Glitter is Forever

I have a saying about glitter that isn’t very complimentary.   It’s been said many times by many people but I’ve adopted it because it’s just so true.   Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies.   The inference is once you have glitter, you can’t get rid of it.    I’m pretty vocal about my extreme prejudice against glitter.   Friends, family and even my children know how I feel.

That being said, glitter does come around from time to time and it must be dealt with.   Glitter greeting cards arrive in the mail, a holiday decoration that sheds a glitter-like substance must be treated with care and placed on a spot the children won’t bother it from.   And then there are the presents.

The thing about giving someone a present with glitter on it is it’s not your problem.   Like what happened to my parents, you may not even realize the adorable little cape the cashier put in the bag at the consignment store was barely holding on to four ounces of gold glitter, ready to shed its motherlode at the first sign of a glitter-free home.

Glitter is really fun if you’re a child.   Children are so carefree and I envy them more and more as I get older and realize they just aren’t bothered by things.   What am I bothered by?  Small bits of shiny stuff that is doing me no harm other than looking shiny in spots I don’t conjure shiny bits should be located.

My parents got this great cape—the one mentioned above—and my daughter loves it.   I like it too, aside from the glitter.  The night they gave it to us she wore it to dinner and when we got home I held it as carefully away from me as I would an angry skunk and went out to the deck.    I commenced a beating on the cape the likes of which only a very dirty, old rug would have expected.

In the dark via the light on the deck post I watched shower after of shower of glitter rain down on the wooden planks.   I beat on and when the cape had convinced me it had a near endless supply of golden glitter I went and got a brush.   I brushed it vigorously and then beat it some more.    Ultimately the cape won and I went to bed, leaving it in the garage where it could do minimal glitter-damage to the house.

I brought my husband out to see the amount of glitter on the deck.   He was impressed.  I was impressed but I knew it would be blown away in the wind the next day and I would be rid of it for good.

My parents came over for dinner the next afternoon and I showed them the amount of glitter that still remained on the deck, most likely due to a calm morning and afternoon.     Today, I needed to get the leaves off the deck so I got the leaf blower out.    When I walked out I noticed, four days after the cape beating, there was still glitter.   There was still a good bit of glitter.

But I had a leaf blower.   The leaves were no match for the leaf blower, but the glitter is still there on the deck.   It’s on the wood; it’s on the chairs; it’s on the pillows and it’s on the table.     I think my new saying is: “glitter is forever.”

The Big Boy Update:  My son brought his iPad over to me this evening and showed me how he had “cleaned up room” on the page so I could download him “a hundred new apps.”   He had kindly put the other apps into a folder.   I tried to explain how we had to wait for people to make the apps.   He told me he would check back in the morning and could I please have them installed by then?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My mother said to me yesterday that my daughter was upstairs singing “Mary Had a Little Lamp.”