"I mean, what is an un-birthday present?"
"A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course."
Alice considered a little. "I like birthday presents best," she said at last.
You don't know what you're talking about!" cried Humpty Dumpty. "How many days are there in a year?"
"Three hundred and sixty-five," said Alice.
"And how many birthdays have you?"
"One."
-- Lewis Carroll
My birthday was last week. I made an ice cream cake (above), received cards, phone calls, emails + messages from near and far, a hug from one son, a hastily scrawled card from the other, and the most horrible bouquet of flowers from my husband. I adore flowers, but apparently the aroma of Stargazer lilies makes me nauseated (and in an odd twist, my sons felt sentimental about the flowers and became upset when I suggested that the best way to deal with the offending smell would be to send the flowers on a quick trip to the compost; so the flowers hung around the house, making me ill for several days).
On the heels of what shall heretofore and forever be known as "the
horrible birthday bouquet," a magical parcel arrived on my
doorstep from my dear friend Christine in France.
The first
thing this parcel-of-marvels revealed was a birthday card; you
can see the P.S. which Christine wrote at the bottom of the card. After reading this, I
went through each item in the parcel, mystified.
After the card, next out of the box was not one but two(!) chocolate bars. And no door to open. Then, a pretty little paper packet of acorn caps came out of the box -- each variety of oak tree, across the world over, bears different shape acorns + caps, and I love receiving them. But there was no door here either. I dug deeper into the box: a fancifully
embroidered bag containing two ceramic feves for inserting into a
galette des rois(!), plus two paper crowns (for setting atop a galette des
rois)! But no door. And then...
The final little paper packet revealed... a door! Christine and I laugh when sharing peculiar vocabulary, and so, describing the little house as "biscornu," she asked what the translation might be. The best words I could come up with were lopsided, tumbledown, ramshackle, or simply crooked, which brings to my mind the traditional nursery rhyme, "There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked style; He bought a crooked cat which caught crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house." Can you imagine a little crooked cat (and mouse) peering out of that tiny window beneath the roof-peak?
And then I did finally open the door to find a tiny bird, chirping a happy birthday message...
Detail upon detail... when I turned the bookmark over, there was a tiny apple tree. The little crooked man, the little crooked cat, the little crooked mouse and the birthday bird, must surely feast well on tiny apple tarts, baked in a little crooked oven, of course.
And can you tell that Christine is part fairy? Her stitches are so small, surely only a fairy could have sewn them. And surely only a fairy could have imagined such a bookmark...
Thank you, Christine, for this beautiful gift -- a perfect companion for my literary wanderings... xo
