True to Form: The Weepies

I don't mean the band, "The Weepies." I mean, The Weepies. When you get weepy.

Sometimes I have sad days. When I want it to rain, and when I want "Paint It Black" to come on the radio while it's raining, while reading "How You Die." I think it's better to embrace the melancholy, man.

Yesterday I had a bad sad day. John was very understanding as I sniffled on the bed. "I'm going to the store. Do you want anything?" I shook my head no. "Chocolate?" Safe guess, but again, I shook my head no. At this point he realized it wasn't pms. Half playful, half serious, he made another attempt. "Doll?" Another no. "Maybe Crayons" I mumbled. "Dollhouse? Well, I can't get you a dollhouse. I can get you a cardboard box, though." I brightened. Now we were talking.

It takes a very mature person to admit they want to make a dollhouse out of a cardboard box. Very, very mature. Only the insecure would say otherwise.

No, I don't have young children to tend. Why do you ask?

July's tend to start this way. I know it's not July yet, but it's hot, and it's Getting There, and July is always a tough time for me for personal reasons. It never hits the same way, which is why last night at 10:30 I was busily cutting up a cardboard box and drawing rugs and portraits for it with crayons and yelling for John to bring some tape.

My cardboard box dollhouse has two rooms downstairs - very traditional - and one large room upstairs, with fold-down stairs because I like to keep it real and it always bothered me when dollhouses didn't have stairs. Like the family was going to fly out the window to enter an upper story. The top room is a dance/modern art studio. Yes, I made a piece of modern art for the wall out of - yes - more cardboard. It all sounds quite grand, I'm sure, but really it's a cardboard box with cardboard interior walls and stairs and crayon rugs and a crayon portrait.

But of course this really is just a continuation of the Mouse House. The Mouse House was a large, sprawling, dusty cardboard mess I kept under my bed when I was little until Mom made me throw it away because it was a series of shoe boxes taped together forming separate rooms for my stuffed mouse who had a little yellow dress and bead earrings I had sewn through her mousy ears. The Mouse House was pretty scraggly and collected a lot of dust and I had passed playing with it but was reluctant to throw away my hours of cutting doors to adjoining boxes and taping "curtains" to the windows and making little matchbox tv's.

Making the cardboard "dollhouse", for me, was like "scrapbooking" is for a lot of people. I don't "scrapbook." Especially when you have to pay lots of money for little cute things to decorate your scrapbook with, which, in my opinion, negates the term "SCRAPbook."

But making things from cardboard did make me think of one children's book I used to enjoy reading, and I have no idea what the title is. It was about a girl nicknamed "Cat" who liked to ballet dance and I think she was adopted and then her parents had quadruplets and she struggled to share her newly redecorated room with squalling babies and had friends with a big family down the street and I could swear the babies' names were Tim, Ian, Seth, and Luke and that Tim died and no, I'm not making this up but I can't even find out what the title is on Google. My memory is super strange and sometimes I do remember details that vividly that I haven't read in...let's see...seventeen years. So if this book sounds familiar, let me know, because it's seriously driving me nuts that I can't remember the title.