Brand, God put that rock there for a purpose.

[Anthropologie silk skirt + JCrew men’s belt + Kors boots + JCrew tee + Moth (Anthro) grandpa cardigan + vintage pendant.]

Grey, chilly days spent watching old episodes of Thumbs Up! on ViceTV and painting tiny canvases with Spirited Away characters—my friend is studying all weekend and he’s in need of some soot ball work ethic inspiration, methinks—makes looking at these photos from a couple of weeks ago sort of wistful and frank, like the lyrics to a Simple Minds song.

A toasty fall afternoon in the ‘Farms with Lizzie leaning around on this wall that I used to make up stories about when I was a kid. It’s a quick bike ride from the house I grew up in, and sort of a visual staple of the neighborhood. When you’re 7 and you move from a beach town with strip malls and McD’s with conveyor belts that transport happy meals across the ceiling, things like this really make you stop in your Jellies.

[Check out Gungho Guides, a sweet guide to everything you need to see, eat, and do in your ‘hood, by my smokin’ hot coworker Kelly. And then get inspired by the vintage pin that hangs out next to it on my old man sweater.]

Ever noticed that weird phenomenon about how things you see from a distance for ages, then pop up to up close, look way different? And dingy? Not that I’m calling this wall dingy, but it reminded me of this feeling I tend to fixate on. If I were a teacher, this month’s curriculum would have been Things Up Close & Why They’re Weird, with a supplementary lesson in Probably Best to Just Keep Your Distance.

There was this cardboard sign I passed every morning in the car when my dad drove me to school. It had a crappy kid’s crayon drawing of a gecko with three legs and it said “Gecko Landscaping” with a phone number. At first, we just liked to laugh at it. Then, Chuck and I got superstitious about it, finding that days we didn’t take the Touchton Rd. detour to see the gecko sign were filled with bad luck, ripped pants, and shitty grades.

One day, the last day before Christmas break, we pulled over and I hopped out and grabbed it off the tree, its rusty nail fixture plopping in to the pine needles. It looked kind of sad and fragile in my lap, and spent a couple of weeks in the garage. My life turned to utter shit—I’m serious! So as soon as school started again, we set off one morning with a new nail and hammer. We pulled over at the stop sign and I roared out of the car, dodging traffic, and—after three tries—nailed the sign back into the tree.

You know that line from The Goonies? “Brand, God put that rock there for a purpose.” It gets kind of existential, this fiddling with things that don’t belong to us. Like that dirty traffic cone I smuggled into my room in 9th grade, then immediately wanted to get rid of. I’m totally incapable of not moving the rock. But it’s cool.

The gecko sign bit the dust a few weeks later. I never saw it again, but I did learn how to change my luck on my own.

-Carey