Stone Faces 5/31/14

Dana and I went to the Cottage Garden nursery in Petaluma this morning. In this land of nurseries, Cottage Garden is our favorite because of its pristine layout of beautifully planted raised beds and large variety of plants, pots and garden ornaments, all laid out around decomposed granite paths. There are a number of well behaved resident dogs, wandering around greeting the patrons, lounging on top of piled bags of potting soil or sleeping.

In the winter, a small dog in her bed can almost always be found in front of the fireplace. Today, however, it was warm, and she was asleep in her bed under a bench outside, happy to turn belly up the moment anyone approached to pat her and feel if her curly hair was as soft as it looked.

Their garden ornaments include large scale pots, rusty wire baskets, modern outdoor furniture and trellises covered with little metal birds and an aged patina. The "sacred faces" displayed on the wall do not strike me as particularly sacred, and would be downright unnerving were I to stumble across one in a garden. They look a lot like death masks to me, but I found the display on the wall, hanging from some old bedsprings, rather intriguing.

The soccer equipment store, our final stop to buy a World Cup jersey for Peter for his birthday on Monday, was very entertaining. Nothing but soccer shirts, jerseys, shorts, socks and shoes are contained within its four walls, which were filled with customers ranging in age from a five year old boy fully decked out in his black soccer uniform trying on new shoes, with his parents, to a very small, very blonde girl with her mother, picking up her powder blue togs with her name on the back of the shirt. She proudly twirled around for us in her pink party dress with a pin proclaiming "birthday girl" on it.

The soccer geeks who work there obviously love their jobs. One was bilingual, switching seamlessly between Spanish and English, while the young man helping us was a trove of information about the origin and provenance of every jersey from every nationality we looked at. We settled on a USA t-thirt and a very spiffy black Brasil jersey for Peter. Since he has no special allegiance to a team, it seemed appropriate to get him one for the home country and one for the host one.