Category: Musings
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Sun trap!
So we sat outside for a little while in the late afternoon sunshine, thinking about old times actually. I’d already channeled my inner photographer, looking for angles and light, so I’d kind of pre-supposed the joy already. But it was a solace to sit quietly and think together. Is this situation the right way forward? […]
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Neither pink, pine, nor apples . . .
Okay, there’s a tinge of pink, for sure, but these otherwise misnamed fingerlings are the third successful crop we’ve begun to enjoy as summer moves along. The Alouettes, definitely pink-skinned, have been a disappointment, but the Charlottes and Harmonies are already very satisfying. The yellow flesh and nutty taste of the Pink Fir Apples make […]
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Just in time for a perfect bloom
Not that the week gone by was hard, but I thought, and felt, that I’d put in a fair amount of physical effort. So we were looking forward to a couple of days quietly tending the potted plants in the New Galloway garden. But had there been sufficient rainfall to keep them alive? The rose […]
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The joy of the resolved query . . .
Without that little stimulating itch, that urge to identify what’s behind the unknown, and indeed, that resolved query, we’d be so much poorer. It’s an urge that must be hard-wired into our mental capacity, the need to know more about something. Engrossed, I have sat through the video recording of this song on YouTube several […]
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Something about slippers . . .
When there’s really nothing better to do than to wonder what sort of brick/block pattern the wall was built in, in the easy shade of a tiny garden, it can feel like a gentle peace has descended. The labours of the day (such as they are, in these senior times) are completed, and a time […]
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From lake to loch . . .
A week ago I stood on the shore of Lake Ahmic in northern Ontario (the near north, as my father liked to say, south of North Bay on Lake Nipissing, north of Barrie), and said goodbye to the loons, a perennial favourite of my mother. A couple of days ago we sat on a strategic […]
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The lovely names
The lovely names I tell myself my mother would have loved to hear the names of the wild flowers we’ve met: stichwort; snowberry; loosestrife; sea thrift and speedwell; woundwort; red campion meadowsweet; big trefoil; celandine; kippernut; angelica; bugle I really don’t know if she would, if she would have enjoyed the new names rolling around […]
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Potluck Hellebores
It’s difficult to find the correct attribution for the often-quoted aphorism ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.’ But Roger Pearse has made a good stab at the challenge, and believes that the line can be attributed to a Quaker thinker, D. Elton Trueblood, in his […]
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Conscientious reading today
Today, although there’s some driving ahead, mostly my job is to read and to think. Read conscientiously, looking at submissions from the lovely Writers Groups I belong to, thinking and reflecting on the turn of phrase, the development of the creative effort. I may snuggle down into reading for pleasure as sleep beckons, but mostly […]
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Forget it, corvids . . .
We’ve finally finished sorting out Mr Duck’s patch with biosecurity netting. It turned out that the rails I had laying around were exactly the right size to be supports for the jackdaw-proof netting, and so the task was relatively easy to facilitate. The challenge has been that the jackdaws, especially if they go in two-by-twos, […]
Roads to Joy 