housesitting, iconic, and OCD button sorting

I held back from calling this entry “Red Buttons”

I was sitting at my mom’s house waiting for her to get back from Europe with my brother. It’s a journey they’d been planning more years than I can imagine, and advance word from a layover phone call suggests it was splendid.

Spain and France. 9 days or so.

I’ve been house sitting all this time and enjoying the wealth of visual food to devour at my mom’s joint (the pincushion, for example.)

A friend came over one night and asked if she was Buddhist because of all the fat, bald, gold characters adorning mantles and side tables. Truth be told, she has lots of things that suggest influences from all over the world, many religions, and no particular time period.

I joked in reply that she was iconic, not Buddhist.

I say things like this, even when I am completely sober.

Wordplay aside, she seems drawn to the strongest visual elements from different cultures, creating a mash-up that somehow works in a cohesive way.

Apart from all these curiosities, there’s a bunch of… assets. Stuff to make other stuff: Racks of paper, bolts of fabric, boxes of ribbon, jars of buttons. This, just from what I can see. I dare not dig too deep in closets, lest I find myself pinned under the weight of boxes piled up to the ceiling in Jenga-like fashion.

I’d say this is odd, but I’m the one who pulled the jar of buttons to the porch and sorted them by color for no other reason than it felt good, and I’m trying to take more red pictures.