Today's big achievement

Sometimes we procrastinate doing something simple and easy and maybe even cheap that will transform the quality of our life. And sometimes we get around to doing it after all.

I have these cute shoes that I wear all summer, and in fact they're pretty much my only summer shoes, since I realized that I tend to trip in sandals and my other shoes go with long pants. Trouble is, the fuzzy side of the velcro straps wore out months ago, and now the shoes won't reliably stay strapped, even for a few minutes. I researched ways to clean and rejuvenate velcro, but that didn't help. A week or so ago, I bought some velcro strips at Bi-Mart (for, like, $2.79), and today, FINALLY, I cut some pieces of the velcro and sewed them onto my shoes (and it's not visible at all). And now my aggravating yet still cute shoes are completely fine.

Book completed - and highly recommended!

Wild Life, by Molly Gloss. (2000). It's 1905, and our non-gender-conforming heroine Charlotte lives in a small town along the banks of the Columbia River, west of Portland, where she supports her five sons by writing pulp novels about amazing heroines having dramatic adventures. They learn that her housekeeper Melba's dreadful son-in-law has taken his daughter off to an old-growth logging camp to see where he works. When the little girl is reported missing, snatched by a creature that looks like a giant orang-utan, Charlotte goes off to join the search party.

One thing I especially appreciated about the book was that it led me to think more about my mom's favorite grandmother, Minta, who was a Mayflower descendant and the daughter of a Union soldier, born in Ohio and raised in Oregon. Minta was certainly gender-conforming; she was also more likely to be described as "nice" than Charlotte, but there were similarities. Like Charlotte, Minta found herself a single mother to a bunch of boys (three in her case, my grandpa the youngest). And she had to support them, not by writing fiction but by working as a cook in a logging camp. (She broke with the social expectations of the day by divorcing the father of her children, who had a bad temper, then she divorced another one who was abusive to my grandpa, and then she was single for a very long time, finally surprising everyone by marrying a man who was kind.)

Minta lived to be 96, and I'm pretty sure I met her but I better remember going to visit her twin sister. I have her cast-iron skillets, her sewing basket, and the letters her oldest son sent from his Army training camp before he went off to fight in World War I. I also have two photos, one of her as a pretty young woman reading to her two younger sons, and one of her in her 80s, standing ramrod straight beside her twin Meda, looking very severe (which had long been my impression of her until everyone who knew her told me otherwise).