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I love to shop at stores that benefit charities, whether online or in person.  This gives me the great satisfaction of feeling that my money is accomplishing more than one purpose at a time.  One of my favorites is the Habitat for Humanity online shop – I have gotten HFH apparel, desk items, and gifts there.  Another favorite is the Southwest Indian Foundation, which has a great catalog as well as a super web site.  This charity supports Native American outreach in New Mexico.  And a third shop I really like is called Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade marketer and retailer that seeks to assist people in developing countries around the world.  While I prefer going to their shop in Boston, I see they also now have online shopping.

It’s always astonished me that Spanish moss – that dreary, droopy stuff that festoons old Southern landscapes — is related to pineapples. But it’s true. They’re both bromeliads, an ancient group of plants that includes a number of epiphytic species that don’t need to be rooted in soil to thrive. What these two very different-seeming plants do have in common is an exterior armor of overlapping plates. In the pineapple, it’s obvious. The skin is segmented with regularly incised scales. On the moss, it’s more subtle, but with a hand lens, it’s plain. Each silvery tendril of Spanish moss is covered with a mosaic of interlocking scales, like a butterfly’s wing.

The house I live in wasn’t always here. Originally, it was a vacation cottage on a barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico. Sturdily constructed of cypress and Southern yellow pine, when its owners found it in the path of development, instead of demolishing it, they jacked it up, put it on a flatbed truck and moved it inland about 30 miles. We bought it a few years ago, charmed by its shotgun shack-style simplicity and its beadboard walls. Of course, being old, resinous wood, it could go up like a torch someday, plus, as old as it is, it’s leaky as a sieve. But love overlooks flaws.

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The day is young, yet, so I’m wearing pajamas still. On top is a periwinkle blue tank-style shirt. It’s sleeveless, with Indian-influenced, machine-embroidered designs an the hem with a matching strip of applique applied to the V-neck. The bottoms are elastic-waist, floral print capri-length pants. The colors include the same pale purply blue as the top, as well as black and white accents — the twining vines, leaves and so on. I got these pajamas at least a year ago, before I’d lost a lot of weight — about 50 pounds — so they’re very loose, but when you’re asleep, that hardly matters.

Not having to worry about money would be sublime, I think. With no financial obligations, I’d get up every day, curry my mare, saddle her and ride hard for a few hours before breakfast. When I returned home, I’d feed her and the rest of the animals, then have a fresh fruit and tea breakfast myself. After digging around in the garden for a few hours, I’d swim for 45 minutes or so before settling in front of my easel or sitting down in front of my piano and fooling around for a bit. Once the kids were home from school — no, wait, if I had no financial obligations, my kids wouldn’t GO to school. I’d educate them here, myself.

I have a shiny little Mac that slips into my leather briefcase like a pistol into a holster. I like the soft clickety sound of its keys; I like its sleek shell; I like its blue-white back-lit keyboard. The operating system and commands feel right to me. Working it isn’t a struggle. In fact, it’s a pleasure. I even like the way it smells — kind of new car mixed with ozone. But what I really love is that it’s the essential tool of my trade — the hardware that enables me to wrestle with the universe as I feed my family.

Mostly, I remember all the laughter. Sure, there were dark times, but my parents saw to it that there were a lot of laughs in the house I grew up in.  Whether it was my mother drawing Christmas pictures on the naked pink belly of the family cockapoo, Cinder (washable markers, of course) or my father announcing that his favorite gum was Feenamint, things were always pretty light in our odd little house. We were often inappropriate — unabashedly so — but sometimes, that’s what kept us going, I’m pretty sure. Still does. My last birthday, my mom sent me a glossy card with a photo of a toucan on the front. Inside, it read, “See that beak? Know what you can do?”

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I like to watch silent films, D.W. Griffith epics, especially. To watch the actors and actresses overdoing their roles is an anachronistic treat. Plus, I love the rickety fonts of the old title cards. Black and white motion pictures seem to me to have a depth and dimensionality that somehow is lost in lushly colored contemporary films. Maybe it’s the simplicity, the limitation in palette to shades of gray, but I’ve always been someone who appreciates nuance over spectacle. The grappling with social issues — and here, I’m thinking of films like “Intolerance” and “Birth of a Nation” — make for interesting historical reference points, especially when it’s all one can do to keep from getting dragged to “Twilight.”

Near the open-air fleamarket on the east end of town is a sprawling Mexican retail complex called La Fiesta, started by a sometimes-jailbird named Miguel. Whatever else he had in his past, that man could COOK, so when I happened to find myself in that part of town recently around dinnertome, I had to stop in. As I remembered, there were cilantro-seasoned, lime-cooled, serrano-heated salsas, rich lardy beans and hand-patted tortillas, but best of all were the tacos al pastor — just as I remembered them from my youth in Mexico, with chile-soaked pork and fresh pineapple on top.

The energy I expend on the current recession doesn’t often rise to the level of thought; mostly it’s spent in gut-twisting fear that it’ll come close enough to scorch my family. But when I do try to think about it in an organized, reasonable way, the conclusion I reach (I’m not clever enough to theorize about causes and societal consequences) are that I’d better try to protect myself and my family. So I work hard, stay extra hours for which I don’t ask to be paid, save my change in a clay jug, sell plasma and spend spare scraps of time working odd jobs online.