In the corner of my bedroom, on permanent display, is the greatest thing I own: this amazing picnic basket.
I fell in a weird kind of love with it while Adrian and I were working on a project in Vancouver and he bought it for me for Christmas that year.
It’s at once the epitome of both Downton Abbey retro chic and hipster acid green.
It’s ultra-traditional yet entirely free-spirited.
It assumes I drink wine (Thank God) and it also has matching plates and linen napkins.
Frankly, my picnic basket is setting a VERY high standard for the rest of my life: a vision of carefree, impromptu springtime picnics in convertibles (yet with a cheese board and wine glasses and linen napkins, it’s also requiring a certain degree of non-road stop preparation beforehand.)
I want to be –– and I increasingly am –- the kind of person who will have that perfect picnic assortment for four always at the ready.
Like Grace Kelly offering Cary Grant cold chicken and beer as she speeds through the hills outside the French Riviera in TO CATCH A THIEF.
Or where someone who strangely gets naked in public, a la Manet.
Or at least remove half their shirt, a la William Holden.
I’m already a huge fan of a glass of wine on a Friday afternoon at an outside bistro table … and now I just want to step up my game/entire lifestyle to be always picnic-ready: spontaneous (though prepared), playful yet classy, and devoted entirely to unplanned pleasures of the moment.
In short, I’m basically hoping to raise myself to a level of worthiness with my picnic basket.
Here’s hoping 2014 … Here’s hoping.
P.S. –– the title of this blog comes from the fact that when I put everything in my life in storage, I photographed the incredibly organized boxes with huge labels created via my laser printer. One said, “Fragile Picnic” and I realized that was saying EVERYTHING …
Life is a fragile picnic, indeed!
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