the best part of waking up

This is perhaps the only day in my life where I say, "My hands smell like Folgers." The company clearly did an excellent job branding their pungent coffee, because the best worst part of waking up is Folgers in my cup pores. Indeed, my cuticles are just as brown as the two-hundred coffee filters I just dyed.


Saturating fibrous materials isn't something I typically do every day, but since the start of this whole wedding process, I've been doing a lot of things I previously wouldn't have considered normal:

-- patrol gravel roads with mom in the 100+ degree heat and, with my scythe, hack down Iowa grasses (Okay, so I didn't really have a scythe, and my "hacking" was more of a dashing snip snip than a hatchet-wielding Indiana Jones.)

-- measure fabric in "knives" (As in, "The piece needs to be "knife-lengthed.")

-- think about destroying an old book

-- actually destroy an old book

-- spray paint "lumber" the dying backyard trees deposit onto the grass

-- listen to Victrola music ... intently

-- dye coffee filters. Two hundred of them. Fill the kitchen and dining room tables with them, circle the tables' edges with them as if layering a pepperoni pizza. All with the intent to make them into something.


I have the intent to make everything into something. An atlas into garland. A book into a table runner. A potato salad container into a hat, a light bulb into an ornament. A vase into a candy jar, an engagement into a marriage.

I think I'm going to need more than rubber cement, stitches, scissors, burlap, black lace, cattails, or masking tape for that last one, though.