“According to whose standard?” One of the characters in my current draft puts that question to herself . She’s right: attempting to be “light” or “funny” (or their opposites) are trickier than tricky ventures. Someone’s bound to tell you you’re being heavy, or “that’s not funny” or “I don’t know how you can make fun of this”

etc

Well, never mind. Characters do as characters can and the same holds true for writers.

***

Two belated and much-appreciated birthday gifts in so many days.  Through the mail today: a vibrant dress from Mexico, “hand-embroidered in the Oaxaca style”.  Fine enough to qualify as wall art.

Hand-delivered yesterday: an angel pulled together from a chair rung, bits of old hardware and wings made of flapping pages from Holy readings edited “à l’usage des mères de famille“.

Why mothers needed special editions of scriptural readings, I don’t know. Something to do with the Archangel Gabriel delivering the positive on Mary’s unusual pregnancy test? Perhaps. At any rate, we agreed my angel’s name wasn’t Gabriel and I was glad to adopt the name under which his Maker calls him i.e. Saint Biose.

This is an untranslatable pun on the French spelling of the word symbioses.  Not everything is translatable  which may be just as well, or we’d all speak esperanto to keep things simpler – and that would throw translators and linguists out of work.

Saint Biose has now stepped inside, and joined the other drifters and moochers claiming to be guardians of my hearth.  Including the one-eyed Bienheureuse Germaine who’s keeping that one remaining eye of hers fixed on  good old Biose praying over the mums on the bookshelf.