This will be long so you may want to skip it, but it is an excerpt from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wonderful book, The Little Prince.  Mum and I read it to each other this morning and cried a bit more, but it seemed fitting.

It was then that the fox appeared.

“Good morning,” said the fox.

“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”

“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”

“I am a fox,” the fox said.

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince.  “I am so unhappy.”

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said.  “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.  But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean - ‘tame’?”

. . . “It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox.  “It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox.  “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys.  And I have no need of you.  And you, on your part, have no need of me.  To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.  To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be unique in all the world...”

“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince.  “There is a flower ... I think that she has tamed me ...”

“It is possible,” said the fox.  “On the Earth one sees all sorts of things.”

“Oh, but this is not on the Earth!” said the little prince.

The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious.

“On another planet?”

“Yes.”

“Are there hunters on that planet?”

“No.”

“Ah, that is interesting!  Are there chickens?”

“No.”

“Nothing is perfect,” sighed the fox.

But he came back to his idea.

“My life is very monotonous,” he said.  “I hunt chickens; men hunt me.  All the chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike.  And, in consequence, I am a little bored.  But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life.  I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.  Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground.  Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow.  And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder?  I do not eat bread.  Wheat is of no use to me.  The wheat fields have nothing to say to me.  And that is sad.  But you have hair that is the colour of gold.  Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me!  The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you.  And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat ...”

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

“Please - tame me!” he said.

“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied.  “But I have not much time.  I have friends to discover and a great many things to understand.”

“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox.  “Men have no more time to understand anything.  They buy things all ready made at the shops.  But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.  If you want a friend, tame me...”

“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.

“You must be very patient,” replied the fox.  “First you will sit down at a little distance from me - like that - in the grass.  I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing.  Words are the source of misunderstandings.  But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...”

The next day the little prince came back.

“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox.  “If, for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy.  I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances.  At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about.  I shall show you how happy I am!  But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you...”

. . . So the little prince tamed the fox.  And when the hour of his departure drew near -

“Ah” said the fox.  “I shall cry.”

“It is your own fault,” said the little prince.  “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you...”

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“Then it has done you no good at all!”

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the colour of the wheat fields.” And then he added: “Go and look again at the roses.  You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.  Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

“You are not at all like my rose,” he said.  “As yet you are nothing.  No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one.  You are like my fox when I first knew him.  He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on.  “One could not die for you.  To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me.  But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.  Because she is my rose.”

And he went back to meet the fox.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye,” said the fox.  “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose - “ said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it.  You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose...”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: Piccolo Books, 1974) pp 64-72

Last night at about 10pm, our cat Scout (who should have been inside but slipped out when we didn’t notice) was hit by a car outside our house and killed.  The driver didn’t stop or even pause, but kept going - in fact, I didn’t even hear the sound of anything being hit.  A trio of people driving past stopped when they saw her and brought her over to the side of the road; that’s when we saw them out our window and went out to see what had happened.  The girl who spoke to me was very upset, and I was touched by her compassion. 

Scout, thankfully, wasn’t squashed by the car.  Her white bib was red with blood, and her eyes black and fully dilated, and it seems that she died very quickly.  We cried a lot and wrapped her up.  The thing that saddened me most was stroking her, and the tail that normally curled around my hand just flopped back down.

This morning we took her to the vet’s so they could take care of her body, and we went out to have a breakfast in her honour.

It’s hard to know how to grieve for a lost pet.  It’s not the same as mourning the loss of a human, but it is a very real grief, the loss of a creature that depended on you and trusted you fully, the loss of that companionship and affection.  She was a dear little thing, and I’m grateful to God for the year and nine days that we had her.

1. Vampires wear a lot of make up, boy vampires especially.
2. Vampires all have really interesting / big / weird hair, boy vampires especially.
3. From certain angles, points 1 and 2 make boy vampires look like Robert Smith rejects from a Cure music video.
4. Vampires drive awesomely cool cars.  Really fast.
5. When a vampire stands in the corner of your bedroom and watches you sleep because it fascinates him, it’s not creepy.  It’s romantic.
6. Vampires sparkle in the sunlight, and that’s apparently a bad thing because it means they can’t fit in.  But it does attract the girls.

Here’s the puppet version (thanks Karen!).  Almost as good as the movie itself!  (which I shamelessly enjoyed as a pulpy diversion).

Bought a pattern for the envelope clutch from Keykalou on Etsy.  And I think the first one I made turned out pretty good, don’t you?

Perfectly fits a Moleskine, phone and a coin purse.  Hooray for creativity!

Mum was sick on the day that her church was doing gingerbread house making, so the kit got dropped off to our house and mum said I could make it.  So I did!  The best part about making a gingerbread house on your own?  You don’t have to share the lollies.

This house has many bears.  Goldilocks would have a hard time getting in.