Me. Rooftop. Ten million years ago.
Once upon a time, there was a girl. She wore blazers and red lipstick, and lived in a fourth-floor walkup apartment with a hole in its floor and a stove that routinely tried to kill her. One day, she decided that she wanted to quit her terrible, horrible job in HR (a job that mostly involved her crying at - and sometimes under - her desk), and write a blog.
...What would this blog be about?
by Claire Zulkey
I saw a post in my Facebook feed not long ago featuring a mother asking for ideas as she put together a bakery-themed “Donut grow up” party for her daughter. It was the child’s first birthday. I thought—oh. Baby’s first guilt trip.
I personally can’t imagine wanting a child to remain 1. I think it’s the hardest age, combining physicality with lack of rationality. But aside from that, I don’t identify with the parental notion that children must be frozen in time, and anything less is a tragedy. Life has gotten easier as my boys get older. To shed the paraphernalia of babyhood, to gain back time and energy as my kids get old enough to pitch in, to lower my guard more in public places— it feels like an achievement.
Yet there are classic tales, new and old, wherein a child leaving the nursery is seen as a tragedy: Peter Pan, TheVelveteen Rabbit, Toy Story, Inside Out, The Polar Express. The moral of these stories, to quote The Breakfast Club, is that when you grow old, your heart dies.
This year, the Halloween plan is four all four of us to do...something. Involving trick-or-treating. (I know; I've given it a lot of thought.) Our son will be Wolverine, and our daughter will be Lydia Deetz, and I will maybe be a gumball machine (more on that later) but will probably be a cat.
Before we get to the roundup of all the things you need to get yourself into the spirit of the season, let's do a little retrospective of Halloweens from Years Past.
Fall is my favorite season, and I’m willing to bet it’s up there for you, too. There’s something about Fall that seems to excite and unite everyone. Once Labor Day passes it feels like everyone is ready to cozy up for the remainder of the year, and I’m all about it!
Decorating for Fall is something I always look forward to. I have a mad love for pumpkins, spicy home scents, warm textures...and candy corn. (Oh my goodness, the candy corn. I try to limit myself to two bags per season, but let’s not talk to my husband about my success rate with that one.) But we have two young kids now, so these days Fall decorations come with two stipulations: they need to be easy, and they need to be indestructible.
Nothing pictured above is new...but all of it is new to ME.
Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves: Just because I said I'm not buying any new clothing for the remainder of the year (and hopefully beyond that) doesn't mean I don't want to pick up some new-to-me clothing. A woman still has needs, you know.
Enter: The buddy swap.
Drawing a single card each day can be an enormously helpful morning ritual. This practice invites you to slow down for a few minutes and check in with yourself before you embark on the day ahead.
That, all by itself, is powerful.
You might discover that the card you pull in the morning provides a set of metaphors that give symbolic shape to your day. And if you’re interested in developing a deep relationship with Tarot, this is a wonderful way to get acquainted with the cards.
While you’re getting to know a card a day, I’ll be introducing you to a card each month - but it's important to keep in mind that the interpretations I offer aren’t intended to be definitive. I’m sharing what I know about Tarot in the hope that you will want to get to know Tarot yourself. And, in any case, my own relationship with Tarot is ever-evolving; if I didn’t keep learning about the cards each time I draw them I would have gotten bored with Tarot by now. The analyses I’ll be offering are simply distillations of what I know about each card right now, along with some questions you might ask yourself when faced with that card yourself.
I am not a "fall colors" person - orange is not my jam. But the fall tablescape I put together to shoot Noritake's new Charlotta Gold dinnerware collection (featuring gold edges that are microwave! safe! YES) turned out to be one of my all-time favorites.
I started with my go-to palette (gold and white, pale pinks, texture and texture and texture), then added in autumnal elements with the eucalyptus, tall grasses, wintry berries, and wheat. One styling trick I've returned to again and again over the years (dating wayyyyy back to the flowers-in-a-teacup years, #memories): I love placing florals in unexpected containers, like the vintage tea light holders you see up there, and even laying them directly on the table (as I did with the wheat). It just feels so casual and light and easy.
Sabine & The Red Lotus just released their new single, "Infinite Orb," and it is stunning. I'd like to see it be the theme song of the next Bond movie, please. (If the spectacular creature in these photos looks familiar, that's because it's Francesca.)
Listen below, or stream the single on Apple Music and Spotify.
Me, as drawn by Jacqueline Bisset for Carrying On
Well THAT was a morning.
So you know how I've been having all these Big Life Realizations lately? One of them is that I need to refocus this site to be less about *me* - essentially because I've started to realize that I want to be peaceful, and happy. Which means having less drama in my life. But which also, alas, leaves me with fewer stories to tell.
YES, GIRL.
For the full duration of my trick-or-treating years - we're talking 3-13 - my mother crafted my costumes entirely by hand. They ranged from the truly extraordinary (a hand-stitched cancan dancer costume with multicolored ruffles that required multiple trips to visit a sewing-machine-having family friend in New Jersey) to the slightly phoned-in (a Cher costume that was basically a piece of sparkly fabric and a fright wig), but I cherished them. I cherish them still; many of those old costumes are now parked in my kids' costume box, and are just as serviceable as they were back in the day.
Things made by hand have a tendency to do that: they last.
