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.
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. I slept in until sunlight leaked around the edges of the curtains, which I never do. Now I’m by the window in the living room, my coffee in the sill, with a cat on my arms as I type this. We got a new chair, and we put it in the prime sitting spot in the house, next to the front window where I like to read and write and look at the garden. The cats also know this is the prime sitting spot, and they are always curled up in the chair, hogging it so nobody else can enjoy it. This morning I kicked Tubbles out, though, and took the chair for myself. She came back immediately and laid across me instead of across the seat of the chair.
I’ll make the cherry pie crust in a few minutes, after I’ve enjoyed my coffee and admired the sun-sparkled dew on our freshly raked lawn. I’ve been traveling a lot, and we’ve hardly been here to take care of basic stuff like cleaning up the oak leaves that carpeted the grass. Yesterday, the sun shone in a blue sky and the air was in the mid-50s, and I finally finished raking after I went for a pre-Thanksgiving run. I raked multiple piles of leaves, dragged them to the top of the hill on a tarp, and then chopped them up with the lawn mower and scattered them down the flower bed hill. They’ll make a decent mulch until my spring delivery of shredded tree-bark mulch, and hopefully they’ll break down a little over the winter to add some nutrients to the soil.
At the butterfly garden at nearby Pandapas Pond, a little sign encouraged gardeners to cut back perennials in the spring instead of fall so that the dried stems and flowerheads would provide protection and food for wildlife all winter. Excellent. Procrastination: check. With permission to put that off, I left the perennials standing. I gave the grass a final trim, and I think the garden is put to bed for the winter.
Now there’s a cat on me and a cat on the floor next to me. Quiet music drifts out from the kitchen where my husband is prepping potatoes. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner stresses me out, and my stress makes everyone in the family miserable, so he has taken over that job. My responsibilities are pies and rolls: the baking. I’m very happy with this setup. I’ll gladly bake, and I’ll gladly clean if I don’t have to cook.
My coffee cup is almost empty. I think Tubbles senses I need to get up soon. She just swatted me with her tail and drooped her head over my arm pitifully. I’ll end this post and snuggle with her a minute before I go make the pie crust. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it ♥️.
The world outside is wet and gray. I hear tires spray rainwater on the slick neighborhood street as a car passes by. I sit with my slippered feet propped up on an ottoman and watch the drizzle mist my freshly planted flower boxes. I put in purple cabbages and yellow and purple pansies last week. Grass tassels droop and drip over the velvety pansy leaves. I’ve got a steaming cup of mint tea in the windowsill, along with a book to read while I drink it.
Our son is home from college this weekend, and our daughter just returned from an out of town swim meet. Life feels complete when all four of us are here. I feel a warm fullness, and a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. I love these people; they’re my favorites.
I made brownies and blueberry muffins for our son, and I stocked up on some of his favorite foods, like fresh pineapple, and orange-mango juice. He and his roommate have a small fridge in their door room, but they can’t be bothered to go to the grocery store to buy stuff like juice. He’s been wearing my WordPress sweatpants since he got home because he forgot to bring any sweatpants, and this is sweatpant weather. I probably should just send him home with those, and get myself another pair.
The cats are happy we’re all here. They’ve got lots of laps to keep them warm during the day, and feet to sleep on at night. I’m happy too.
Butterfly Mind 