possibly my very favorite thing.

It's this record, which I currently cannot actually listen to because the power cord for my record player vanished in the move but! youtube saves the day!My mom got this record and the book that came with it at school when she was a kid. By the time I came into the world it was long gone, but she had memorized the entire thing, voices and all. She used to recite the poems and stories to me when I was little. It made an impression. I found an absolutely pristine copy of both the record and book (in the original spooky Halloween bag it came in!) on ebay a while back and could've died, but instead of dying I showed it to Mom and she bought it for me for my birthday. And with fall on the way (yes!) it seemed appropriate to share.

it came from my parents' basement.

This spring I will be doing a lot of work around the house for my parents. One of the tasks they've requested I take on is that of cleaning out their basement.
I'm excited about this. It is a magical mess of a place, with boxes haphazardly stacked under the stairs and in a dungeon-like storage room. My parents are the type who have a hard time getting rid of anything--my mom can be sentimental, but my dad is something else. He has always been of the opinion that just because you don't want something right now doesn't mean you won't want it later. He's not bad enough for an episode of Hoarders or anything, but he sometimes saves sugar bags, jars and broken appliances, and if he possesses organizational skills, they're understood only by him. It drives my mom mad because if she ever needs to get something out of storage, it takes a day to figure out where he's tucked it away. But I enjoy it. It's like a junk store treasure hunt. The other day I was trying to help Mom find some old school photos. We didn't find them, but I did luck into a box of books that were Mom's when she was a kid. I collect vintage books, especially the spooky ones, as that's the sort of thing I read when I was little. It's what my mom read, too.


I'm looking forward to what more extensive digging will uncover.