Grandmothers

I bought a shirt and a sweater yesterday from a garage sale at the Elk's Lodge and didn't wash either because I was positive they were worn and washed by grandmothers. Yesterday, they smelled of faint perfume and powder. But today, as I wear one under the other (they look fab together, incidentally), I feel like all I can smell is grandma. Customers at the shoe store have complimented me on my amazing get-up (that costed a grand total of $1.50, mind you), but they don't have to smell grandma. I learned a very important lesson this weekend: one tiny load of wash is always worth the time.

The Case for Winona Ryder

My Dear Winona,

Please come back. I've missed you terribly. Last year I saw Heathers for the first time, and it was like you coming back to life. Last week I saw The Crucible and loved you even more than that handsome Daniel Day-Lewis. When I was a girl, I saw you play Jo March in Little Women, and when I was a bit older I properly fell in love with you in Reality Bites. You are gorg beyond belief and you can actually act and you have style and there's something both bad-to-the-bone and charmingly whimsical about you. Where oh where have you been hiding? So many years, gone! Let me tell you a very important something. No one cares if you steal stuff. We've all committed our own crimes. And the worst crime you ever committed was stealing my heart. Please come back. Just don't come back and play a silly part opposite Adam Sandler (leave those parts for Drew Barrymore), or as a cartoon or a sketch (what was that silly movie with Robert Downey, Jr. scanning darkly?), but please come back as your perfect pixied self. Oh, that pixie cut! I love you, Winona. I do.

Ever Yours,

Anne Elizabeth Pries

Bellingham

It is strange to explore, once again, the town you grew up in. So much remains the same, but appears to have changed because your lens has changed. Some things, you have to wonder if they've actually changed, or if you've forgotten how they've always been.

I work at a shoe boutique in downtown Bellingham, and one of the teachers who taught at my middle school came in with his wife. He looked the same, but older, and we talked briefly about my favorite teacher, Mrs. Wiseman, and he told me he sees her on occasion at the gym and that she's still in good health.

It's strange to see people, the store fronts, the things I loved that have disappeared, the new things I feel I could learn to love. I now belong in part to Seattle, in part to Moscow, Idaho. New places have made their home in me. But Bellingham is still mine.

Voguely

I can't afford to subscribe to Vogue any longer because I am poor. However, I often take breaks from work for a nice walk to the Rite Aid. When I saw Michelle Williams on this month's cover, I nearly had a heart attack. I often fall in love with women with pixie cuts (Mia Farrow's wedding photo from her Frank Sinatra days), but there is more to Michelle Williams, something demure and classic and perfect. Inside is her first interview since Heath Ledger's death, not to mention a perfect pair of flats that I'd like to steal and an adorable top hat.

Eggnog

Some say it shouldn't be allowed yet, namely Starbucks. But Espresso Avellino on Railroad, the best coffee in Bellingham, knows a thing or two about filling my heart, and making my day. Last Sunday morning I drank my first eggnog latte of the season. It was perfection. I can't explain what eggnog does to me. The smell, the taste, absolutely everything about eggnog takes me back to California and being a child. Eggnog is a magical thing. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Barbra

Today is Robert Campbell's first Saturday in Bellingham. We ate a late breakfast. We wandered about the farmer's market with our new friends and their little boys. I ate a late afternoon chocolate doughnut with milk. And we antiqued. Robert gave me a record player for my birthday. We are slowly starting a record collection, and there are certain records that must be part of a record collection. This is one. I bought it today for three bucks. Oh, Barbra. The world needs you.

Joan

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens." — Joan Didion

1966

1966 and lovely, I'd give my feet and toes to have been alive for the premiere. I watched this movie for the first time a few months ago, when summer was just beginning, and I will never forget the blur of yellows and reds in that little living room in Idaho, sitting with a heap of pillows and two new friends (a man and a woman, in fact), sleepy eyes scanning subtitles to a language I wish I had learned while still in school (I suppose there's still time), and falling in love with this woman's face (I still don't know her name, and I'd be a failure at pronouncing it, anyhow).

China

Two sets of vintage Lenox china (one almost identical to this pattern) sit in boxes, waiting for me to make my next move. They were both gifted to me, one belonged to my grandmother, the other my great-grandmother.

One set contains teacups whose insides are perfectly stained purple from red wine (I always serve wine in teacups) from the many cocktail parties I hosted while living in my studio apartment in Moscow, Idaho. I should probably be punished for this (I hope my grandmothers understand), but I will never try and scrub them clean.

Ducks

All of my things are in boxes. After living in Idaho for some years and completing graduate school, I have returned to my parents' home in Bellingham. I am waiting for the next thing, for my man to pack his 4x6 U-haul and move to Washington next week, for us to move together to the city. Home alone and dreamy (my parents have gone to San Francisco for the weekend), I get the idea to look in my Dad's closet for the knit sweater with the stitched ducks, circa Randy Pries 1979. I remember the duck sweater from old photographs of my father, bundled on a grey coast of California winter, on his honeymoon stay in Pajaro Dunes (my mother could confirm this, I'm not positive it was the honeymoon, that could have been his perfect flannel coat). My father doesn't save much, but I know the sweater's back there, somewhere deep, near his starch white tennis sweater from Alameda High School. I find it. The ducks on the sweater are orange and golden brown and look like Thanksgiving. I miss a crisp autumn. I feel it passing.

Introductions

This is a blog for your grandmother. I know little about computers. I'm a bit bored. I have a friend in France and I'd like to show her my cowboy boots.