Home for a few days...

Beyond the mossy trees there resides a little white cottage… full of charm, cozy, and peacefully nested in a magical forest of privets.  I am so glad to be here.  So thankful to be back and delighted like a little girl full of wonder.  For I have missed our home immensely…  

Wisconsin, with fields and fields of Queen Ann’s lace last month, then it was Idaho, San Diego, this weekend Tennessee with its lovely rolling hills and green green country roads and little white houses… then on Tuesday, NY and then North Carolina.  I’ve been traveling so much this summer I’ve almost lost my sense of time… where has summer gone?

Ephemeral, evanescent, vanishing, volatile—that’s how I describe my little world these days, and a garden surrounded by vaporous sunlit woods that some how it appears to be a different place than it once was, just a few weeks ago. 

We don’t have the extreme season changes that typically belong to those September days of the North, but I can already see the quiet changes taking place in the southern season; changes in the wind shifting directions, changes in the sounds in Nature; somewhat muffled, quieter, subdued if you may, and I can read the secrets trees hold in leaves that are already starting to lose their youthful zest… and how the natural world, too, watches us in return committing our progress and the season of our lives to wild and fragrant memories.

What surprises me more than anything is this sense of rush growing inside me… this need of preparedness, of bringing in little treasures to the protection of the insides... 

Potted flowers, the gentle geraniums and sensible ferns and to begin the accustomed task of pruning and protecting… oh this strange and deep-rooted sense of  impending doom the winter gifts us with up North… 

To get the garden and oneself ready for the despondent long months ahead, as if winter here would come crashing upon our heels, when in fact we still have a few more months of delight… 

And such delight it is right now… for how wonderful the change in climate, and how wonderful the cooler breezes as the intense heat succumbs and the garden gets fill again with birds of every color…  how delightful it feels working out there again. 

From my voyages I’d brought a few new friends to the pond...

But today I saw the first live resident—a brown medium sized frog whom upon sensing my presence leaped away to hide behind the Mandeville vine. 

  

And then there are the goldfish… 15 goldfish have been let free to make our pond their home.  They scattered away the minute we put them in the water and went to hide amidst the Pickerel Rush, and Water lettuce roots.  We were told they will not keep the small size they are right now for too long.  They will grow, and grow fast.  So I’m hoping to be able to see them again soon some day.  

Oh it is so good to see you again, 

even if you’re kind of invisible behind my screen.  

And I hope you’d remember that out there 

within the grasp of our imagination there is a magical forest...  

 I'll meet you there.