In These Days ...

I sit at my typewriter
remembering my grandmother
& all my mothers,
& the minutes they lost
loving houses better than themselves

Erica Jong, extract from Women Enough.

I've been busy ... a project, of course.  A new website specifically for the project, and all kinds of other things too.

At night, I shift my aching body from my ergonomically-disasterous desk and creak to my bed ... tired from sitting rather than anything deliciously active.

But the website is almost done.  I'll launch soon, via a newsletter that shall become regular.  I'm eyeing Instagram too ... I'm in Genova next week, it seems like a good time to work out all this social media stuff that I've mostly ignored, as the new project is all about Genova.

I've been cooking and cleaning, imagining myself quite marvelously productive there too, although wanting more applause than I get for fitting everything into my day.  I've always been dubious about this housewife stuff.  It seems to run along the lines of 'if a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to see it ...'  Same with housework.  A clean house is the result of many lost minutes and hours.  Many.

Erica Jong wrote the perfect poem when she wrote Women Enough. 

So precisely, yes.

But I must work.  I have one more in the elderberry series to post.  It's been up to 28 celsius, thunderstormy, calm and cool too.  It's Spring.  I'm loving it.

A Lightness of Being ...

For me, there is this feeling of an incredible lightness of being that comes with that first really summery Sunday morning of the year.

We can finally open the door to the garden and enjoy the scent of the Jasmine I'm growing not far away.  But better than anything else, in those early morning hours, Nature often wins out as the dominant scent in the air ... especially on a Sunday when the roar of that massively busy highway nearby becomes so much less.

I wandered outside with my camera just now, startled a thrush, then watched a pigeon fly clumsily away.  The lawns will be mown today, there is a BBQ planned for our evening.  It's the first of this summery season. 

And the rhubarb is going crazy out there, so are the raspberry plants.  The fern has experienced new hope and is growing accordingly, and my beloved New Zealand Lupins are finally making an appearance too.  The yellow ones, the kind found growing at beaches back home.  Those ones that have a scent I love like nothing else.

Somehow they manage to contain both this huge celebration of summer and the promise of the sea.  I would fill my garden with these if I could.  But they're not in flower yet so I still don't know if they will grow and smell as they do on the other side of the world.

But it was the Elderberry blossom that turned my head this morning.  Perhaps more photos will follow.  The elderberry berrries are usually gobbled up by the pigeons but the birds were here first and do so little to harm the environment that it feels okay to let that situation be.

A good morning to you out there in the world.  I hope your Sunday is lovely in that way you need it to be.