Friday 5: The crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change

Happy Friday! Today is also National Cheese Fondue Day (yes, please!) and National Submarine Day (no thank you!) and I’m pretty pooped so let’s head to the Friday 5. This week’s theme is: the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

Oh, my heart. This is Charlotte’s Web. Before I move onto the questions, I want to share what that book means to me. I first read that story when I was 8 or so. Charlotte’s Web opened my eyes and my mind to the grand cycles of life. Not only the change of seasons and the signs of them changing (see the title about the crickets) but also life itself. Over the course of the story, Fern goes from pushing a doll and a pig in a doll carriage to riding a Ferris wheel with a boy. Wilbur, with the love of his friends, escapes his expected 3-season life cycle and lives for many years at the Zuckerman farm. Charlotte, of course, dies, but by saving her egg sac Wilbur ensures that her legacy will live forever and is greeted by new spider friends every spring. Seasons change, old folks die, babies are born, and little girls grow up. It’s a beautiful book, and it explained things to me at the perfect time for me to understand them. Charlotte’s Web taught me to love the changes of seasons.

1. How do you feel about spiders?
   I’m honestly not a fan, but I try not to kill them on the spot anymore. Maybe if one wrote “SOME MIDDLE MANAGER” on a web over my desk I’d feel better.
   
2. When in your life was every day a happy day and every night peaceful?
   This sounds terrible, but when I’m not home. When I’m traveling everything is great.
   
3. When did you last attend a fair, and how was it, and what did you eat?
   We go to Collingswood Mayfair every year! It’s not a traditional pig and quilt fair but it has fair in the name so I’ll count it. I always have one of the fresh-squeezed lemonades and a bag of kettle corn.
   
4. This weekend, what is likeliest to have you feeling T, double E, double R, double R, double I, double F, double I, double C C C?
   This is going to also sound terrible but sleeping in tomorrow morning. We’re in the crunch time before our conference and your girl is TIRED. And I’m not even in the meetings department.
   
5. What are some of your favorite children’s books?
   I already waxed poetic about Charlotte’s Web, but I also loved Little Women, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, some of the Little House on the Prairie books, and all of the Judy Blume books. I never read Anne of Green Gables. Am I too old to read that?

It’s going to rain most of the weekend which is truly a bummer. But I have a garden bed with beets, green onions, spinach, and lettuce that will thrive in the chilly dampness.