First Day of Spring?

Along the banks and verges, white has changed to gold and purple, as the virginal snowdrops die away, giving place to primroses and periwinkles, crocuses and daffodils. The wintry sunshine, that struggled to push its way through cloud and mist, has also gone, at least for now, and in its place is a blessed heat, tempered by gentle breezes. The birds' joyous song is joined by the humming of bees, as they bumble and buzz from one blossom to another; and even a couple of butterflies have come out to join the fun.

One doesn't like to get speak too soon, but might spring be here to stay?

"Late Summer"

In the tradition of Chinese Medicine there are five seasons, the fifth being 'Late Summer'. For my part, I agree with this. There is a turning point in the year that begins in August, and continues on through September, when, though the full splendour of Autumn is not yet upon us, the glory of Summer has past.

"still drinking nectar..."

On days like these, when a chill appears in the air in the early mornings, and the mists begin to hang heavily over the fields, the sunshine (when it comes) is still hot; and whilst the ripening berries shine in the hedgerows like clusters of red and black jewels, neither the conkers, nor the leaves, have yet fallen from the chestnut trees.

And though we are reminded by the catalogues that have started coming through the door, that there are now only three months until Christmas, the butterflies are still drinking nectar, and the bees go on bumbling and buzzing in the flower heads, collecting pollen until they can hardly fly for the weight of it...

Collecting pollen in the sunshine

"Happiness"

I am the winter sun coming up over the horizon;
I am a robin singing in a hawthorn tree;
I am a bunch of bright yellow daffodils;
I am a fountain pen with turquoise ink;
I am droplets hanging on a hedgerow;
I am bryony berries, strung along a fence like red fairy beads;
I am sweet sleep;

I am laughter;
I am a joke shared with a friend;
I am the softest fur on my dog;
I am fresh bed linen;
I am the solving of a cryptic crossword puzzle;
I am summer's heat;

I am the delicate lime green of the first leaves of spring;
I am bright orange and deep purple;
I am the smell of woodsmoke hanging in the crisp autumn air;
I am the smell of damp earth;
I am a vole running across the garden;
I am a blackbird singing at dusk;

I am chocolate slab;
I am home-made ice-cream;
I am pasta and pesto with peccorino cheese;
I am self-knowledge;

I am that high lonesome Bluegrass sound;
I am the deep throbbing of a helicopter as it flies low overhead;
I am rain drumming on the roof at night;
I am a red kite mewling to its mate;

I am a parcel from the postman;
I am an e-mail in my inbox;
I am Morecambe and Wise;
I am Calvin and Hobbes;
I am Pride and Prejudice re-read for the hundredth time;
I am a hug from a child;

I am puffy white clouds;
I am sunlight;
I am creamy-white plum blossom against a blue sky;
I am paddling in an icy cold stream;
I am strength in my limbs;
I am Psalm 19;

I am happy.

Summer!

Summer is here at last. We thought it would never come...

The mornings dawn bright and clear, and the deep blue sky stretches above us, uninterrupted by cloud, from morning till night. For some curious reason I am reminded of school sports day, though I can't imagine the weather was always so perfect as this.

But though we have no rain, the grass is still wet every morning from the heavy dew. As I did my garden chores this morning I kicked up my feet for sheer joy, and great showers of droplets flew out from the end of my shoes, and sparkled in the sunshine. When I looked down I saw little silvery spiders' webs in amongst the grass, twinkling as though they were spun from jewels...

"We're all going on a Summer Holiday..."

"We're all going on a Summer Holiday, no more working for a week or two;

fun and laughter on our summer holiday,

no more worries for me or you -

for a week or two..."

 

                                                                  

Towards the end of May my parents and I (and the dog) went over to our house in France for a fortnight's holiday.

Cow parsley, buttercups and pink roses

We arrived to find the verges up to my waist in cow parsley (to be strictly accurate it was Burnett Saxifrage, but it looks like cow parsley), and tall golden buttercups. The drive was liberally bespeckled with leggy daisies so overgrown that they wobbled, and bobbed around in the breeze; and there were roses everywhere. They grew up the sides of the house, and tumbled down over the barn; they crept sideways along the walls, their buds peeping out here and there through a tangled mass of greater celandine; and they arched up and over, and twined their blooms amidst the sweeping branches of the weeping willow.

The weather was gloriously sunny and hot, and I lay on a blanket under the willow tree every day, and read Geoffrey Trease and Jennings and William Mayne and Hans Brinker, and 'Where Matthew Lives', and other childhood classics, whilst the bees hummed busily around me, and the cuckoo sat at the top of a nearby sweet chestnut tree and 'cu-ckooed' with all his might. It was a good holiday!

A bunch of Queen Elizabeth roses

At the end of the fortnight we had a leisurely drive up through Normandy, took the ferry over from Caen, and arrived back very late on the Saturday of the jubilee weekend. It poured with rain all the way home from Portsmouth. Oh to be in England...

But before we left France, our Queen Elizabeth rose had come into full bloom; and so we felt that whatever the next few days might hold, our jubilee celebrations had at least got off to a good start.

Early morning walk

Yesterday, my dog and I went for an early morning walk. We set off straight after breakfast; the sun shone, the sky was blue, and every thing looked fresh and bursting with life after a few days of rain. Up above, the flag on the church flapped joyously in the breeze, and in the copse a thrush sang.

++++++++++++++++

I am rather fond of gates.
They have such an intoxicating combination of invitation and forbidden entrance, that I cannot walk past even the most mundane without feeling a little twinge of excitement. On our walk today I had the joy of walking through two kissing gates (so romantic, even if one is, in fact, on one's own...), the second of which opens onto a glorious view of the Chilterns.

We walked slowly on, taking a little path beside the copse where I heard the thrush, and came across another gate; and here was richness! An old iron, padlocked specimen, it's stone pillars covered in ivy, and the path beneath all over-grown with grass, it stood tall and proud in its half-forgotten state. I should not have been surprised to know that the house it led to was named Satis...

Who knew Miss Havisham lived in Oxfordshire?

It also reminded me of Shelley's Ozymandias, except that these 'legs of stone' were surrounded by green fields and not lone and level sands:

"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Bluebirds flying..."

"I wanna see the sunshine after the rain;
  I wanna see bluebirds flying over the mountains again."

Last week was dank, damp, and dreary. A permanent milky whiteness hung thickly over the fields, waiting to be burnt off by a sun which never came out for more than half an hour a day - if we were lucky. Occasionally we had a little rain (though nothing like enough to hold off the threatened hose-pipe ban), but even on the days when there was none at all, a general murk of moisture hung in the air which dampened everything and everyone. It hung in little droplets on the trees, and settled in a silver mist over the grass; and it got inside me, and slowed my body down to such an extent that for a whole week I functioned at the pace of a sickly snail...

But every weather has its plus sides, if only you can find them, and depressing, illness-inducing dampness is no exception. As I came back from church on my mobility scooter, the delicate scent of wet grape hyacinths rose to greet me. It took me back twenty years!

And of course, the dampness didn't last. I wouldn't live in a country that had a climate for all the jewels in Christendom. Give me changeable weather any time!
On the very day that I wrote to a friend, crying out for sun, the sun came. Unfortunately, I was so excited by this sudden change that I behaved rather foolishly, and managed to contract both sunstroke and a chill at the same time. This combined to give me the curious and decidedly unpleasant sensation of being on ship in a slightly choppy sea, and I was unable to maintain an upright position during the whole of the second half of the evening; even walking down our short corridor resulted in the kind of clutching at furniture more often seen on a ferry crossing the English channel. However, I am all restored to health this morning, and ready to enjoy the rest of the weekend (hopefully in a more sensible, and slightly less theatrical manner...)

Daffodowndilly

She wore her yellow sunbonnet,

  She wore her greenest gown;

She turned to the southwind

  And curtsied up and down.

She turned to the sunlight

  And shook her yellow head,

And whispered to her neighbour:

  "Winter is dead."

                                        -- A A Milne

-8˚

This is the temperature the car thermometer registered when my father drove off to work this morning. Of course, I realise that compared to what Eastern Europe is going through it is a mere pittance, but it feels pretty darn cold to us!
Still, it always brings out the bird life. A female bullfinch came hopping round the patio this morning - the first time I've seen one all winter - and three robins have been occupying the same territory with hardly a scuffle between them, which is more than can be said for the starlings. Is it impossible for two starlings to eat from the same food dish without having stand-up fights every three seconds? And always accompanied by that un-earthly screeching that sounds as though the Doctor's Tardis is landing.

Last year, when the winter went on and on and the snow hung around for weeks on end, I began to dream.
I dreamt of blue seas and bluer skies; of daisies and irises and masses of tumbling roses; of tropical lemons and pink-rendered houses, and donkeys giving rides on yellow sands; and I dreamt of a sun shining hot and strong, creating dazzling sparkles on the sea below...

Meanwhile, back in reality, the sky continued to be heavy and overcast, the sun carried on being weak and thin, the snow still lay thick on the frozen ground, and life was generally murky and depressing. So I decided to make a collage.

It was a pretty big collage, made of two A3 sheets taped together (it had to be large enough to fit in all my requirements and still look like a plausible landscape), and it took me at least a month to finish it. I kept running out of deep-blue sky, and had to cadge travel-magazines from obliging friends and relatives.

By the time I did finish it, I had become so immersed in my fantasy-world that I felt as though I really had just got back from an exotic holiday; and when I finally looked up from my completed picture, I found the snow had melted away, and spring had arrived. My Summer Dream had created for me a Wrinkle in Time...

"It might as well be Spring..."

The birds are singing fit to burst, the sun is shining, I counted fifteen daffodils by the red telephone box outside the post office yesterday, and the first bumble bee of the year just bumbled passed my window. Even the sky is looking higher today.
I would say all these signs point to spring being firmly established; only I have just heard that they are predicting a cold-snap for tomorrow - and what will cock robin do then, poor thing?

"He'll hide in a barn, and keep himself warm,

with his head tucked under his wing, poor thing."

"The sky was so blue today, I just had to be a part of it..."

Yet more roses!

"The sky was so blue today, and everything was so fresh and green, I just had to be a part of it; and the Untersberg kept leading me higher and higher, as though it wanted me to go right through the clouds with it."
 - Maria in The Sound of Music

This morning we had the first real frost of the season. Well, it wasn't quite the first frost - we had a few light ones about a month ago, but this was the first one to mean business; and I very much hope it heralds the beginning of some real, prolonged wintry weather; all this unseasonal warmth was beginning to get unnerving...

 Take this week for instance. The sun has shone so strongly, and the sky has been so blue, that it has been simply crying out to me to be a part of it, and if Maria could not withstand such temptations, who I am to refuse them? I did not even try...

And while I was imitating Maria (as well as I could for a distinct lack of mountains) I thought I might as well imitate the spirit of Elizabeth von Arnim in her German Garden again. So I sat on the patio, well wrapped up in a Royal Stuart shawl, and did some sketching. All I needed to complete the picture was a little snow and some big furry gloves...