench
of dying, our bodies
powder, our bodies
the vessel & the vessel
empties.
Outside
the world hungers.
A cockroach, stung,
can be removed.
A careless child
forced a snail inside with a stick once.
We waxed over the orifice of its shell
sealing the creature in. And here,
the celler of the comb,
a mouse,
driven in by winter & lack.
Its pawing woke us.
Even twitching it reeked--worse
the moment it stopped.
Now every day
we crawl over it
to pass outside,
the wax form of what was
staring out, its airless sleep,
the mouse we built to warn the rest from us.

Bees, a List

1. One spring, carpenter bees infested my bedroom wall. Their buzzing woke me each morning, and I would sit on my knees and put my ear up to the wall to listen to, feel, their hum.

2. Lily says there's beekeeping camp. Beekeeping camp means you can take your space camp and shove it.

3. This 2007 New Yorker article on the disappearance of bees is a good one, if you missed it. It is fascinating, sad.

5. Boy bees are only good for one thing.

6. This fellow keeps bees (les abeilles) atop the Opera Garnier. Because my Opera Garnier obsession wasn't quite bad enough before this discovery. (Buy the honey here. Photo above.)

7. It is fun to say "apiary." Apiary, apiary, apiary.

8. Another name for "first milk" is "beestings."

A warm welcome to any of you beauties stopping by from the Lil Bee, and many thanks for your kind comments over the last couple of weeks. I wish you long winter hums. I wish you pollen for dusting yourself in, and honey and huddle enough to make it through.

January, Ice

The weekend the days were sunny, cold. I walked 30 blocks quickly, mittened, and then another 30, hoping to beat the blues. I got a haircut. I tried hard to find a warmer coat. I stopped by Alice's for a savory scone. I bought a coloring book just for me. Sunday morning, a friend and I watched ice flow down the Hudson. We stood on a sticky-outy pier, gleeful and awed and apple-cheeked, as the ice dipped and surfaced and broke, until we could take the wind no longer. Walking back, my friend pointed out a murmuration of starlings, and I was glad to see them, glad to have the sort of friend who knows which birds are starlings, glad to be the sort of friend who knows what a gathering of them is called. And then we ran down a hill and kicked at some snow.

January is a hard month. My blues aren't entirely gone, but the tromping, the rushing ice, soothed. Today some bit of me resigned to hunkering down, to knitting mufflers and thinking about quilts and scribbling away in my various books for the next few months. Perhaps, for January, resigned is the best we can do. And when it gets bad, we can always kick at some snow.

{Ice on the Hudson, me}

Paperwhites, Blues

First weeks back are always the worst. And the new year, somewhat predictably, has me on the blue side of things. Another year gone. There is not even any chocolate cake with caramel frosting downstairs to assuage the weepies this year. But there are paperwhites in my window, tall and reedy and smelling of spring. And there is New York outside, beckoning.

{Paperwhites, me}

Branches, Ships

It is one of my more long-term goals to be able to suddenly and discreetly fold good pieces of origami, mostly to delight fussy or especially pleasant children that cross my path. Conjuring small treasures from nothing but fingertips and paper always feels like magic to me. I've perfected the easy stuff--cranes and boats and hats and stars, and boxes to put them all in. The frog is a pleaser, for it hops, but I always get a little caught somewhere in the middle. The paper balloon is undoubtedly next.

For Christmas day in the morning, threesomes of tiny origami ships sailed onto doorknobs. A colorful fleet festooned my itty rosemary tree. These sorts of physical meditations--on the nature of paper boats, say--never fail to delight my rule-loving, anal-retentive soul.

For your own folding pleasure, paper boat instructions here. Just remember to coat the bottoms with wax if you wish them to float in anything but branches and wind. A solid scribbling of crayon should do the trick.




{Photos, Me}

Lavender, Sew

Stuffing my mother's Christmas stocking has been my domain for several years now. The task suits me well, and I always find myself excited about finding, making, wrapping her tiny gifts. This year, lavender sachets for drawers and stockings and mommies, sewed by hand and topped with a tinkly bell. Strong, heady lavender from France. Purl cotton. Tiny stitches. Strong thread.

Patent, Shine

Pretty sure I've been looking for these since I was four. For charleston ballerina tap dancers. And for grown four-year-olds everywhere. And standing with your hands behind your back. And kicking things.

Mine are not pink, but it seemed only right to post the pink. Only. Right.

2010 Resos: Balance, Sow

Highly specific 2010 resolutions. You knew they were coming. On the bright side, it's the longest list I'll post all year. Probably.

I'm hoping to make this year one of balance--to combine more homey adventures, circa 2008 (pickling cucumbers) with more out-and-about ones, circa 2009 (head to Paris for a month). Mostly, I want to enjoy, breathe deep, better notice and love who and what is right in front of my nose (beautiful seed pods, for example, above).

1. Go NYC places. Do NYC things.
2. Hone my photography skills. Consider a new camera.
3. Home: Plant things. Peruse cookbooks. Bake bread. Make jam.
4. Consider buying pants that are not jeans. Also, wearing them.
5. Read poems by poets other than T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
6. Write a poem a week.
7. Return to my breath.
8. Buy a fantastic pair of heels. Wear them even though.
9. Know when long weekends are going to be. Plan things for them.
10. Make things. Craft. It. Up.
11. Keep doing the things I'm doing well.
12. Make a financial plan. Avoid the term "budget" at all costs.
13. Wallpaper something.
14. Consider next steps. Those next steps on that sticky note I've been avoiding. Yes, that one.
15. Paint my toenails a luscious brown.
16. Write a letter a month.
17. Work on my French. (Carry flashcards.)
18. Try skinny jeans again. Just in case they aren't really that bad.
19. Visit a farm. Nuzzle chickens. Interact with cows. Learn more about bees.
20. Pick apples.
21. Visit Maine. Or the Catskills. Or Niagara Falls. Or all three.
22. Stick to a schedule.
23. Be tidier. Put things away where they *go.*
24. Sit up straight. Mostly.
25. Read out loud sometimes. Reading out loud is my favorite.
26. Make a rhubarb pie.

What are you doing this year?

{Photo, Me}