I ate lunch outside atop our white wooden table yesterday. I dangled my feet over the porch railing and watched a monarch butterfly float from flower to flower. It drank deeply from a magenta zinnia, pirouetted into the air, then dropped down onto a fiery orange blossom to drink again. I wondered if the butterfly is fresh from a chrysalis I’ve been watching. One of the three under the porch stairs looked ready the day before: instead of the bright green translucence of a new chrysalis, the sheath was transparent, and I could see the folded orange and black wings of the butterfly within it.
The mums are a deep brick red, and the sedums like blushing cauliflowers. I love these rusty hues after the bright yellow and cool lavender flowers of summer.
I’ve hardly sat on the deck since spring. The weather is finally perfect for it now. I wore short sleeves yesterday, jeans, and bare feet. Wind rustled the leaves of trees all around me, and the breeze was cool on my arms while the sun on my back was warm. I couldn’t see the bird feeder because the oak is still heavy with foliage that obscures it. I see a few red-tipped leaves, though. Soon the branches will be bare, and the birds will come to eat, and I will lunch with them.
I sat in my chair by the window last night with a glass of wine, and when I looked up from my book, I saw the moon hanging low in the blackness. It would set soon. I went out in my bare feet after dark, gingerly feeling my way out of fear of stepping on dying yellow jackets — we had a nest under the stairs that we exterminated — so I could see the moon in the full of the sky, without walls around me. The air was cool and crisp, the night air of late summer, soon to be fall. Insects chirred their song in the darkness, and I wondered how much longer the evening will be filled with their sounds.
To the west, over the shadowy tops of deciduous trees that will soon lose their leaves, in a valley of sky between mountain domes, the tilted crescent nestled in a light pillow of clouds. It felt cozy. I felt invited to climb under the covers in my own bed and snuggle in with a good book.
I felt moved somehow, like the moon is different and more accessible, and maybe a little more magical, as we enter the fall season. It says I’m here for your quiet, your going within. Night will be crisp and clear and dark, and there will be more of it; I’ll be here shining, a sliver or a sickle or a full glowing globe in an inky sky. Walk with me.
Tis the season of coffee and books in the garden. Tis the season of cabbage and sulphur butterflies, unmarked and unremarkable when compared with the splashy swallowtails and monarchs that will come later in summer. But still, the little pale green and yellow butterflies flit and flutter, unencumbered and free. They inspire one to enjoy flowers and sunshine, a sip of something sweet.
Tis the season for bees to buzz, to dip into the purple trumpets of salvia, the yellow buttercups of rue, the diminutive white daisies of feverfew. Tis the season of birdsong trills and the putter of private prop planes on Saturday jaunts from the nearby one-runway airport.
The sky is blue. Midday sunlight is blinding bright on the ivory paper I write on. The sun is warm on my pale winter skin. A hint-of-summer breeze lifts the edge of my flowery skirt.
I’ve got my afternoon coffee, my book of short stories, the butterflies and the bees, and for the first time in months, nothing I have to do today but enjoy it.
Daily writing prompt
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
My Saturday started hectic, which I didn’t love. This is a big weekend in town between the Virginia Tech spring football game and the high school prom, and I wanted to get to the grocery store early before it was mobbed. I shopped before I’d even had breakfast or coffee, and by the time I made it to Panera at 8am to get an asiago bagel for our daughter and a cinnamon raisin to go with my mascarpone cheese, they were already out of all of their bagels but oats and asiago. At least I was able to get one for our daughter for prom morning.
When I got home, I arranged the flowers I’d gotten her, unloaded groceries, sat for a few minutes to read, and then was off to the pool to swim laps. I think I injured my foot on my gardening vacation. I then ran on it for a week, and then probably walked 20 miles in NYC last weekend, and now my foot is rebelling and will barely let me walk. This is a problem for me. I get cranky when I can’t exercise, mainly because I like to eat. And I swear, the older I get, the less I can eat without outgrowing my clothes. I exercise so I can eat. When I can’t exercise, I can’t eat what I want. This makes me unhappy.
I considered swimming, but the aquatic center where our daughter swims is in the next town over and is an annoying ordeal to arrange a time to swim, reserve a lane, drive over and back, blah blah blah. It is A Thing. She asked why I don’t just go to the one here in town, and honestly, it had never occurred to me to look into it. I reserved a lane easily over the phone (the other pool is always full), and when I arrived, it was all chill and easy and perfect. And, it’s only 5 minutes away. When I walked out onto the pool deck, I was transported back ten years, to one of our daughter’s first experiences with organized swimming, which had taken place at that pool. I swam my laps blissfully, and after I got out, I bought a ten-day pass and reserved lanes four days next week.
After swimming, I was kind of pooped. I haven’t swum laps in a while. Back at home, I lay down on the couch with The Artist’s Way and started reading. Some friends and I are going through the book together starting next week. Two things the author recommends that I’m eager to do are morning pages — 3 pages of longhand brain drain every morning, just to get stuff out of our heads — and artist dates with ourselves. I’m pretty excited to get started. I got all my chores done today so that I’ll have Sunday all to myself to get ready for the first week’s practices.
As I lay on the couch reading, my eyes kept trying to flutter shut. It didn’t help that my glance repeatedly wandered to our cat, curled up in my writing chair. Finally, I followed her lead. I put the book down, curled up on the couch, and let myself fall asleep.
I received a shipment of ink yesterday — a bottle of Diamine Holly to get me through winter, and a small vial of Sherwood Forest. The first is an elegant holiday green with a hint of shimmer in it, and the latter is an earthier green, like fir or spruce needles. Both inks remind me of evergreens, which I need very much when the garden is brown.
I’m taking today off of work. Other than the solstice, today is the only day I’m taking off for the Christmas season, so I want to take advantage of it to do as little as possible. I was on my feet, mostly in the kitchen, for 12 hours on my other day off for the holidays. It was worth it — our yule feast was delicious — but today I plan to do the opposite of what I did on Wednesday. Today, I plan to put my feet up, relax, and do stuff I want to do. Like clean all my fountain pens, which I did this morning, now that I’ve got this pretty new ink.
I might play with my camera some if I feel like it; last night, with time finally free to caper, I used my little tripod to photograph Tootsie in the light of the Christmas tree. The light was low, and I wanted to use my tripod and play with slow shutter speeds, using my phone as a camera remote, and testing different setting combinations in the dimly lit room. I never did get a great focus on her eyes, but I can keep trying. I forget I have practice subjects in the cats, and that when I want to play with my camera, I can photograph them.
Tootsie at Christmas
But mostly today I want to read. In February, my team is meeting up in Istanbul for work, and I know next to nothing about Turkey or Istanbul, except that I know I’ll like the food (kebabs! pastries with pistachios! falafel!), and that the setting of one of my favorite fantasy series is modeled on the land and city-scapes of the Byzantine empire. The two books comprise the Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay; the main character is a mosaicist, and the setting is rich and textured and gorgeous, and I want to read it again before my trip.
First, though, I will read real-world fiction by one of Istanbul’s celebrated novelists, Elif Shafak. She’s written several books, and I’ve selected The Bastard of Istanbul to start with. I love to learn a place through its fiction, and Shafak has put together a whole list of titles for anyone who wants to read their way through Istanbul. From that list, I learned there’s a hotel in Istanbul that’s the last stop on the Orient Express, and was where Agatha Christie would stay when she visited Istanbul (Hemingway would also stay there). Apparently the hotel is near our Airbnbs. So now I want to read some Agatha Christie as well, which I wanted to do anyway thanks to my friend Zandy who recently finished reading Christie’s entire ouevre and blogged comically about her experience in A year of murder, and also because I loved Knives Out, and I can’t wait to watch Glass Onion, and the director of those two films is of course inspired by Agatha Christie. I’ll need to ask Zandy if Christie set anything in Istanbul I should read.
The wind swooshes down the chimney and rattles the flue. Tootsie cleans herself, calm and unhurried, while trees shake and snowflakes swirl outside. I’m going to slide some brocolli into the oven and read my book while I wait for it to roast.
Most of the religious holidays on the calendar mean little to me. We celebrate the Christian holidays primarily as tradition and to spend time with each other as a family, but none of us are actually Christian. My spiritual inclinations tend more towards paganism; Easter isn’t meaningful to me because of the resurrection of Christ, it’s meaningful to me because of the resurrection of the earth. I do love how the date of Easter is determined — it takes place on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox — and to me Easter means the rebirth of life: it means green emerging from the ground again, it means snowdrops and daffodils, and creatures blinking back out into the sun. But instead of celebrating Easter, I celebrate the equinox. I usually make seed bread, and I try to time my annual gardening vacation around it.
I love the spring equinox, it is a joyous time of the year. So much life reemerging! But my favorite holiday to celebrate is the winter solstice. The winter solstice is the shortest day, and the longest night. Where I live, the sun rises at 7:32 am on the solstice this year, and sets at 5:07: we’ve got nine hours and 35 minutes of daylight.
What I love about the solstice is that after weeks of lamenting the short days that just kept getting shorter, after weeks of late sunrises and early sunsets, on this day we can rejoice that the shortening of days is over. The sun is born! The days begin to lengthen again. The sun rises earlier, the sun sets later. The solstice means more light is coming.
I took today off of work to celebrate. I refilled the bird feeders, brought in more firewood for the bitter cold front that’s supposed to arrive on Friday, bought fresh bagels for the kids, and am preparing a solstice feast.
In fact, the real reason I’m writing this blog post is to document the menu so I can remember it in future years: Bakewell tart, homemade applesauce, crescent rolls (some baked with brie and jam), Caramelized Onion and Butternut Squash Roast (with pecans instead of chestnuts), and a winter solstice salad (with almonds and goat cheese instead of walnuts and feta). I love the combinations of autumn vegetables like caramelized onions and butternut squash, winter fruits like blood oranges and pomegranate, and nuts and cheeses for this meal. The kids probably won’t care about the salad or the butternut squash dish, but they’ll love the plain rolls, the applesauce, and the tart. I also made a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies this morning, so they can eat cookies if they don’t like anything else.
I’ve made the applesauce and it’s cooling on the counter. Now I’ll go for a run under the sunny, blue, solstice sky. I’ll bake the tart this afternoon before going back into the kitchen this evening to make the rest.
Butterfly Mind 