April 15, 2007

Amelia Bedelia

I had a strange blast from the past when I was thinking about the concept of 'dusting'. Why does 'to dust' mean to wipe away the dust? And why are those little particles called dust, when dust originally referred to what we now know as 'dirt.'

Anyway, this got me thinking about Amelia Bedelia. She is the star of one of my favorite book series that I read when I was a kid. Amelia Bedelia is a maid who always take directions literally. I remember her dusting the house by putting powder over all the furniture, drawing the drapes by doodling in a sketchbook, rearranging the towels by cutting holes in them, and putting the lights out by hanging light bulbs on the clothes line. The only way Amelia continued to keep her job was by making fresh pies and stuffing fork-fulls in her bosses' mouths as they spot each new disaster that she created. Who couldn't love Amelia Bedelia?

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:50 PM

    why in the world would you be thinking about dusting? hahaha

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  2. b/c I used the line "it gathered dust" in one of my poems and then I got to thinking about how gathering dust is hardly an active phrase. How can an object go about collecting dust as if it willed itself to do so? That therefore led into the thought about the task of dusting itself. Gee, I bet you wish you hadn't asked...

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  3. Anonymous10:48 PM

    hahahahaha....nice jenn

    ReplyDelete