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Still seeing all those smiley faces
For all of my early childhood, the knob on the closet door of my bedroom was a nose on a sad, flat face. Toothbrushes standing in the holder looked like horses - the bristles were manes. For reasons I cannot now explain, beds were happy and chairs were strict.
I got a bit of this the other day while trying to cull the herd of stuffed animals in my daughter's room. We were getting nowhere.
"How would you like it if someone just tossed you away?" she said, and so I sent her off to do something else so she wouldn't have to witness the looks of dejection and abandonment of a dozen old Beanie Babies.
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On my own walks lately, I've been paying more attention. Jetties of crunchy leaves are full of mischief; one of them grabbed onto my shoelace and held on for a ride, finally jumping off blocks from its home. The faces of jack-o'-lanterns are caving in now, exhausted from the holiday. Sunflowers are nothing but big flirts.
Houses with front porches are always smiling; tall houses without porches look like men with weak chins. When I drive my Honda Pilot in certain light, the shadow created by the front end with its two side mirrors looks exactly like the silhouette of Shrek.
The pile of towels on the laundry room floor really does have a bad attitude; so do my son's shoes on the middle of the hallway floor. Teapots are grandmotherly ("Beauty and the Beast" saw to that), corkscrews are squirrelly, and our new stainless-steel refrigerator is just plain stuck-up.
Other languages have a bit of this built in. In French, butter is male and table is female, and equally baffling, cat is a masculine word. As a child, I thought that all cats should be girls and all dogs should be boys; all cats were arrogant and all dogs carefree. (I still think that.)
Horses are manly and rabbits are girly. Leaves that float to the ground seem happy to be abandoning the tree. When the trees finally go bare they look lonely. Grumpy, even.
And how about the letters on this page. J? Loud and friendly. T? Serious. N? Stubborn.
OK, so I'm nuts. (Cashews are kind and womanly, peanuts are young and always in a good mood.) But I live with the things around me, and see them dozens of times a day. How can I not begin to see them as more than a kettle on the stove or towels on the floor? The object to the right of my keyboard really does look like a mouse, and to me, mice are timid. Outside my office window is a Japanese maple tree whose leaves have turned the exact shade of blood. They look like hundreds of mittened hands. I'd swear they were waving to me.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.
