I am definitely more of a “broad” than anybody's notion of a “girlie girl.” An old boyfriend once disparagingly compared my walk to that of a football player and, despite a certain verbal grace, everybody knows that I can have the mouth of a stevedore as well. I laugh loudly and am highly opinionated, I shovel manure, I am not particularly domestic and I definitely take a back seat to my husband when it comes to the baking of cakes and fussy pies. There is nothing about me on the outside that explains the stuff most people never see - the love of candles and firelight, of French milled soaps, pearls,  “green” perfumes, handmade lace, silk ribbons and the novels of Colette.  Somehow, underneath it all, I'm an incurable romantic at heart.

I am also the daughter of a seamstress, a woman who once apprenticed herself to a tailor in order to learn some of the finer points of making beautiful clothes. Growing up, I had the good fortune to benefit from her abilities in a number of different ways, from exquisitely tailored jackets to beautiful lingerie; and although I live now almost entirely in blue jeans and sweat pants, I have never lost the love of running my fingers over fabric that is still on the bolt, or the knowledge that in capable hands, lovely textiles can be wonderfully transformed into almost anything a  person could desire.

At some point in the last decade, prompted by an impulse I now can’t even recall, I made the somewhat peculiar decision to spend the rest of my life sleeping only on pure white sheets. To be precise, only on pure white cotton sheets, and pillow cases trimmed with hand made white lace. Although Sasha no doubt considered this to be a rather extreme eccentricity on my part, he must have found something charming in it too, because that was when my white “revolution” began.

In a world that has online shopping and especially eBay, it was relatively easy to replace the existing household prints and colours with a beautiful collection of vintage bed linens, all in pristine condition, for relatively little cost. Not only were such things terribly out of fashion and not at all politically correct, but by most modern women they were also regarded to be dull, labour intensive and totally unhip. To me, they were the very embodiment of romance, calling forth from the imagination the promise of cool breezes blowing gently through gauze curtains on starlit summer nights. Even now, these long years later, my crisp white sheets, lightly sprayed with lavender linen water, make crawling into bed at the end of every day an almost indescribable delight.

The second thing I decided, flowing naturally from the thing about the sheets, was that I would also only wear white nighties. No PJs for me. Pretty white nighties made of natural fibres are a commodity not easily to be found, particularly if one lives on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, so it has always been a challenge finding something decent to suffice. My favourite Eileen West nightdress, a treasure purchased years ago in Boston, recently became tattered beyond redemption and turned out to be hideously expensive to replace. Not sold in Canada, and available only through the smallest handful of online sources in the US, gowns like my beautiful Eileen West are costly in the first place and absolutely prohibitive to import, especially when exorbitant shipping tariffs are applied.

No longer having anything special to sleep in and recalling the days when I had the luxury of custom made clothing right at home, it dawned on me finally that the best and surest way to solve my white sleepwear dilemma was simply to choose  the fabrics and notions myself and have everything made to order, so this is exactly what I have done. 

This afternoon I returned happily from the seamstress with no fewer than three gorgeous white cotton nightgowns to sleep in and enjoy all summer long. Prettily pin tucked and trimmed with white silk ribbons and beautiful bits of vintage lace, they are the stuff of any girlie girl’s dreams. Given what I went through to acquire them, obviously they are the stuff of my dreams too and I thank Susan Richards with all my heart for every perfect stitch.

It seems that all I think about nowadays is either blue food for Sasha’s film gig or his pending appearance in Small Claims Court where he is being frivolously sued by the photographer, Sherman Hines. Both played a part in our weekend because it was the only time that Sasha could be here at home and that we’d have any chance at all to get caught up on anything. So, while dipping cold cuts and cheese slices in blue food dye, we reviewed the legal situation while toasting our nephew’s twenty seventh birthday with pink champagne. I guess you could say that we got a lot of bang out of the weekend buck.

In my own small world, my maiden effort at blogging, Sherman’s Behind,  apparently got itself noticed by another blogger last week, someone who writes about marketing and communication, who has suggested he’d like to include it in an article about “how the internet makes the David and Goliath story obsolete.” His readership, he tells me, is about five thousand people, but so far nothing further has happened on that front. 

In the particular situation detailed in my blog, David has yet to score a victory and Goliath keeps coming on strong, so I’m not sure I can agree with the premise anyway just yet. In the meanwhile Sasha has started a  new Facebook group called People Supporting Sasha in his Claim against Sherman Hines, so the saga continues in that universe as well. As fascinated as I am by social networking and the power of the internet to disseminate information rapidly, I am beginning to find the entire thing quite fatiguing intellectually and would far rather focus my own attentions elsewhere. If I didn’t believe so strongly in this particular struggle, I’d have packed it in a long time ago. 

When I’m not reflecting on the vagaries of the legal system. I am still enjoying myself quite a lot these days. One bit of happy news is that yet another broody hen in another habitat entirely, seems to be sitting on another clutch of eggs. This time I had the wit to turn to my friend and mentor, Ron Rogerson, of Oaklawn Farm Zoo, for some advice on how to achieve a happier outcome this time around. According to Ron, it is likely that the previous hen had, at some point in the past, eaten an egg or two and that the behaviour just resurfaced again in the barn. Cannibalism can apparently lie dormant sometimes .

With a new opportunity before us, this time we are planning to take Ron’s suggestions and handle the situation a bit differently. We will, by night, remove the broody hen and her eggs  to an apple box or bushel basket which we will then cover with a small blanket or a towel. This we will remove again to a secure and private habitat in which no other birds will be present and the hen and eggs will be left in peace. Apparently, once uncovered, the hen will hop in and out of the box (or basket) for food and water and the eggs should be quite secure until they hatch. Unless she’s another cannibal, that is. 

If that happens, we are definitely giving up.