The outdoor Cours Saleya market square smells like flowers and fresh air. If you’re ever in Nice, look for Marché aux Fleurs Cours Saleya (Cours Saleya flower market)– it can be hard to Google in English for “Nice”… anything. Make sure to bring cash if you want to buy from the market vendors. To limit my spending, I purposely did not get cash and opted to bring home photographs instead. Now I wish I had some of the soaps, teas, and truffle oil, though.
One week ago, I left home to travel for work for the first time since I rejoined Automattic in November of 2019. We are a fully distributed company, meaning we are distributed around the world, with no central offices — we all work from our homes and co-working spaces. The way we get quality in-person time together is by traveling 2-3 times a year for meetups.
When I returned to the company, I was excited I’d get to see people again who I’d become friends with through work, but who live in different states, countries, and continents from me. Then, of course, Covid happened.
Last weekend, on my way to my first meetup since I came back to Automattic, I traveled to France via a 24 hour layover in England. Despite using two different London airports for the journey, I did not see London at all. Instead, a friend from Automattic who I haven’t seen in six years picked me up from Heathrow and drove me to his cottage in Hammerwich, where I finally got to meet his wife and children. When we got out of the car after the two-hour drive, I was amazed by how fresh and clean the air was. I’ve never smelled anything like it, even in autumn in the mountains where I live.
I’d never been to England before, and when Ben asked me if there was anything I wanted to do while I was there, I told him I wanted to hang out in their garden, chat with them all, and go for a walk and enjoy spring. We did all of that, and we drank tea, and we all looked for flowers and tried to identify them. We walked through the countryside where properties are lined with hedges of holly or hawthorn or various other plants, and the hedges are gentle and a part of the landscape. They’re green and full of birds and wildlife, and I now think everyone should adopt hedges instead of fences. We ate a proper Sunday roast with roasted veggies, and Becky showed me how to make Yorkshire pudding. We talked about books, the kids showed me their flower press and then pressed flowers from the garden, we played laser tag, and their smallest even let me read him a bedtime story.
I had a short visit, but a lovely one.
My upper body can’t shovel another crumb of dirt. I tried to clean up the rest of the mulch today and my left shoulder pretty much said, No, No more of that. I put the pitchfork and wheelbarrow away.
I’m curious what the gardens look like of people who actually know what they’re doing. There’s a horticulture garden on the Virginia Tech campus, just a couple miles away from our house. I have a Fitbit again, and after four days of it gushing how great I am with all the gardening exercise, I couldn’t stand to have a day without it buzzing to tell me I’ve broken yet another record. So I grabbed my camera and went for a walk.
The cherries and Bradford pears are blooming, so there are soft pink and white petals everywhere. The light was a little flat today and I didn’t get great photos of them along the way to the horticulture garden. But once I arrived, everything I wanted to photograph was close to the ground and didn’t require shooting the sky, and all the flowers are adorable, and I felt like I was in a fairy forest.
Yesterday, I knew snow was coming. It was Friday afternoon, and the sun shone bright and warm on the flowers that have already started blooming. After work I grabbed my camera, and I went for a walk; I didn’t even need a jacket. As I type this, the world outside is cold and grey, and snow swirls down the street in gusts of wind.
In February, first come the snowdrops, then the crocuses. Then, when all the other deciduous trees are still stripped bare, there’s one that blazes forth in bright sunshine yellow. With its saffron strands, the witch hazel announces itself against the bleak grey-brown of the winter landscape. It tells me, it’s not just the ground flowers that are coming. Here come the trees, and flowers in the sky.
Today was warm and windy. The dry winter grasses whipped like ponytails out back. When I took the compost out on my lunch break, I carried my camera, too. I thought the snowdrops might have come up, and I was delighted to see that they have.
One crocus has opened as well, despite its greenery being nibbled to the ground.
Butterfly Mind 