Whirligig Memories

The word of the day for today from Merriam Webster is whirligig (\WER-lih-gig\ ; a child's toy having a whirling motion ; one that continuously whirls or changes b : a whirling or circling course (as of events)). I don’t recall ever having a whirligig as a toy. The favourite toys of my childhood were toy horses that I got for Christmas one year (big surprise eh).

Most of the horses were from a set of boy’s western toys that included a Colonel Custer, a chuck wagon with lovely palomino horse to pull it, some corral fence, a couple of dogs (English setter and German shepherd), and few other ponies – all Barbie doll sized! My sister and I had lots of fun with this set, getting our Barbie's  to ride the ponies (I had a Skipper with flexible legs), setting up farms & houses and general Barbie fun. I wasn’t into dressing up my Barbie (I don’t recall that we had many outfits anyway), but I loved to build houses and barns out of cardboard boxes and furnish them with whatever bits and pieces I could find. Many had barns attached right to the living room or bedroom - what better sight to wake up to than a horses head hanging over a dutch door. This may be where my interest in house design started. Luckily for Carm by the time we designed our house I realized the impracticality of the horse stalls opening onto our bedroom! But I have made the barn my bedroom on occasion :-)

Pleasures from yesterday and today: yesterday and today’s lunches were fresh tomatoes with red onion sliced thin, some Kalamata olives, slivers of parmesan cheese, all drizzled with a good extra-virgin olive oil. Yum. And to make it even better we had some fantastic Italian bread from a shop in “Little Italy”. It just needed some fresh basil to make it perfect (which we had for today’s lunch) ; more food pleasures this morning were had in a luscious fruit salad with peaches, blueberries and banana ;

Another pleasure from yesterday - we picked some apples from our trees – sure some were wormy (we don’t spray) but some were perfect. There is something so elemental about harvesting our own food. I cooked them up in an Apple Cake which was good, but I think I like Apple Crisp better ;

A few years back I scanned my parents slide collection, about 1500 photos (omg what a job) – today I was looking through them looking for a photo with my horse toys (no luck) - it was fun looking back and can certainly be considered a pleasure ; getting outside with the dogs is always a pleasure – our property is so beautiful no matter what the time of year, and it is always fun to watch the dogs play and hunt.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan