Chilly Birds, Hot Pea Soup, Bananas, and an Old Magazine

I have not written a blog post in more than 2 weeks.

Let's chalk it up to the February blahs, okay? 

So . . . Happy March!

Is the month that will bring us Spring,

as gentle as a lamb,

 

coming in like a lion for you?

 

In New Jersey, we've had some mighty chilly and windy days.

Teeny birds were hanging for dear life onto the

bare branches of bushes outside our local Wal-Mart.

One little guy looked particularly stressed.

 At least he had the good sense to face into the wind.

  This is going to be an oddly random post.

As if my posts are usually so well planned and thought out!

Question: Do the diners in your part of the world

offer pea soup on Thursdays?

This is the tradition in New Jersey;

I didn't know this until we moved here 5 years ago.

 But it's a great tradition.

Mmmm . . . Pea soup and coffee in thick white diner china.

I once asked a waitress why every diner or coffee shop

made pea soup every Thursday, and she said,
"Because it's Thursday, hon."  

*********************************************

Which brings us to bananas.

Because I found pictures Anne took last week.

Bananas, getting nekkid:

 And why are they getting nekkid, sliced into a

Chinese food container, and heading for the freezer?

 Ha!  Anne can fill you in on that in a couple of days.

It's not my project.

*********************

And that brings us to an old magazine.

 House Beautiful is the oldest shelter magazine in continuous

publication in the USA.  I've been a subscriber since

shortly after I got married, about a hundred years ago.

 

Today I was wading through stacks and stacks of old

magazines, while watching an episode of Hoarders,

and - because I don't want to find myself

on one of those shows - reluctantly relegating some of them

to the Recycle bin, and others to the Giveaway bin. 

   

And then I found this in the pile:

 Check out the date.  And the price.

 It isn't a mistake that I have a 28-year old magazine on my bookshelves.

I wanted it there; I wrote this:

"Save"

 But I couldn't remember why I saved it.

So I flipped through it.

It featured some beautiful, some eccentric, private spaces - some of them

carved out of larger dwellings, like Tricia Guild's hideaway in

her London apartment, below.   

 Some of them, including a darling English cottage,

featured on the cover,

were tiny hideaways all on their own.

It struck me that much of what was in that issue looks timeless.

Like Guild's room, above, and even what she is wearing:

linen cropped pants, blazer, huaraches.

   

There was a story about a charming antiques shop on Long Island:

Was I harboring plans to someday sell antiques myself?

Howard, our dog Brandy, and I were living in a roomy old railroad flat,

without central heat, in New York City, and in May 1985 

were brand-newly expecting our first child.

We were looking at houses in New Jersey that we couldn't yet afford;

maybe the pictures of quirky homes and their intensely personal decoration spoke to me, given some of the extremely

quirky houses we'd looked at that year.

Or, maybe, I just wanted this Chocolate Mousse recipe

from the old "Quick Cook" column:

I am pretty sure I made this mousse - it seems very familiar!

Some things don't change.

This ad is for the food processor that I use now,

and I bought it just a few years ago. 

 Classics.

They endure.

I think I'll keep this issue of House Beautiful,

for maybe another 28 years.

Thank you, JoAnn Barwick.

-- Cass

P.S.  Looking through an old magazine highlights the changes in the last decades.  The photography is not as crisp as today's digital images, and there are no websites listed in the advertisements, and no phone app do-hickeys.  Ah, I am a dinosaur.