1.
Many years ago, nearly 30, a dear friend, now long gone, brought me the gift of a Sussex trug. It’s a real one, made of coppiced sweet chestnut and white willow; the nails are copper. For ages it’s been hanging from the pot rack above the kitchen work-table. I use it in winter to hold a trio of primroses when they become available in the supermarket or in summer to hold bread for a dinner party. Today I took it down and put it up with the pots of salad greens to remind me to use it for tonight’s salad.
2.
The roses are beginning to bloom. First one, the pale pink Madame Alfred Carriere, a noisette climber, so sweetly scented I could smell it from the table where I was drinking my coffee before my swim. And then, turning, I saw the Blanc Double de Coubert just opening beside the table. Soon there will too many roses to name or count but today, these two:
3.
When I opened my email after my swim, I had a link to this review of The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, posted at River Street Writing. Catherine is a beautiful writer herself so I am grateful for her care and attentive eye and mind.
Kishkan is a movingly precise raconteur and the reader is held by her careful details: the “dark hair strewn with flowers” of one of Wilkinson’s early paintings of her; the empathic picnic they once shared of a “baguette and soft cheese, slices of apple…wine out of small tumblers”; the Grecian path in Iraklion fringed by “wild oats, henbane, the desiccated leaves of coreopsis”; or Ireland where she fled his incessance to a place of “dark bricks of turf cut from the bogs” to a “weather-beaten whitewashed cottage surrounded by grey-green leaves.” Woven within, allusions to Homer, Berger, Freud, Kristeva, as Kishkan interrogates the confusing past from an array of angles: her own shame or maybe her innocence, the painter’s wife, her possible perceptions in the wake of their divorce, the judgement of outsiders, and her own husband’s acceptance even as Jack’s erotically-tinged sketches persist despite her marriage and children.
4.
In the garden right now: two teepees of beans (Blue Lake, Hilda Romano, and Fortex, with Cerise du Japon to come), rhubarb, garlic growing as I watch it, kale both ready to cut and tiny volunteers to take over once it’s done, raspberries beginning to bloom, pebbly sage to mince over tiny fingerling potatoes, tree peonies full and open with the herbaceous ones in bud, the sweet yellow daylilies two or three days from opening, figs swelling on the two trees, wisterias about as beautiful as they’ve ever been in more than 40 years, every herb imaginable and maybe a few others too, lily of the valley, sweet woodruff, blueberries with their bells bringing in bees, one, two, three, and in the greenhouse just now, the most beautiful swallowtail (either a pale swallowtail or an anise) reclining on a branch of rosemary, so relaxed I could get close enough (almost) to touch it. But didn’t.
