Pareo ramblings

Because I would not stop for the mail.....

It kindly stopped for me.

(Sorry, I have Emily Dickinson on the brain right now. First Amy calls me up and tells me that all of Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas." I'll save you the headache -- no, they can't. But it's fun to try to make them fit. Then Miss Snark recommended Emily Dickinson to someone who wanted to read some good poetry. It must be Belle of Amherst time or something.)

Anyway, I received my prize package from Islands magazine for the essay that they liked. Yes, the sappy essay. They posted it at http://www.islands.com/readeressays/ . I'm fairly sure they gave it a title with the word "lost" something-or-other. It's very sappy. Oh, I looked it up. My story is at the link to "Lost In Time." Take a napkin with you if you go to read it. It's really saccharine.

Regardless -- the pareo came in the mail the other day, and I've been trying to get Emily to model it for a photo, but she keeps refusing. So I draped it over the herb garden for this photo. It's quite bright and pretty. I like it. If I were skinny, I would wear it.

The most fun part of the prize package, however, was a glossy, four-color brochure about how to wear a pareo. Emily looked at the brochure while I was cooing over the piece of cloth itself, and she gasped, "Mama! These people... these girls... these people are... NAKEY!!!!!"

I looked at the brochure myself, and sure enough, those models are entirely devoid of clothing whilst wrapping themselves cheerfully in pareos. Some of the girls wear leis to cover their top halves. Some of them don't. All of them are absolutely ecstatic to be nakey.

So if you are a gorgeous, dark-skinned, exotic Tahitian girl, you, too, can go nakey under your pareo!

Me, I think I'll just use the pareo as a tablecloth or something. It's very pretty. It's just .... I mean, I'm ... Well, it's very pretty, isn't it?

We're keeping the brochure about how to fold/tie/drape the thing far from Woodrow. The poor boy is very sensitive, and I'm afraid he would die of shock if he saw all the South Pacific nakey girls in the booklet.