#cornelia st

[ileftherbackhome]

midnight rain sounds like cornelia street!!!

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Two little girls watching the village blacksmith at work, 1937. Greenwich Village, that is—33 Cornelia Street.

Photo: E.M. Bofinger via NYC Municipal Archives

[jomiddlemarch]

and is there honey still 

Kissing Mary Vance was nothing like kissing Faith.

This realization, occurring a moment after the kiss ended, Jem’s hand still at Mary’s slender waist, her normally pale cheeks as pink as a rare mayflower, was followed immediately by the understanding that he’d never be able to tell anyone. There was no confidant he could trust with such a secret, even if he could bring himself to so violate the rules of gentlemanly behavior. It just wasn’t done and that was before he considered speaking of kissing Mary Vance, who was accepted as Miss Cornelia’s adopted daughter, but whose personal history was never quite forgotten.

Susan, should she ever hear of it, would be scandalized beyond comprehension. 

Jem would never eat another slice of her strawberry pie.

His friends and siblings would be confused, Faith put out, her pique covering any feelings of betrayal, for all that there was nothing binding between them.

Mother would be disappointed and Dad would shake his head.

The expression in Mary’s eyes, those queer eyes he now saw were the color of moonstones, told him she understood it all. 

“It’s nothing to make a fuss about,” she said. Faith would have tossed her head making such a remark, her golden-brown curls shown to advantage, but Mary only looked at him steadily and let the hand that had been on his shoulder drop to her lap.

“You hold yourself too cheap, Mary,” Jem said. 

“That ain’t—that isn’t possible,” she replied. “Anyway, what’s a kiss amount to?”

It was a good question, one Jem had thought he’d known the answer to, just as he thought he’d known the answer to the question she was laboring over at her desk in the empty classroom, a piece of paper scribbled over and crossed-out, grey smudges on the foolscap, on Mary’s white cuffs. She would’ve laundered them herself, being Miss Cornelia’s daughter not relieving her of her housekeeping duties, chores she’d call them though Jem knew none of his sisters had ever helped even pinning clean clothes to the line.

He supposed a kiss could be an ordinary thing, a peck on the cheek or the lips, a greeting, friendly and inconsequential as a wave, a forgettable gesture of a mild affection.

Kissing Mary Vance was nothing like that.

He could say, in all honesty, that he hadn’t planned it. He’d been pointing out something in her writing, a tricky bit she’d gotten tangled up in, and she’d been peering down at the page, trying to make it out. When she’d perceived her mistake, she’d looked up at him, her expression one he’d never seen before, victory and pride and delight all swirled together, altering her face from one he’d recognized without being aware of it into one he’d been startled to discover. Without a word, without a thought, he’d leaned in and kissed her parted lips before she crowed over her achievement or thanked him, the caress impetuous, a whim, irresistible.

She was irresistible. He’d grazed her lips with his own and in the space before the next heartbeat, he’d cupped her jaw with one hand and let the other drop to her waist to draw her close. He felt the most tremendous desire for her possess him, everything else dropped away. She tasted, quite impossibly, of honey, though that was perhaps because he had always liked honey best, and she was warm in his embrace, coming closer when his hand at her waist reached around her back, sighing a little when he stroked her cheek and angled her head to be able to kiss her more deeply. Every second, his desire for her ratcheted sharply upwards and she met him, her hand clutching his shoulder, her sharp tongue sweet in his mouth. She kissed the way a fast girl kissed but there was a terrible innocence to her response that made him know she’d never kissed anyone else, whatever she might have intimated to his sisters and her friends.

He couldn’t say why he’d broken away. 

A sound in the hallway or her sudden stillness when his hand grazed her breast, the need to breathe, the pounding of his heart felt throughout his whole body. 

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Mary went on when he was stayed silent.

“Are you sorry?” he blurted out, and hearing the words he became suddenly terrified that he’d transgressed, become that monster Reverend Meredith always warned of in his gentle way, a man consumed by his appetites, greed and lust. “Oh, God, Mary, have I made you do something you didn’t want—”

“As if you could!” she said, wry again, Mary Vance again as he’d ever known her. If she’d wanted to, she would have slapped him, he was sure of that. “There’s no person living who could make me do what I didn’t want and certainly not you, Jem Blythe.”

“That’s good, I suppose,” he said, chastened, still too close to her. Still tasting the honey-sweetness of her lips, feeling the sound of the quiet moan of hers he’d swallowed in his throat.

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” she offered. “Or ever again. It could be just something that happened once, like as if you’d knocked over my inkwell, and we can forget about it. If that’s what you’d like. To be easy about it.”

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” he repeated, agreeing. An inkwell knocked over would leave a stain, one endless scrubbing would never entirely remove. “But I won’t forget. I shan’t.”

“That’s good, I suppose,” she said, her old tone mixed in with a new softness. He’d mussed her hair and some of the loose strands caught the light, a far cry from the usual trig appearance Miss Cornelia insisted upon. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see this Mary again, but it might be enough, to have seen it this one time. It was more Walter’s way to say he’d carry it as a talisman, but Jem felt it without saying it, that to have this moment might serve him well in the future.

“Mind you turn that paper in,” he said. 

“Mind yourself, then,” she said and turned away.

He wouldn’t see Mary alone for another ten years. 

“Thought I’d find you here,” Mary said, sitting down beside him, facing the water. She tucked her skirt around her and made no effort to conceal her sturdy, scuffed boots. It was a cool evening, cooler by the shore, but she didn’t have a coat or even the old wool shawl she’d refused to give up before he’d left for France. He shrugged off his own coat and offered it to her. He’d be warm enough in his heavy jersey, one the fisherman down at the harbor wore when the wind picked up.

“Not Rainbow Valley?” he said.

“Why would you go there? You’re not a child anymore. Haven’t been for a long time, unless I miss my mark,” she said. 

“No, you’re right,” he said. “Not for a long time.”

“You don’t have to talk to me about anything. Not about the War or Walter or being a prisoner,” she said. She said it without any particular tenderness, which was the most consoling part. He recalled, very dimly, that before she had come to Miss Cornelia, she’d lived through her own horrors, yet spoke of them rarely if at all.

“Don’t have to tell me about any French girls either,” she added and he laughed. 

It was the first time he’d laughed since he came home. Since he came back to the Glen, anyway, and called it home without being able to fully mean it.

“Not much to tell there. I mostly saw nuns and the Red Cross nurses are awfully brisk, whatever their nationality,” he said.

“I’ve always thought Cornelia would make a good nun, for all that she’s married,” Mary said.

“Perhaps,” Jem replied. The waves kept breaking on the sand and it was dusk, romantic if you wanted it to be. Mary had his coat wrapped around her shoulders. Jem felt scoured, raw and empty.

“Why’d you come, if you don’t expect me to talk?” he asked after several minutes of silence.

“I guess because you need someone who doesn’t expect you to talk but who’s willing to sit nearby, without fussing over anything,” she said. “I’ve plenty of handwork and housework to deal with at home. I’m perfectly content to sit and be idle and there’s nothing you can say or not say that can hurt me. I’m not hurt the way you are, I can bear whatever you need—”

“They can’t at home,” he said. Mother, with grief in her grey eyes and grey in her auburn hair, and Rilla, grown into a mother before she was a wife, Dad with something more broken inside him than any of the rest. Susan and Dog Monday and the letters from Di and Nan, blotted and halting. Una, who might as well be one of the French nuns who tended him, all of them mourning Walter and trying to rejoice at his return. Jem, trying to keep them from hearing any of his nightmares, biting his tongue when they spoke at a meal of the future or the past.

“I know,” she said. “Faith Meredith’s married a Brit. Officer, Lord Something Hoity-Toity of Fancy Abbey-on-High.”

“I’m happy for her,” Jem said tiredly. “We were childhood sweethearts, that’s all.”

“I know. Just wanted it said so you’d know I know,” Mary replied.

“If she’d waited, I wouldn’t have wanted her. I wouldn’t want her to have me now, as I am,” he said. “Befouled, diminished—”

“Walter’s dead, Jem. You don’t have to speak in his voice,” Mary said. 

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were. If you don’t think I’d remember, after all those afternoons, those walks and rambles, listening to him, well then. You’d be wrong. I remember,” she said.

“I want Faith to stay as she is. Beautiful, golden, untouched, a lovely memory from my splendid childhood,” Jem said.

“Good Lord, she’d far better off than I thought, even without taking a castle into account,” Mary exclaimed. “Maybe her Lord Gawain-Excalibur-Avalon actually treats her like a women. A person.”

“I didn’t know you liked the Arthurian legends,” Jem replied, taken aback by Mary’s remark, choosing to deflect.

“I liked the sword. And the Lady of the Lake with her own place,” Mary said.

“I thought it would be like that, the War, knights going out,” he said. “I knew there’d be wounds and death, but I thought there’d be honor—"

“You always were a bit of a fool,” Mary said. “Stands to reason though, the way you were raised.”

“We had a—you’re right,” he said, realizing he did not have to defend his parents or Ingleside. “Mother was so careful for us to be well-loved. To live in a world where we might imagine ourselves heroes or able to speak with the fairies—you would have done better than I at the Front, Mary.”

“No one would do better,” she said. He braced himself for her to talk about his medals, his valiant efforts in the prison camp, how he tended those around him with what little he had. How many men had died in his hands, their blood the scent in his nose as terrifying as gas. “You lived.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough.”

“Come here, then,” she said, shifting to kneel facing him. The moon had risen and it suited her, her eyes gleaming like opals, her hair silver, the shadow soft around her bare throat. She reached a hand to touch his cheek, rough with the whiskers he hadn’t shaved for the past few days. “Come here, James,” she said and the sound of his name startled him enough to move closer. To let her draw his face to hers for a kiss.

For a moment, he was seventeen again and Walter was alive, the fields of France green, the chestnut trees in leaf. Then he heard a wave break and felt Mary’s hand move to the nape of his neck, her fingers callused, and he tasted salt mixed with honey. She beckoned him and he put his arms around her, holding her tightly, trying to lose himself in her embrace. Letting her find him.

They were alone with the moon and the sea. There was no hallway and Mary kissed him well enough there were no memories, not of France or Germany or Holland, not of the ship or the train or the graveyard with the stone too white, the wilting mayflowers at its base. There was nothing Mary would not do, no end to the comfort she would offer. His hands were at her waist and her breast, eased beneath her skirts, and she coaxed him on. When he brought both back to cup her face, she’d smiled under his lips. When he lay back against the sand and brought her to lie next to him, her head resting upon his chest, she’d come with him.

“I should have asked, Miller Douglas?”

“He married Ada Parker six months ago. I didn’t shed a tear, except that they should be happy,” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t fancy being a shopkeeper’s wife, but I would have made the best of it.”

“I’m alive, but I don’t know what I have to offer,” Jem said. Mary thumped him on the chest, hard enough to notice, soft enough to be nothing more than a scolding.

“You’ve yourself and I’m myself. You don’t have to offer me anything,” she said.

“That’s the first lie you’ve told,” he said.

“Then remember me. This. How it was, how it might be,” she said. “Grieve and suffer and if you want, I’ll be there for it. Or you can come round in a while, when you’re sorted out. I’m in no hurry. I’ve an idea of how to run a doctor’s house, no offense to your mother or Susan, and I’d like to try it out some time.”

“Will there be much pie?” Jem asked.

“There will be honey-cake, pots and pots of clover honey ready to drizzle. That’s your favorite.”

“Call me James again,” he said.

She propped herself up on his chest so he could see her face, the curve of her lips, her silvery hair hanging loose around her cheeks.

“I believe you meant to say, please, James. Mind yourself, then.”

Tagging @gogandmagog who posted this:

DIANA, teasingly: “You, anyhow. I saw you kissing Faith Meredith in school last week ... and Mary Vance, too.”

JEM:- “For mercy’s sake, don’t let Susan hear you say that. She might forgive it with Faith but never with Mary Vance.” From The Blythes Are Quoted

And @freyafrida who wrote "also want to write jem/mary fic now although i have zero ideas for anything apart from the ship"

[foxes-that-run]

The way she's mashing up songs to change the meaning of the songs since Miami. Idn

I think she’s doing a great job of finding songs that are about the same thing with different points of view. I think it’s a comment that songs are a point in time rather than a definitive statement on something. In Betty speeches throughout the tour she’s said she wrote a song that was what she felt for (it used to be 7) 4 seconds. She’s saying two opposite songs can be about the same thing/time.

Cornelia st - the fear of losing someone, in the canon this is supposed to be weeks into a relationship which is frankly weird. The song makes most sense in an on/off contending that it has and will end.

The bolter - an acknowledgment that Taylor has run from relationships, that unlike Cornelia & it’s hopeful warmth it’s a perfunctory admission that she ends things.

Together this is books ending, both are about a relationship ending, both the fear of it happening and a kind of defiant realisation that she is the one that ends things. I

DBATC is about not being about to move on, the relationship was broken, she gave up and tried to put it behind her but can’t let go and wants it back

The Great War is about a relationship that’s been similarly ravaged but here they succeeded, she thought she lost the person but found she didn’t but they’ve been through it

Together DBATC x The Great War are both about losing a relationship and contemplating the outcome of keeping it or losing it. She ended on the line “I asked the traffic light if it would be OK and it said I don’t know” which summed up the dichotomy of the mash up. It’s one of my favourite lines of hers and I think she said she also likes that line once but I can’t find the reference now.

[charmingsaturday]

on that note..... this mashup finally gave me the push I needed to commit to change my url..

wishidnevergrownup -> charmingsaturday

[swiftlysimulation]

“One More Time”

Cornelia Parker

St Pancras International Station, May 28 - November 2, 2015

Cornelia Parker’s work, One More Time, in 2015, was a working replica of the station’s DENT London clock. Reversed out in black and silver, it became reminiscent of a photographic negative. The black clock was suspended 16 metres in front of the original, so for those alighting from the trains the original face will gradually appear eclipsed.

One More Time was conceived to invoke meditative thoughts on the passage of time, life and mortality: “The clock is the most conscious focus of a railway station, a dominant force. Everyone is watching the clock, checking if they are late.

[taylorrepdetective]

and how are we?

Wondering the context of this ask.

Like in general? Getting over bit of a flu. After traveling last week. Tired.

With regards to Taylor? That surprise song set was really something and got me thinking of fall 8 years ago. And also rolling my eyes at some of the takes.

With regards to the looming feeling of dread that the election on Tuesday is bringing? Not well anon. Not well.

[gaylor-gremlin]

[tsmerch]

what are your top 3 favorite and least favorite merch pieces and why?

This is so hard. I am struggling. My subjective answers:

Favorite (because I wear/use them a lot and like the design): green rep crop long sleeve, i know places bomber jacket, and the evermore guitar.

Least favorite (because they did not live up to my expectations): blue and red stars around my scars pullovers, grey exile pullover, blue color block midnights sweatshirt/sweatpants.

But I think products like the cardigans and the snow globes are objectively great products, they’re just not things I personally am interested in.

[mulderscully]

i noticed the difference between me and other swifties: i don't think taylor's songs in terms of like. they're about her. all her songs are about me and/or my blorbos after the first listen.

[ilovefandoms]

Me thinking that all the surprise songs this weekend were going to be from SN 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 as if she wasn't literally in K's home state, and of course she sang dorothea

[ileftherbackhome]

so, i know y'all think cornelia st is a gaylor song and honestly, would y'all be mad at me if I said I didn't really see it? like, i know the arguments for why y'all thinking it's only about karlie but to be honest with y'all, there is a cornelia st in london (i just looked it up, and it's in the islington boroughs, which are apparently wealthy af according to google) and honestly, the whole second verse feels like it's about joe (it feels like mastermind and delicate and cruel summer all in one)... and like "i snuck in that summer every night just to seal my fate" (if she moved in with joe and he's always lived in primrose hill... it's like a 13 minute drive lmao wow i didn't even realize that one). I just feel like cornelia st is about her time in london, but with a callback to her time in new york? and we know that she was hiding out in london in early 2017 and so i feel like it makes much more sense for the song to be about the fear she feels losing joe, cause it almost killed her the last time she lost someone on cornelia st?

[9w1ft]

remember when u predicted her playing cornelia street in august?👀

wait i did?? i swear everything has been a blur and a half 😭

[jomiddlemarch]

That it alone is high fantastical

“Oh, Mother, you’ll never guess! You’ll never guess in century of guessing!” Rilla cried out, sounding so much as she had as a little girl, for a moment, Anne could convince herself the War had never happened and that somewhere in Rainbow Valley, Walter sat writing a crown of sonnets in his leather-bound journal, his face dappled by the light, back braced against the bole of a birch tree, his grey eyes unfocused as he searched for his next word.

There was still a white stone in the graveyard. Shirley was in Toronto, having refused (albeit politely) to return to Glen St. Mary, much to Susan’s dismay, and Jem walked with a pronounced limp, his uneven gait announcing him as much as Mary’s voice.

There was a mystery there, Jem and Mary Vance, but Anne couldn’t see any way through it and Gilbert, lying beside her in bed, both of them tired but sleepless, told her not to try. Jem had seemed less removed, less falsely cheerful lately, and had begun talking about the medical course again, perhaps a specialty in obstetrics, a hospital practice. As far away from men dying in battle as he can get, Gilbert had observed and Anne had recalled Joyce’s little face, white as a mayflower blossom, and held her tongue.

Rilla, remarkably, given her exuberant entrance, had done the same in the absence of Anne’s response. Miss Oliver had left Ingleside some weeks ago, so there was no one to suggest Rilla either elaborate or calm herself, as her likeness to a whistling copper tea-kettle was increasingly pronounced.

“If I’ll never guess, dear, you must tell me,” Anne said. It was a relief that Rilla could still be the young girl she ought to be, for all that she wore Ken Ford’s diamond ring on her finger and was capable of a brisk, warm matronliness when it came to raising Jims, now reserved for the writing of letters to his new British stepmother and clucking over the missives she received.

“Faith Meredith has eloped!”

Anne did admit to herself she would never have guessed that, because for all her imagination, she wouldn’t have guessed something impossible.

“But, Rilla, Jem is with your father today, doing the Lowbridge rounds. Susan and I packed a lunch with plenty of pie for Dad and some of that flapjack Jem took to after being in England,” Anne said. He’d been in hospital in England, recovering from the injuries he’d sustained at the Front, in the prison camp, during his escape, none of which was spoken of. Only flapjack and stewed tea and how no cook in England was a patch on Susan and that you may tie to, uttered with some semblance of his old roguish humor.

“I didn’t say she married Jem, Mother!” Rilla exclaimed. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were bright. She had a look of Gilbert at his most delighted about him, an expression Anne remembered from their childhood. Anne opened her mouth to speak but Rilla interrupted.

“It’s Bertie Shakespeare Drew! Faith Meredith is Mrs. Bertie Shakespeare!” Rilla said.

If Anne hadn’t already been sitting down, she would have, suddenly and gracelessly. As it was, the shirt she’d been mending fell from her lap.

“That’s—why, Rilla, are you sure?”

“I heard it directly from Mary Vance,” Rilla said, lifting a hand to stop Anne from speaking. “And Miss Cornelia Bryant. You know Miss Cornelia has no taste for gossip. Miss Cornelia’d heard it from Mrs. Meredith—”

“Poor Rosemary,” Anne said, before she could stop herself.

“Why poor Rosemary? I suppose they thought Faith and Jem would make a go of it, at least, perhaps Reverend Meredith and Mrs. Meredith did, but the War’s done funny things to people and Faith and Jem, they just didn’t fit any longer,” Rilla said. Sometimes, Anne felt Rilla reminded her of someone she couldn’t name and realized her youngest daughter spoke with the wisdom Anne’s own mother might have had. Plenty of folks in the Glen would find such a thought eerie, but Anne was comforted, for all that she ought to be the one offering a thoughtful explanation rather than receiving it.

“I suppose I meant the surprise, an elopement—”

“They must not have wanted to wait. Or were afraid someone would try to talk them out of it. Bertie’s mother maybe,” Rilla said.

Rosemary or her father, Anne thought. Jem, if he’d been given the chance, perhaps. Perhaps not, if Rilla was correct.

“Bertie Shakespeare Drew,” Anne said. “I remember when he was born. He’s just Jem’s age.”

“He’s not much like you remember him, Mother. He’s all tall and stalwart now and they say he’s going in for engineering, that he learned quite a bit in France, found he had a talent for that sort of thing. And his ears don’t stick out quite so much anymore,” Rilla said.

“There’re more things on heav’n and earth,” Anne said, mangling the quote a bit, fairly certain Rilla would not correct her. “D’you suppose Faith calls him Bertie? Or his full name—it’s quite a mouthful.”

Queenly Faith Meredith, the undisputed beauty of Glen St. Mary, who had a sense of humor but also a sense of herself as beyond any teasing, now to be Mrs. Bertie Shakespeare Drew. Anne smiled to herself and thought how Mary Vance would find a way to make Jem grin over it all. She’s lucky to get him, Mary would say, reversing the order the Glen would have assumed, and Mary, canny and unexpectedly kind, would have the right of it, perhaps.

Susan would be quite outraged and the pastry of her next pie might suffer for it, but Gilbert had always taken an unchristian glee in Susan’s outrage and wouldn’t mind the pastry being a bit heavier. It was still the best piecrust on Prince Edward Island, now that Mrs. Rachel Lynde was no longer living to give Susan a run for her money.

“Miss Cornelia said Faith was heard to call him Will, when she spoke to her parents. It’s after Shakespeare of course, and because he was so determined they marry,” Rilla said. 

“And because Faith wanted to,” Anne said. She wasn’t sure if she meant the elopement or the name, but it was all of a piece.

“Miss Cornelia said they’d gone to New York for their honeymoon and she hoped Faith didn’t come back with a bunch of silly Yankee airs but Mary and I didn’t think that was likely,” Rilla said, sitting down beside Anne, picking up the shirt and starting to sew.

“She didn’t come back from England any different, after all,” Rilla said.

“Except that she didn’t marry your brother,” Anne replied.

“D’you know, Mother, even without the War, I don’t think they’d ever have gone through with it, Faith and Jem,” Rilla said. “It was, how shall I put it, like a childhood fairy tale, the honorable knight and the maiden fair, all sorts of adventures they had in Rainbow Valley. They were always going to grow up. We all were.”

Not Walter, Anne’s heart said. Not Joyce.

“I’m glad of Ken’s name, anyway. And don’t worry, I wouldn’t elope for anything. I want our families around us, as many as we can get, even if we have to wait. We’re rather good at that,” Rilla said. She’d finished the one shirt and picked up another. She peered at it, frowned. “I can’t think what Dad does to his clothes—”

“I’ve made up a thousand stories to try to explain that and I still don’t think I’ve figured it out,” Anne said. “Some things, my darling girl, are beyond explanation.”

This one's for @freyafrida because I didn't manage to squeeze Faith/Bertie Shakespeare into my Jem/Mary fic...

[highscal]

where were you when 5sos announced a tour? i was literally on cornelia street @nostalgiabones

[bidamonalbarn]

taylor has the opportunity to pair king of my heart with you're losing me and I think that gives her too much power