Leaves fallen, growing

The seasons in my garden are very mixed up right now.  The first flowering of spring irises has already passed in a swathe of purple, and one round of jonquils has bloomed too.  But the guava tree is holding on to its red dead leaves, and the silky oak is dropping grey shrivelled ones daily.  All the green things are very very green thanks to bathtubs (not buckets) of winter rain, and I have lost a branch from the oriental tree, and two from the oak, to the Cape of Storms storms we've had in the last week.  All this has sent me outside today in my good work shoes (no reason) with a wheelbarrow and a rake, picking up the leaves that had been heaped before the last storm, and now look like rice flung by storm guests over a chilly winter bride-garden.  It works like this: rake, heap, bend, gather, dump in barrow, wheel, throw out into compost heap.  Over and over.  This is surely comforting, for the obvious reasons: things live, they die, we clean them up, new things grow.  If I remembered this more often, I would get less stressed and wound up about my life.

Legacy

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.




It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

I like the sound of this.  Legacy for it's own sake always sounded a bit self-important to me; but leagcy as the last refuge of your soul, sounds warm and comforting.  Wondering now, where would I like my soul to rest when I die?  And where is my grandmother's?  I wanted so much to find her Melting Moments recipe yesterday, and maybe this is why.

Wash, rinse, repeat

Thanks to you, Adam, I am going to pick this blog up again and see where it wants to go, this time. May it be entertaining and surprising and, above all, stand in place of my really terrible memory ... 

Self-portrait from 7" up

A lot of things have happened to me, & this is how I look now. I wonder how long it will last.

mishmash

February arrival of the Dutch student teachers; Valentine's Day cake; farewell moment in April and of course the ancientest of ancient skeletons on display at the museum ..

March 2010

March 2010 - the Waldorf School medieval festival, with beloved chicks .. and the the peacefulness pre-Starfish of the Napier valley and the famous hot tub.

Here's mud in your eye ..

24 February 2010: my formidable appletini friend ...