Category: Musings
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History as grist for story . . .
Long ago, when we were young(er!), we visited Sicily several times, falling in love with the island. On one of our holiday adventures, we persevered and actually found the mausoleum, high up on Mt Venere above Caselmola, where the doughty Florence Trevelyan reached her last resting place. Not many tourists, we figured, actually make that…
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Simple pleasures . . .
I’ve been beaten at Scrabble by my beloved, consistently, since we took our maiden adventure together across Canada on the Canadian Pacific railway, back in 1981. We’ve played on a variety of boards, though the travel game with corner feet in each tile has survived intact through those forty years. Some day, perhaps, when we’re…
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Halfway to happiness
Moves and transitions are rarely easy, and when you don’t understand what’s going on, and why you’ve been displaced, it must be even more disorientating. We’re now about halfway through the adjustment phase, when Kali cat is allowed to ponder the great outdoors, but not to explore beyond what her eyes can see. It’s fair…
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Roads from confusion?
The last ‘joy’ I could develop was in the middle of fraught tensions before Christmas, and life has been a frenzy of strenuous physical effort since to pack up all our stuff and vacate our home. Now that we can sit still, in our tiny bolthole within a pleasant village, and sigh in some relief,…
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The joys of flexibility
This morning I’m exulting in multiple uses for the same thing. A few years ago we decided to tidy an awkward wedge of space behind our house. The idea was to store wood for the bakery oven, so it would be conveniently accessible, and dry. The first incarnation of the roof was not felicitous; too…
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The joys of cat-speak
Our cat is very talkative, as Bengals seem to be. She has a variety of vocalisations, and she’s perfected the art of disdain as well. The body language of a cat with her back turned to you is pretty obvious. But what might a deliberate and prolonged yawn actually mean? It may, of course, be…
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A quiet retreat . . .
When we were fortunate to acquire the little bolt-hole across the border, we didn’t realise quite what a solace it would be. The weight of responsibility somehow seems more pressing when we’re home, but here across the open-plan living, dining and kitchen space it’s a temporary break from all that. Writing duties carry through, however,…
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The accumulated joy of small steps . . .
We were just chatting this morning, waking up with our daily word games, about the joys of a daily activity, whether that little step is poetic, journal, memoir, or something more physical like a small knitted square or another sorting exercise. One of us has been a fan of Brian Bilston‘s daily poems for some…
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Too busy to muse . . .
We must have planted the Viburnum in the corner of our front garden some years ago and then left it to its own devices. My iPlant app tells us that this lovely plant decides to bloom in late autumn and then continues on into early spring. But we’d never been aware of its blossom until…
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Where we belong . . .
I’ve been flummoxed for a week, trying to figure out a fictional response to a WriteOn Galloway task. Finally I ventured into our own lives to create a kind of story-memoir piece about our travels. The challenge of the task was to create the story without revealing the author’s/narrator’s own take on the personal passion.…
Roads to Joy 