… in London.
She’s Barbie.
She forgot to list Windsor, for a work gathering.
The rest of it was meeting up with friends, attending a wedding,
and exploring Lisbon, which she’s been wanting to visit.
There I am, foreground, in a little white sweater, pacing the tree with my siblings. It’s 1960. We lived in London that year, but this moment has us in Sea Palling, beside an eerie old holiday house our parents had rented.
I remember little from that long ago, but distinctly recall crawling in and out of the strange hidden little rooms and crevices of the Sea Palling house on dreary days when we couldn’t walk the beach.
This woman for awhile mapped every monkey puzzle tree she could find in England, but no Sea Palling tree appears in her search engine. Is this one still there? They live for a thousand years and grow to over a hundred feet. This one looks to be about thirty feet. If it exists, it’s massive.
I’m in love with the name Sea Palling. Like pure music, it means everything and nothing — I mean, the words pulse with significance, yet when you actually look at them together they’re semantically silent… The town used to be called only Palling – Victorians attached “sea” in a bid for tourists – and could have meant anything even at the beginning. No one, that is, can tell you what the name of the town means. The two words compressed seem to become one – seapalling … appalling? The sea palling, fading in power or beauty, its waves receding… Or in a deathly (funeral pall) way, the sea whitening, blanching, as when Blake describes
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.
… PROROGUE! What a great word. Describes the current American government beautifully, but I think its meaning here is different.
… hangs out with its star, Rebel Wilson.
The child does get around.