around the house

Late June Wednesday

Wednesday 24 June 2020 | 0 Comments

If it’s late June and we’re in Poland, we might be celebrating Babcia’s birthday in one form or another. Probably not a lot of celebrating happening the day of it (at least not until later in the day) as Babcia, lacking any social media whatsoever, spends the day talking to people who phone her with birthday wishes.

As it is, we simply got everyone up early and phoned ourselves. It was hard to get through, though. Everyone loves Babcia.

If it’s late June and we’re not in Poland, I’ll probably be on the back deck, applying water sealant.

And of course, there’s the evening game of hearts.

Two nights in a row — how do I do it?

Helping

Monday 22 June 2020 | 0 Comments

In 3s

Wednesday 10 June 2020 | 0 Comments

Things go wrong in threes. That's what they say, right? So if that's the case, we're done. First, the roof. A leak. Fortunately, insurance wrote us a new roof.

Second, the lawnmower. Two hundred dollars to fix it. I could have bought a new lawnmower for that. Of course, it would have been a cheap piece of junk, but the fact stands.

A Maserati owner takes up four spaces in the parking lot... it just amused me.

Then the dishwasher. We paid a repairman $75 to tell us what I thought I knew: the main board was gone. So we went to a few places looking for a replacement, including a local appliance store that sells the crazy cabinet-depth $20,000 Sub-Zero refrigerators. You'd think that's the last place to find a deal, but we did indeed find a deal. The real deal: they had it in stock. Big-box stores didn't, and we'd still have to wait weeks for delivery.

So we got the dishwasher installed, ready to go. We're waiting on the roofing company to catch up with their work that's been thrown off schedule with all the rain. And I've already used the mower once. Are we past the threes? Who knows.

Visitor

Monday 08 June 2020 | 0 Comments

Day 76: Reality in the Shower

Saturday 30 May 2020 | 0 Comments

We are a pattern-seeking species. And where we find patterns, there we find meaning. Even if that meaning is nonexistent because the pattern itself is an accident of nature. Instead of seeing it like this, though, we often prefer to take these as omens.

I’ve found a few omens, then, in our shower.

There’s a Grateful Dead teddy bear on one tile. I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t been such a Grateful Dead fan in high school (now, not so much — they’re okay, but I rarely listen to them).

There’s a bandit with a kerchief covering his mouth. His eyebrows are straight and determined: he’s surely about to commit a crime. Perhaps a home invasion is imminent for us. But our little town is really quite peaceful (we checked with the police department and did some research before buying here), so it’s unlikely.

There’s a fetal-size footprint. Surely this is a hint of things to come? A prophecy of another child on the way? No. It’s just a shape.

There’s the number 12 — certainly, that is not an accident but, like Jesus burned into toast and the Virgin Mary on an underpass, a message from the heavens, some reference to the disciples.

Yes, this is a little something I wrote long ago and just tucked away for just such an occasion: I’m still working on pictures from the Mass I shot (a paying gig this time!) and won’t be done any time soon…

Day 72: Reflection and Time Together with a Tripod

Tuesday 26 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Reflection

I titled the post “Heading Out.” It comprised one single picture:

The Boy and I were going out for a Sunday-morning ride. We rode about our neighborhood, the neighboring neighborhood, up to his school, back — a typical ride for us. If there were any puddles I would have had to tell him not to ride through them.

We got back sweaty and satisfied, and after a shower, we had lunch with Nana and Papa and then I headed out to photograph a special ordination Mass for a deacon in our parish, Deacon Richard — now Father Richard.

At some point during the afternoon — I don’t remember because I wasn’t there — Nana went to sleep. K must have texted me about it because I remember thinking, “Well, we gave her an opioid — she always goes to sleep after that.” The Mass ended and the reception began, and after an hour and a half of the reception, K texted me that I should probably come home. “It doesn’t look good,” she texted.

Still, I wasn’t worried. “She’s just asleep. The opioid’s effect will wear off and tomorrow morning she’ll be just as good as new.”

That was May 26, 2019. She passed away sometime in the early hours of May 27. We’re not exactly sure when even though the death certificate has the time the hospice nurse came and checked: 7:30.

“Tomorrow morning she’ll be as good as new.”

I’m not sure how I could have been so blind other than to suggest it was self-deception out of a sense of self-protection. A lot of “self” in that.

“Can we have some time together?”

The Boy asks me every day, “Can we have some time together?” On the one hand, that makes it sound like I don’t spend a lot of time with him. “Poor kid — has to ask his father to spend time with him.” It sounds positively Dickensian. On the other hand, that shows how conscientious he is about spending time with me: he wants to make sure the day doesn’t slip by without us doing something together, and that has happened.

Today, I had some work to do, though, after I completed my school responsibilities (only three more days) and before I could play. The Boy is always eager to learn how to do something, so I invited him along.

Spraying for pests suits him, I think.But then again, you do have to be somewhat systematic — follow a pattern, a plan, a path. You can just spray here, spray there. You have to make sure you have even coverage over the whole area you’re hoping to affect. Much like with mowing, then, I let him work but often took back the equipment to hit a spot he’d missed.

After the work (“Is this our time together?” the Boy asked, concerned), we went back to our favorite spot in the creek and discovered, much to our surprise, that the island we use to assist in crossing the creek was gone. The last flood must have washed it out completely.

We also started planning our next fort. We might get a little less primitive this time. We might even use some 2x4s.

Tripod

I took the camera and tripod out with us today and set the camera to take a picture every minute.

Why didn’t I do that before? I don’t have many pictures with the Boy when we go on these adventures. It’s a simple way to solve that problem.

One can also reverse-mount the tripod and take some pictures otherwise impossible: three-second exposures at water level. That type of thing.

Day 66: Morning Ignorance of the Below and Above

Wednesday 20 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Morning

The morning, post-breakfast ritual during this time of lockdown and isolation:

The Boy works on his schoolwork. We try to pace it: whatever’s going to be more challenging for the day we tackle first. Lately, things have been fairly balanced: everything has been much easier, in short. Still, old habits persist, and he’ll start fussing if he gets the slightest bit frustrated some mornings.

Today, we made it through everything fairly quickly with minimal fussing.

Papa often takes a nap. He doesn’t necessarily intend to take a nap — he’s just comfortable, full, content, watching television or listening to a book, and what else is there to do?

K works on emails for her real estate clients. She’s trying to work two jobs now. We all tell her that she needs to focus on one or the other. We know which one she’d like to focus on. We also know that that job doesn’t have a set pay schedule.

I am usually either helping the Boy or working on my own school work downstairs. Or as in this case, taking pictures.

The Girl — well, she does what a teenager does best.

Below

Ever since we had our first flood in the basement several years ago, a heavy rainfall makes me just a bit nervous. I look at the puddles forming in the backyard. I check the weather. I duck into the crawl space to look in the sump pump basin. I repeat the cycle. I worry, worry, worry. Until our big flood in February, I’d gotten to the point, though, that I really fretted very little. It had gotten a little wet but it hadn’t flooded flooded. Still, I’m always probably going to be a little worried about water coming up from below, the hydrostatic pressure building to the point that it forces water through the smallest of cracks and starts filling our basement again. It will happen. And though I have taken steps to remediate the situation, there are no more steps I can take that don’t involve massive work and a sizeable fiscal commitment.

Option 1

Our neighbor up the street had a drainage system put in his basement recently: around the entire parameter of the basement, workers busted up the concrete and the applied perforated drain pipes that lead to a central sump pump. It was a five-figure job.

That might be the next step if the basement continues flooding. It’s the type of job that, having the summer off every year, I’d be keen on tackling myself. At the very least, I could rent a jackhammer and bust up the concrete and dig down to the footer, cutting the cost significantly, I would think. Or at least hope.

Option 2

The other option: when we pull out the landscaping front of the kids’ bedrooms, I could dig down to the footer there and re-seal the foundation, perhaps installing a French drain system there while everything is dug up.

And Above

I was playing pool with a friend in the basement probably almost decade ago when water started pouring onto the pool table. It turned out that the shower pan in the master bathroom had failed.

Count Me Out, In

We ended up renovating the whole bathroom as a result.

There was one other time when the water came from above instead of below: somehow, the water came in between the upstairs deck and the door sill and started dripping from the top of the door in the basement. I never figured out what caused that, but I caulked well around the door and it never happened again.

But most of our experience with water entering the house comes from below.

But tonight, the Boy was getting ready for his bath when he looked up and asked, “Daddy, is that a leak?”

Shit.

I went to get a chair so I could reach up and feel the dampness I knew would be there. Still, as I walked to the Boy’s room and returned with the chair, I found myself thinking, “Please, oh please just be a dark spot on the ceiling that I’ve never noticed though we’ve lived here almost thirteen years.”

I looked carefully at where the stain was and realized quickly what had likely happened: the roof vent flashing had somehow failed. Perhaps it had gotten cracked. Perhaps it was torn. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

“Maybe it’s just running down the sewer vent,” I thought.

I climbed on the roof to see if anything was amiss. “Perhaps the hail we had a few days ago damaged something and insurance will pay for an entire re-roofing job,” I thought both hopefully and sickeningly. Examining the flashing, I couldn’t see any sign of compromise. We covered it with some plastic and hoped for the best.

Still, I needed to check in the attic to see just how bad the problem was.

I don’t really know if that’s bad or not. Part of me says, “That’s horrible: it’s bad enough that it’s saturated the ceiling sheetrock enough to make a stain.” And yet, I really don’t know.

So tomorrow we’ll call the insurance adjuster and a roofer to see what they say.

When I got back down and talked to K about what I found, the Boy discovered my boots and couldn’t resist.

Later in the evening, K thought the spot is damper than it was earlier. We decided to go all out: we brought out the two tarps we use for camping, overlapping one with the other so that water can run under the tarp, weighing the whole thing down with bricks and cinder blocks. And doing all this in a light rain. At 10:30.

Lightroom Revisit

In August 2003, K and I rode our bikes south through Slovakia to Hungary to spend a week in Budapest. When we returned, we rode to Sturovo, a town in southern Slovakia, where we caught a train to Zilina, where we waited for another train to Trstena, just across the border from where we lived in southern Poland. We had to wait in the Zilina train station for most of the night to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to Trstena. This guy was waiting for a train, too.

This is one I’m particularly pleased with the Lightroom reworking. The before-and-after shows how much of a difference it makes to do selective editing:

Day 57: Math, Mowing, Painting, and the Missionary Society

Monday 11 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Math

The Boy was having trouble this morning with three-digit subtraction, things like 352-178. He was thinking a little too much, mixing prior knowledge with current practice. For example, in the number above, he would know he had to borrow a 10 from the 10s place in order to subtract 8 properly, but then that would leave him with 4. Instead of writing 4 above the crossed-out 5, he wrote 40. Which is technically correct. But the be was subtracting 7 from 40 and coming up with 33, and before long, he was subtracting one three-digit number from another three-digit number and coming up with a six-digit answer.

I remember the frustration of borrowing numbers in subtraction. I, too, experienced it in second grade: I just couldn't figure out how those numbers were shifting around, 5 becoming 4 so I could subtract something from the 1s place. Everyone tried explaining it to me: my teacher, mom, dad, the girl who babysat me from time to time. It just didn't make any sense to me no matter how often and how many different ways it was explained.

So I understood the Boy's frustration this morning. I sat with him a while, taking a break from my own work, and tried to help him through it.

"Yes, but Daddy, that's the 10s place, so it's not just 4, it's 40."

"Technically, you're correct, but..."

"What do you mean 'technically'? What does that even mean?!"

It was another moment that I found myself in awe of elementary school teachers. I don't teach many new skills: I mainly take existing skills and improve them. The kids can write when they come to me; I just help them write better. They can read when they come to me; I just give them tricks for comprehending more challenging texts: things like "make sure you keep track of your pronouns' antecedents -- you need to know who 'he' is when the author uses that pronoun," or "determine the part of speech of that unknown word -- that will help you a lot in inferring a possible meaning." But just taking a kid who doesn't know at all how to read and turning her into a reader? I haven't got the slightest clue how to do that. I know it's just a matter of training: I minored in education in college, but in secondary education -- not primary. An entirely different field of study.

Still, having experienced that frustration myself, I had a certain patience and understanding of his frustration.

This is why some feel that teachers who teach subjects they were always good at isn't as effective as alternatives. We -- for I was always good at literature and decent at writing -- know how to do these skills seemingly instinctively. It's hard to teach someone how to do something that you can do, relative to the struggling student, without thinking. It's better to teach something that you yourself have struggled with, goes the thinking. But the problem with that: where's the passion? I don't teach English just because I want to teach and happened to choose English. I teach it because I myself enjoy writing; I teach it because I love reading. I teach it because I have a certain excitement about certain books, certain poems, even certain reading skills that I love to share with students. I struggled with math, and the only passion I feel about it is a certain kind of revulsion.

Mowing and Painting

The Boy loves working in the yard. We bought a battery-powered weed eater just so he could help (which is now out of trim line, which we don't have). Today, after scolding me a little bit about still not having the right line, he asked if he could help mow.

When we first started doing this, I would let him do the little flat, straight portion in the front yard just between the flower bed and the crape myrtles. Today, I let him tackle some of the more challenging areas.

"Make sure you keep the line of uncut grass just on the inside edge of your outside wheel," I explained, demonstrating just what I meant.

He tried, poor fellow, but he just couldn't stop drifting inward, leaving slivers of uncut grass with every row.

Still, I can't help but be pleased that he's still willing to help. At some point, the job will be his entirely.

Saturday in the Yard

The Girl finished up the afternoon with a little more painting: the swing I'd started Saturday for K's Mother's Day gift is nearing completion.

The Missionary Society Meeting

It's always a chapter that confuses students: the 24th chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird feels like someone took a chapter out of a completely different novel, changed a few names to match a few characters' names in Mockingbird, and just slipped it into the stream of the story. The only connection it seems to have with the rest of the book is the news of the death of Tom Robinson toward the end of the chapter. I contend that in many ways it's one of the most important chapters in the book as it fully develops one of the book's major themes: the hypocrisy of Southern white Christians.

Most of the chapter centers around Aunt Alexandra's hosting the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South Missionary Society meeting. Scout attends as "a part of [Alexandra's] campaign to teach [Scout] to be a lady." Poor Scout is lost from the beginning: she asks about what they studied and gets confused immediately:

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” [Mrs. Merriweather] said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.

Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”

Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty... the darkness... the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—”

“Was he there, ma’am? I thought—”

“Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”

A skilled reader with a moderate amount of background knowledge immediately understands: this J. Grimes Everett is a missionary to the Mrunas, who, in turn, are clearly an African tribe ("Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett").

The reason the author includes the Mrunas is clear only toward the end of the missionary society meeting, when Mrs. Merriweather begins talking about Atticus's decision to represent Tom:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky... dissatisfied... I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that wool of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

Miss Maudie said it. Two tight lines had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She had been sitting silently beside me, her coffee cup balanced on one knee. I had lost the thread of conversation long ago, when they quit talking about Tom Robinson’s wife, and had contented myself with thinking of Finch’s Landing and the river. Aunt Alexandra had got it backwards: the business part of the meeting was blood-curdling, the social hour was dreary.

“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.

“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly.

Yet this is where students really get lost. In typical Southern gentile fashion, Mrs. Merriweather won't deign to gossip about anyone -- how uncivilized -- so she simply makes talks about Atticus in the third-person plural. And everyone in the room knows exactly who she's talking about -- everyone but Scout. And our young readers.

Today, my English I students started the adventure of figuring out this marvelous chapter. I always read the relevant passage aloud in class. It's one of the most enjoyable things I do all year. I lay on the Southern accent, dropping final rs ("squalor" becomes "squala") and altering the cadence and tone of my reading. How to do that when in lock-down? Simple: record it. My favorite part -- that passage above.

Day 55: The Swing, the Dog House, and the Bench

Saturday 09 May 2020 | 0 Comments

I don't know how it inevitably happens, but projects with me just seem to swell completely out of proportion from my original estimates. Sometimes it's simply that my estimates are wrong. No, that's most of the time. I tend to underestimate the time required because I tend to overestimate my skills. Today, though, my estimation of the time required to make K's Mother's Day present was just about dead on. True, it took me longer in the end, but that's because I decided to pull out the router and round over every edge. Why? Because I have a router and quite honestly don't have that many opportunities to use it.

I also decided as I was working to countersink all the screws and go back with wood filler and hide them all. That added a bit of additional time. But the raw building itself took just about as long as I anticipated.

What got me off track was not the time it took to make the bench but rather the time it took to gather the needed materials. The wood was the real trick.

I went to Lowe's expecting to be back fairly quickly. All I needed was a bit of additional chain for the swing, a few hooks to connect the swing to the chain, and some 2x4s for the framing of the swing. The chain took quite some time -- probably more than twenty minutes -- because I pressed the "Press here for assistance" button and no one came for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally, I was ready to pick up the lumber and haul it back to the in-store sawing station to have them cut the 96" studs down to 48" pieces that would fit in K's Rogue. The first trick was to find a lumber cart. I finally gave up looking for one, went to the cashier, paid for the hardware, took it out to the car, and returned with a lumber cart from the parking lot. I loaded my six 2x4s and headed to the cut station. Where I found a sign that read, "Saw not functioning."

I felt like I was in the film Nie Lubię Poniedzialku except that I was in Greenville not Warsaw and it was Saturday not Sunday.

I just left the cart there with the lumber on it. It was a somewhat crummy thing to do -- I could have at least taken the lumber back.

After dropping off the hardware at the house (because it was on the way), I headed to Home Depot. The saw there was completely functional. The studs I picked out, though, were not 96" but only 93". So when I told the shop assistant to cut them at 48", adding "I just need them in half-size pieces," he did just that: he put one end of the board on 48" and cut. And the resulting pieces were of a significantly different length. That's when I measured and saw they weren't 96". I could have checked. I didn't. I just sighed.

While all of this was going on, the Boy alternated between helping me and helping the Girl, who was painting the dog house and the bench.

In the evening, we watched Nie Lubię Poniedzialku. We've been trying to expose the kids to some of the classics, and we decided it was time for Poniedzialku. I love that film. It's probably my second-favorite Polish film, right behind Miś. The story, such as it is, is charming: we all laugh at the horrid Monday everyone is having even though none of their trials rise above irritation. There's no shadow of any real tragedy -- just the annoyance of plans going awry.

What I really love about the film, though, is the views of the Warsaw of the early 1970s. Just a quarter of a century after the Second World War, much of the city is still under construction, and what has been completed has the look of 60s communist architecture that was still prevalent in Warsaw when I arrived in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2386VX0Po

Papa decided he'd watch the film with us. "There are no subtitles," we warned him, but he wasn't fazed. We explained critical dialogue, but most of it really didn't require a whole lot of explaining.

The Boy disagreed. "I don't get any of the funny parts, even when you explain them," he fussed.

Perhaps he'll find the next one we've planned a little more enjoyable: the classic Sami Swoi. We found it on Netflix DVDs, which means it will have subtitles. "Kargul, podejdź no do płota!"

Day 48: Scarlet Projects

Saturday 02 May 2020 | 0 Comments

This morning I had a little epiphany that I should have had months ago: "I'll bet there are lots of audiobooks on Spotify." I know -- an obvious thought I should have had long ago, but I am sometimes a little slow on the up-take. I did a quick search and discovered that almost any classic one could imagine is there. Shouldn't have been a surprise.

A month or so ago, I'd pulled from the bookshelf a novel I've been wanting on and off to re-read since college, The Scarlet Letter. I hadn't really liked it a lot then, and I liked it even less in high school, but I reasoned that, being twenty-five years older than when I'd last read it, I might see something more in it.

For one thing, it's been a different read because I finally made it through the opening section, "The Custom House." When we read it in college, we were supposed to read that seemingly disconnected introduction but I didn't. Today, I listened to it while I worked on our broken smoke, cleaning off the base blocks before screwing down the barrel that serves as the body of the smoker and then covering all the base in concrete. The job took about an hour and a half because I spent some time trying to pry off the leaking quick-connector on the hose before mixing the concrete, to no avail; the intro itself took considerably longer to complete.

And what of "The Custom House"? It's a fictionalized attempt at making the story seem authentic by making it something of a found-footage type novel (mixing media there, I know). Was that novel (no pun in intended)? I really don't know.

When the novel began, I was back in familiar territory. I'd initially forgotten about that opening, with the rose outside the jail door, but once that portion began, it was like hearing a long-forgotten-but-once-loved song again after twenty years:

[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

While I was working on the smoker, the Boy was working to remove the last bit of flaking paint from the bench we brought from Nana's and Papa's to use by our firepit.

I went inside to get the drill and impact driver and by the time I came back out, he'd disappeared.

"It's too hard!" he exclaimed. I think he understood that I expected him to get all the paint off.

By the time I was ready to work on the next project of the day, the novel was introducing its heroine, Hester Prynne.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The scarlet letter is a double symbol: it is a symbol to the characters in the novel of Hester's sin and depravity as well as a symbol for Hester herself of her resistance. For readers, it's both these things, but it also represents the hypocrisy of Puritans, among other things.