Fall, Fertility, and Art
1. Now that it’s October, I’m filled with this animal desire to go to the grocery store and purchase bags of tiny pumpkins and gourds. Also, I want to go outside and collect seeds and leaves. Then, I want to smear the pumpkins, gourds, seeds, and leaves all over my house. With glitter and varnish, if necessary. I don’t care.
But the last time I put tiny pumpkins in my apartment (Who am I kidding? I don’t have a freaking house.), it was high up in tiny windows where they looked beautiful and then leaked mold. Nature is cruel.
Every fall, I think of my sisters in spirit over at You Grow Girl. I can’t bring myself to read that site anymore. It makes me cry. I no longer have a garden, I only have an apartment, so I can’t participate in plant obsessions past the level of a few half-dead houseplants. But I peeked at the site the other day and it made me happy, just a little, to know that others are out collecting seeds and having fun. And, screw it. I’m gonna go buy a bunch of pumpkins and gourds. I can just clean the mold later.
2. One of my friends is having a baby shower soon. I’m one of the co-hosts of it. She and I talked a few weeks ago about what baby showers mean to us as women, Latinas, mommies, girls, etc. We confided/shared our disgustingly retro belief that baby showers should be GIRLS ONLY. That is because, under the tea, the cake, the balloons, the delicate pink and white streamers, is a primal, bloody FEMALE BONDING RITUAL. What is giving birth, besides blood, guts, gore, and heroism? Or heroine-ism, I guess you could say, if you wanted to be appropriately sexist about it?
So now, of course, I feel a primal need to go buy a bunch of little plastic babies. Do you know which ones I mean? Some of you do, for sure. The tiny plastic babies you get from the florist or the craft store or Arnie’s on Studewood. LOTS of them. Jillions. I want to buy them and glue them to everything.
Some women in my family liked to buy the little babies wearing clothes or, better yet, make little clothes and diapers for them out of paper and crochet thread. Not me, though. I want my babies naked. Screaming and bursting with breast milk, if possible. The only thing I want to see on their little plastic bodies is, at the very most, glitter and hot glue.
Just kidding. Heh, heh, heh. I’m just kidding about all that, you guys.
Okay, no I’m not.
3. Not even to mention Halloween. Not. Even. Mentioning. Halloween. Much less the Day of the Dead, which I can’t even celebrate, because then I would cry. One year in my life, I tried to celebrate both Halloween and the Day of the Dead in the same week, and I almost died. Making the yellow tissue chrysanthemums and filling my house with tiny pumpkins and skulls sent me into such paroxisms of Octoberish rapture, I had to take to my bed for hours at a time while my children revived me with hourly administrations of candy corn and mini Twix.
So… no.
No… Yes. YES. Screw it. I don’t care!
See you at Arnie’s, fellow crazy craft bitches. Happy October to everybody else.
