my morning

i got a new job. slipcovers for three big cushy chairs. hopefully my measurements are acurate... but the chair is now in my apartment. good so i can try the the slipcovers on multiple times... but hopefully my new employer will get fabric quickly so i can get started on them! after he brought it, i started measuring, so now i would like to transfer those to paper so i have a pattern to work from- a much better idea if i have to make three of them.

anyway, to make room for this new chair, i moved my pillow filled wicker chair into the kitchen. thank goodness the card table is still out there, or there would be no room for it. i curled up in its pillows in my cozy kitchen to finish my book and eat breakfast this morning- quite delightful. hard to feed the worms though, with it blocking their bin.

my book was "a true and faithful narative" and takes plaace in 1687, a bookseller's daughter longs to write books of her own. it reminded me of aftershocks, by william lavender, which is a daughther at the turn of the century who wants to be a doctor like her father, and gets opertunity after the san francisco earthquake- which i suppose is on my mind, since i'll be leaving for sf in four days.

i guess all through my childhood i've read, and been drawn to books like these. certainly children long to read about other children, but specifically i've always read about upity women who disobeyed their parents- the true confessions of charlotte doyle, anything about maid marion, that sort of thing. i makes me wonder what kind of woman i would have been if i had been alive at any point in history. i would like to think so, but i fear i would be much more passive. for starters, i like to sew, and am not against cooking, which it seems all my heroines have problems with. i know now how much i need to read, but would i have worked so hard at learning if it wasn't around?

i never learned to read in the sense i learned phonics and sounding out words. perhaps i should ask my parents, and they would remember differently, but i think it was just one day the print i was surrounded with was uncodeable to me, and the next day it wasn't. i don't remember very much from my childhood, or have any really early memories like some people do, but i do remember where i was when i first read, and the book and my excited parents.

anyway, if i could learn to read the same way even without being surrounded with print, i'm sure i would have enough gumption to persue prohibited words. and i certainly would work hard against my father marrying me off to anyone, ever. so maybe i would be able to be all strong and brave like my novels' heroines. but i have a feeling hindsight is 20/20, and it's easy to put today's morals on the past. though fiction is full of such empowered women, history isn't quite. i have a feeling my life would have been pretty content with status quo. but it depends alot on the cercumstances, of course. things like if we had a spinning wheel or if we had a lot of silver to polish or if the family business had to do with chamber pots or what.

i also sort of like the element of surprise. like, women's lib has made equality of the sexes expected. it's much more impressive if a girl knows how to read latin or handle a sword if such a thing is prohibited. i guess i was raised to believe girls can do anything that boys can do, but no one believes it. so us girls, we can be impressive. watch out.