Enjoying
The way scraps of fabric find a pattern, blues, a little square of ochre (with a bunny), the way my mind wants to enter the hidden folds, the way.
Watching
On three different mornings, a coyote has come out of the woods to trot across the grass this window looks out on. On one of those mornings, the cat was outside and he scrambled up a post to watch from the roof. On one of those mornings, I went to the back door and saw the coyote turn to look at me. Leave the cat alone, I told it in my sternest voice. The cat hasn’t gone out since.
Appreciating
How even though my book isn’t actually out yet, people are reading it. (ARCs available from publisher for those who’d like to review it! Or via Netgalley.) And how they are already writing about it– here, and here, and here.
Loving
The way spring is in the air, the sound of tree frogs as I planted peas in the greenhouse yesterday, the little clumps of daffodils here and there, the surprise stars of periwinkle by the front stairs, and Venus and Saturn in the western sky.
Listening
The other day I was wistful for the past and I put on Janáček’s piano cycle, “On an overgrown path”. I was taken to my grandmother’s home ground in the Beskydy Mountains. At the heart of these pieces are Moravian folk melodies, ones she might have been familiar with at school or community dances; in them, the pauses and trills of insects, birdsong, even the call of an owl. The composer confessed that he “was walking along an overgrown path of old memories” and somehow, in the way that music can transcend time and place, these are my memories of my grandmother, though she died when I was ten and I can’t recall a single conversation about her childhood. But I can place her on that path, listening to owls in the twilight, anticipating a visit to the Madonna of Frydek, and listening to the piano cycle, I am with her on the overgrown path, the scent of clover and the hum of bees with me still.
Thinking
How to begin the quilting of this, what thread to use, what stitches in the narrow sashing between the log cabins. I’ve pulled out my hoop and fitted the centre of the quilt within its wide circle. I’m not quite ready.
Eating
Last night I made us a proper Sunday dinner: roasted duck legs, a pan of roasted vegetables — delicata squash, carrots, small sweet peppers, onion, carrots, and wedges of red cabbage –, salad of mild and peppery greens. And for dessert, one of the pies I froze in September, using our Merton Beauty apples, and as we ate slices of it with dollops of cream, I thought of how John had recently pruned the tree, shaping it, and in late August, we have another bounty of apples for pies to eat, if we’re lucky, when March comes around again. If it does.
