More pearls and a longtime delusion

Beware the urge to check your pleasant word in the dictionary. The familiar one you believe you know so clearly that you'd never researched it. But you don't know. Not really.

All my life—forever, until today—I've believed the surface of a pearl was formed of the magical.creamy.delicious French nacre. But no. Nacre is mother of pearl and lines the lovely shells we used as ashtrays on screened porches circled with windchimes. Fine, but nacre is not a pearl and no one smokes any longer, so I plant succulents in the shells. Briefly. They advance quickly from shallow shells to celadon pots. There's another word I won't look up. Celadon. And shagreen. Onion skin. Penultimate.

I prefer innocence. Illusion. Delusion. I prefer nacre as the surface of my pearls. Or glow.

I checked a thesaurus. There is no synonym listed for 'moonlight.'

Spring arrives in music + impossible greens

"Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is" —Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons





Music for this springtime:

• Van Morrison — Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl
• Madeleine Peyroux — Bare Bones
• Jolie Holland — the living and the dead
• Neko Case — Middle Cyclone
• Avett Brothers — Mignonette
• Heartless Bastards — The Mountain
• David Byrne & Brian Eno — Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
• Lucinda Williams + Shelby Lynne — YouTube, Still I Long for Your Kiss
  
• + a bottle of wine
  

People, places, thinkin' | Independent Lens

Lions and tigers and bears ... who cares? PBS does. A PBS hour or two of who is caring about something. Irresistible.

Frog went a-courtin'...

...and he did ride, uh-huh.


I feel silly, oh, so silly.

Wallflowers | long-term potentiation | Memories

I was concerned about sentimentality and photos of roses — or more truthfully, my grandmother and the Windsor Rose nail polish that she wore always and forever. But everyone has a grandmother and a memory or two, the persistence of which is unlikely by any measure, but there it is like Windsor Rose. And the incessant smoking, occasionally with a cigarette holder or possibly cherry tobacco tamped into a carved wood gargoylesque ladie's pipe with semi-precious stone eyes or shrimp cocktail with Saltines or wearing heels and sporting pearl earrings while watering the lawn with an impossibly ugly green hose.... This is the grandmother who taught me to pack her pipe and smoke it. She gave me that pipe by the time I was 10. I lost it or gave it to a friend.

Today I read a NYTimes blog regarding memory. There are currenlty 186 readers' comments posted, but if you sort for Editors' Selections, you might read a dozen or so and then be not quite able to turn off the thought process.

So I quit even thinking the blurry shots might be sentimental.

Petrichor and Merriam-Webster and me

I'm puzzled.

There is a definition for 'petrichor' here and a singular place for it in A.Word.A.Day but no definition at Merriam-Webster online except obliquely as the root (second) 'ichor' 2 : an ethereal fluid taking the place of blood in the veins of the ancient Greek gods.

Possibly it has to work its way into Oxford English Dictionary to be deemed a part of our lexicon. I venture it's in OED. Does anyone subscribe?

Ichor but no petrichor.

You know petrichor like you know rain, earth, air. Don't you?