Category: Musings
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Is ‘laughing at yourself’ a kind of joy?
So I was doing a decent job on the shower cleaning, and I let the chlorine-based anti-mould application sit for thirty minutes to bleach the black fungus stains off the white grout, as you do. So far so good. I prepared to rinse the product off the tiles. Whoops! Turned the shower tap in the…
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Solace of a morning mist
The unconscionable challenges of the Barnvelder cockerel were incessant, this morning, so that by 5:55 we turned around and agreed that we might as well get up. My awaking duty is to get the water on for the tea. I might not have noticed, in my own sleepy haze, that the mist had settled across…
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Shared thoughts . . .
Never mind the mirror neurons today. I’m feeling blue for folks who have not had, or are losing, the opportunity to share old age with each other. After say forty or fifty years together, I suspect that most thoughts are exchanged between ageing partners in a process of mutual osmosis, a kind of seepage from…
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Learning how magical realism works
Into each life, some sprinkles of magic faery dust sometimes fall. It’s all part of our story-telling sensibility, I reckon, these magical moments of understanding. I think, as resonant as metaphor, as compelling as an epiphany, these moments are also a big part of what makes us human. I’ve used magical realism with conscious effort…
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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…
Roads to Joy 