A Girl With a Sword

my name

I know, I kind of obsess over my name, this is like the fortieth time I've talked about it on my blog, but I just realized something. I've always seen my name's meaning given as "lime tree" or "linden tree" and I didn't realize until now that these are the same thing! And they're not lime trees as in bearing limes, it's something else! Which is very confusing and a little disappointing, but it gets better.

This is a lime tree of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. This may not be significant to my readers, but I'm in the middle of reading The Historian and I'm like "Matthias Corvinus, legendary enemy of Vlad III of Wallachia, aka Dracula!" The Wikipedia article on lime/linden trees also talks about how significant they are in folklore. They're the national emblem of not one, not two, but four people groups! I'm impressed, although it will still take awhile for me stop feeling related to the small green fruit.

I realized all this because I was looking up the Romanian pop song Dragostea Din Tei and Wikipedia says "There are several proposed translations of the title, such as Love from the lime trees (also called "linden trees") and Love out of the linden trees." And I was like, oh how nice, it's about me, but what's this about linden trees? So I looked it up and then I realized "Linden" (also, Lyndon, Lindon, Lynden, etc.) is probably the masculine form of my name, even though my baby name book says it's English, not Swedish, it says it means "linden-tree hill" so it's very similar. And I do have a Swedish uncle named Linden (is that how he spells his name?). Anyway, that's like a breakthough for me because I could never figure out why there weren't any names similar to mine and I just realized there are! And I also couldn't figure out why a Swedish name would mean "lime tree," and that's solved too! Plus I get to be named after a national emblem of my fellow Slavs! I feel like my name totally unites my heritage! Great job picking my name, Mom!

tea and Christmas

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
--Dylan Thomas, "A Child's Christmas in Wales"

(Me and Will and "House" the snowman, Christmas 2006)

One Christmas was so much like another

Listening to Marian McPartland reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." I love Christmas. Going to Nebraska tomorrow, (Hmm, I also apparently love composing sentences of gerundive phrases.) where there will be snow and we can throw snowballs at cats, or we could if I went outside, which I don't. I stay inside and read and drink tea and make mince pies.

The first half of this week I spent grading the twenty-three writing portfolios I got from my students. Grades were due on Thursday at noon and I got them turned in on Wednesday night at eleven. Cutting it close. Twenty-three portfolios with four papers each, that's ninety-two papers. I should have taken a picture of them when they were spread all across the living room floor, but this is what they look like now, piled neatly by the bookshelf.

Since then I've been Christmas shopping and grocery shopping and going to work and to the library (can't get stuck without books over Christmas, the best time for reading). Made channa masala this morning. It was great. I've been kind of obsessed with the dish over the past month, getting it whenever I can--Indian takeout, frozen dinners, the buffet on Hope's birthday. My version isn't quite as good as an Indian restaurant, but it's still nice to know I can make it.