The Little Artist Whose Mother is Addicted to Post-it Notes

Post-it art by our Leonardo. Leonardo d'Atlanta.

Now on display in the Gallery of the Master Bedroom.

Oh I know Marie Kondo wouldn't approve. But what does one do with these little scraps of paper? You are not meant to preserve something to show that while you were reading bedtime stories to your son he was whiling away the time doodling on post-it notes? Doodling in ways you never could. Or did.

So for now the show is still up in the gallery.

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Fall grief

One day in Atlanta, circa 2015

Lost diary entry 

It feels a bit like grief, the first warnings of fall -- that sudden chill in the morning air when until yesterday, there was nothing but heavy, humid, hot air mugging every breath out of me.

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Pilgrimages I made in Italy (Il Libraccio -- Milano)

I visited as many bookstores as possible when I was in Italy, and had the joy finally of shopping at Il Libraccio (Milano branch), which I had heard about for a long time.

What I bought:

*A back issue of Granta Italia ("Sesso") that I'd wanted for a long time (and at a good price -- better than Amazon, of course; I can now take it out of my Amazon cart!)

*L'Arminuta by Donatella di Pietrantonio

*La Malora di Beppe Fenoglio (largely because I became obsessed with the word 'malora' while translating one of the Bruck short stories and spent hours in the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library poring over the big Italian-Italian dictionaries with extensive, historic entries on all of the major literary iterations of the word)

I spent a lot of time at the Mondadori store in the Prati neighborhood in Rome. I also spent lots of euros at Libreria Edison in Florence, kind of my "home" bookstore when I am in Florence.

But Il Libraccio is famous in a special indie kind of way.

Plus, because I bought two Einaudi books, they gave me a free backpack!

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Who we were

 

Who were we? We were girls who stretched out, seatbelt-free, in the spacious trunk of our noisy green station wagon, reading, writing in our journals, sharing thoughts. Little girls who fell asleep together even when one of us begged for her own room (not me!). Kids whose headquarters were the swing set in our backyard, a blessed magnet for our neighborhood friends. Two out of a total of four girls with stock phrases like, "Let's not and say we did."

Today we are women headed to my parents' house to pore over artifacts such as this photo (taken by my Uncle Larry at my beloved grandmother's house at the lake in what we then considered Upstate but what was really simply Westchester). 

And we -- I! -- will be forced to part with some of the evidence of a happy childhood, lest we build museums to ourselves (and man am I tempted to do just that).

There are many items at my parents' house that no one needs.

But this artifact? Nah, not going to part with it (which will surprise no one who has read my letter to Marie Kondo).

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