Ghost Stamps

 

So much fun! New stamps featuring unusual creatures with various magical tendencies. They are designed by Japanese illustrator Youko Sakamoto.

 

I actually was hunting down these ghost stamps in the swamp of Japanese stationery land, and the rest came along for the ride. They happen to have arrived just in time for Halloween, which is a lovely coincidence, but I’m planning on using these year round: tiny ghosts representing all of my disastrous and existential thoughts swirling around in the air above my head, or imaginary stationery fairies sprinkling good luck on the page. What To Do What To Do What To Do.  

 

 

These days I am mostly using stamps in my planner, my Traveler’s Notebook, my journal, along with spicing up notecards or notes or gifts or snail mail. They are little creatures that accompany me through the pages of my notebooks, on various journeys of their own.

 

 

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I wasn’t quite ready for the school year to begin, and it caught me a bit wrong footed. Homework! The kids are getting homework, which is a strange new thing for us, ha ha ho ho. The days are full, and I’ve been bumping appointments back, missing and canceling things, trying to prioritize the priorities while still “leaving room for spontaneity.” In this house, that seems a little more like “leaving room for total anarchy and half-naked children playing recorders very loudly.”

 

I seem to be flopping around like a fish out of water, in charge of making decisions I have no idea how to make, signing forms blindly, spending 45 minutes attaching command hooks to the wall to hold an ipad and then wondering where the precious minutes of Junia’s nap went, Jon wondering the same thing. The other day I was solo parenting and there was a very large spider and a very large scene involving a spatula and mosquito repellent and three gleefully shrieking children. Another day, out of the shower, I found one very long hair, a third of it black, bleeding into grey, bleeding into white. It was a metaphor for life—my life—and how much time I have left on this earth, the bathroom sending me a message. I impressed even myself with how dramatic I could make a single hair.

 

But, some sunny day, on the way back home from dropping off an armload of overdue library books with Junia, I walked past a neighbourhood cafe and found their normally bustling patio empty. Such a rare sight! I could not resist a hot coffee, some tasty pastry, with my gurgling turkey. Was it the cold weather that emptied out the benches? A wonderful black hole in space and time?

 

I will take what the universe has to offer me.