Charleston, SC

I'm writing from our beautiful hotel room

where we'll be staying for a few days,
in Charleston, SC... 

The haunting sensation of walking on another skin in another era.  The evocative melody of cathedral bells ringing the early morning.  Those ghosts of yesterday roaming ancient cemeteries under the fragrance of camellia canopies.  Bermudian limestone ancient dwellings.  The sound of hoods of gentle beasts, and horse drawn carriages traveling on flagstone century old streets.  Courtyards and secret gardens.  Exotic blooms and fragrant trees.  Camellias, azaleas, tea olives and the crepe myrtle.  I have been enchanted by the oldest city in South Carolina—Charleston.   

Enchanting courtyard gardens... 

   

Ivy covered walls...

The old St. Philips Cemetery in Charleston's historic downtown, where camellias petals cover century old tombs...  an enchanting place to visit. 

It is said that this graveyard is visited by the apparition of a woman crying over a grave. Others have heard a small child, almost a baby, crying here.  Perhaps it is something to do with baby Julia?

On June 10, 1987, local amateur photographer, Harry Reynolds, was snapping pictures around the cemetery at St. Philip’s Church.  Harry is a native Charlestonian who grew up just down the street from St. Philip’s Church Cemetery.  So, even though the main gate to the cemetery was locked, he knew that he could still get a shot of most of the cemetery by poking his camera through the bars on the rear gate.  Harry took several photos and sent them for development.  He noticed nothing unusual about any of them…until he got to one very particular...  you can read and see the photograph HERE.

I've been enchanted by the exotic beauty of camellias and now I need to have one or two trees growing in my garden...

Huge potted plants go hand in hand with beautiful wrought iron work, and every house is embellished by a lovely, walled garden... 

Can you hear the whispers, a few giggles and the soft swooshing of the silk gowns and dresses?

This lovely home here is for sale.  If you have 2 millions to spare, it could be yours...

When my husband asked me last week if I wanted to go with him to SC to some meetings he was holding there, I could barely believe my luck... why, I've been reading Emily Whaley's book about her garden on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina for a few months now (slow reader), and her ageless and captivating gardens had me dreaming with it and wishing for a deeper connection with my own creations in my little plot, which for too long now, is been bared of blooms and under the spell of winter.  How could I'd said no to that!  We didn't get to go inside Emily's lovely gardens because it was closed to the public, but we were able to take a peek of it from a neighboring home that was being renovated and whose workers let us go through...

You can find Emily Whaley's book HERE.  And you can see some photographs of her garden here HERE...

Hope you enjoyed the little tour... see you soon!

Spring dreams

The garden is calling my name, spring has started stirring within my soul... I run outside, turn to the sunlight and shout to the quietness contained within the woods:  "Where are you... oh where are you precious, lovely 'Spring' where are you?"

That’s sort of how the end of winter feels to me.  You see, I can sense the seasonal change coming, the sun is out, I yearn to start working the soil, but spring isn't really here yet. Nature is not giving in, and it is so frustrating.  Do you feel like that sometimes too?

Around here in these parts of my little world, the end of our winters starts right around February. Which is a most marvelous thing to me, considering that up North where the house in the roses sits, the beginning of February it actually is the worst part of winter.  You are still pretty much immersed in it by then, and I remember how sad and anxious I used to feel, my heart already long past its endurance towards winter. There wasn't a day then in wish I didn't yearn for warmth and flowers and my precious garden to come alive again.  Can you imagine how I felt then?  I'm definitely not a winter bird.  

Ah yes I want my magic back... back in my garden and my little world.  So alas, I'm banishing Winter from my heart... "Awake! arise, ye flowers!" ;)

As it is, I'm already spending longer spells of time in the garden during the warmer hours of day; removing dead leaves and annual climbers that were left behind and making a mental count of all the bulbs and flowers I need to fill pots and such, whilst the thought of spring brings a warm glow to my vision, and thaw my mind and muscles from their endless time spent inside winterizing.  The heart can get really cold if all you know is winter, does it not?  Oh I'm sure the Winter Witch had something to do with this... the saddest thing found yesterday in one of the birdbath.  What do birds die of?  I have to wonder. Perhaps his little heart was frozen to death by the Winter Witch for something he did, or didn't?   

I'm spending my days working on various projects in the house, which I usually leave for those months when there's nothing I can do outside... like working on embellishing these old beauties I found at our local thrift store yesterday...

These lamps are so pretty, is hard to believe they were only $14.00 each.  I have big plans for them thought, so they will not stay as they are for too long... ;)  Or this lovely vintage dresser I'm envisioning painting in cobalt or navy blue and gold.  Only thing is I don't have a place to put it... ;)

I really think anyone can redo her home only using items purchased from thrift stores. 80% of mine is...  I am such a thrifting junkie!

In the morning when sunshine permeates our little white cottage in golden dust, magical things transpire... furry creatures would come over for a comfy snooze, new boughs start to steep, young buds gets tinted and leaves swell...  I am so in love with this little white cottage of ours... so in love and thankful for it!... there's nothing about it I don't appreciate... the quiet glories of the early mornings when the sun sits in its center and all the entire front part of the house doze in sunshine, mid-afternoon birds, the woods twinkling under the rays of the last sun and the darkest dark of nights... I so love it all!

Isn't he ever so cute!  Ferals... not fair that he gets to soil my settee, but won't let me pet him!

       

Is your heart yearning for spring too?  There is one thing which gives radiance to everything:  it is the idea of something good around the corner... We're almost there!  ;)

See you soon!

Yesterday's ghosts

When I was young I'd listen to the radio

Waitin' for my favorite songs

When they played I'd sing along, it made me smile

Those were such happy times and not so long ago

How I wondered where they'd gone

But they're back again just like a long lost friend

All the songs I loved so well...

Every sha-la-la-la

Every wo-o-wo-o, still shines

Every shing-a-ling-a-ling, that they're startin' to sing's, so fine... 

Remember that song by the Carpenters?  I have always loved Karen Carpenter's soft contralto voice. She died from anorexia way too early for her time. Her music as well as the story of her life make me so sad. But I love Karen, and love all of her songs even if they make me sad, and today I've been remembering her and singing her songs all day long, because the Fisherman had bought us a Turntable Record Player, and we've been hunting in thrift stores and flea-markers for some collectables records and original oldies, and have found some very lovely original hits by various artists... and who knows if one day the fairies decide to smile down on me and I'll find a Stevie Nick's original?  Like "Bella Donna", or "The Wild Heart"?

If a fairy came to me today and ask me for a wish, I could only think on one thing this very moment—to be a famous drummer player... really!  To play the drummer the way Karen did.  Her skills as a drummer has all my admiration.  What would you wish for if a fairy gives you a magical wish? 

Winter has settled in around here.  Super chilly temperatures and dark days have kept me wishing for sunshine and warmth, so I'm trying to keep warm and create a little.  I have been making more canvases for my gallery wall.  

More Frida Kahlo's canvases that is, because Frida is another of my favorite ghosts from yesterdays.  What is it with Frida that I adore?  Her paintings?  Not as much.  But her unique example of freedom of spirit and inner strength.  The way she knew how to make for herself a pair of wings when she had none.  "Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly.”  Frida Kahlo.

And I have a new lover, or two... Eugène Delacroix and a remastered variation with unknown spoof of William-Adolphe Bouguereau paint: "Monsieur M"... ghosts from the Victorian Era under whose spells my heart have succumbed to... and I should soon summons a Mr. Darcy too.  For how can anyone resists his charms?  “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I love this following print here, artist unknown...
I have name it, "Friends"

"Friendship... is born at the moment when one man ('girl') says to another 

"What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”

–C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.

But my favorite.... oh my favorite among all the artwork hanging from my gallery wall it will have to be this little duplicate of a Pre-Raphaelite girl and her pet owl... by Valentine Cameron Prinsep, entitled Il Barbagianni, which means The Barn Owl.  Was this girl real once?  And if so, who was she? I've been under her spell ever since I found this painting.  Oh I was so sure that girl was me there... my soul pouring out through that painting from some other life outside life... the connection was so strong. That's what I wanted to believe the moment I discovered this painting, but no... obsessed by it, however, I did a bit more digging on it the other day, and what I found it is just amazing, and overpowering and beautiful.

Artist, writer, Deputy Editor for Faerie Magazine, Grace Nuth has written a most interesting post about this painting... she insists that the woman in the painting is no other than Lizzy Siddal, who was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and who was the model for Sir John Everett Millais's Ophelia. 

While posing for Millais' Ophelia in 1852, Lizzy floated in a bathtub full of water to represent the drowning Ophelia. Millais painted daily into the winter putting lamps under the tub to warm the water. On one occasion the lamps went out and the water became icy cold. Millais, absorbed by his painting, did not notice and Lizzy did not complain. After this she became very ill with a severe cold or pneumonia. Her father held Millais responsible and, under the threat of legal action, Millais paid her doctor's bills. 

It was thought that she suffered from tuberculosis, but some historians believe an intestinal disorder was more likely. Others have suggested she might have been anorexic while others attribute her poor health to an addiction to laudanum or a combination of ailments. In his 2010 book At Home, author Bill Bryson suggests Lizzy may have suffered from poisoning, because she was a "devoted swallower" of Fowler's Solution, a so-called complexion improver made from dilute arsenic.

Lizzy Siddal was the primary muse for Artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti throughout most of her youth...

Lizzy Siddal as 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1866

The story tells that Lizzy overdosed on laudanum in the early months of 1862. Rossetti, who by then was her husband discovered her unconscious and dying in bed. Overcome with grief after her death, Rossetti enclosed in his wife's coffin a journal containing the only copy he had of his many poems. He supposedly slid the book into Lizzy's red hair. Before publishing his newer poems he became obsessed with retrieving the poems he had slipped into his wife's coffin. Rossetti and his agent, Charles Augustus Howell, applied to the Home Secretary for an order to have her coffin exhumed. It was done in the dead of night to avoid public curiosity and attention, and Rossetti was not present.

Howell reported that her corpse was remarkably well preserved and her delicate beauty intact, probably as a result of the laudanum. Her hair was said to have continued to grow after death so that the coffin was filled with her flowing coppery hair. The manuscript was retrieved although a worm had burrowed through the book so that some of the poems were difficult to read. Rossetti published the old poems with his newer ones; they were not well received by some critics because of their eroticism, and he was haunted by the exhumation through the rest of his life. 

Seven years after his wife's death, Rossetti published a collection of sonnets entitled The House of Life; contained within it was the poem, "Without Her". It is a reflection on life once love has departed: 

What of her glass without her? The blank grey
There where the pool is blind of the moon's face.
Her dress without her? The tossed empty space
Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.
Her paths without her? Day's appointed sway
Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place
Without her? Tears, ah me! For love's good grace,
And cold forgetfulness of night or day.

What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,
Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?
A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,
Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,
Where the long cloud, the long wood's counterpart,
Sheds doubled up darkness up the labouring hill.
— From Without Her

Extrange, sad story, isn't it? The more you read about her the more fascinating she becomes. There's quite a few books, documentaries and YouTube movies out there about Lizzy's life. You can read a thoughtful timeline of Elizabeth Siddal’s life HERE.

Hope you have enjoyed my super long post... till we met again!

On a rainy sunday...

The rains are upon us.  It is the season of magic in a thousand silver liquid drop.  It is a lullaby sent from heaven, a singing pool on the birdbaths.  Rain—the little sleep song on my ear at night.  Do you love rain too?

Yesterday morning we drove to a neighboring little town for breakfast and on the way there a storm unfolded... the skies, laden with a heavy rain opened up its fountains and it turned our world gray and stormy.  Cloudy sheets blinded our vision in a thousand dream, and we followed the rain imagining the world being some ancient great cathedral where treasured pieces were displayed like holy relics. Trees, cars, the rivulets of rain on the windshield, the fathomed winding road ahead... everything was priceless in the enchantment of the moment...  

It has been another dark-gray rainy day today in the little white cottage.  Little lights are being turned on because it is so dark inside it feels like night, although it is only four o'clock.  Outside the windows the world unfolds dreamy and silent; except for the angry rumblings of thunder in the far horizon from time to time.  I am terrified by thunder and lighting, yet I find something magical and exciting in it.  My soul must share some hidden similarities with thunder? 

You, LORD, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light...

Before it started raining this afternoon, there, in the garden, materialized a most lovely vision... a round, super big sorts of a furry vision that is!  One I'd never seen around here before, but it surely knew how to keep my heart skipping a happy bit and running around the house in search of my camera, whilst praying it will stay put for a little bit longer until I could get my lenses ready...

I was thrilled would you not!  Such big cat too!  Perfectly round and colored in a most lovely honey-vanilla fur.  What shall I name him, I wonder!

The Fisherman saw him first and at that first glance thought it was a dog. You should had heard him calling me ever so excitedly to come see 'another dog roaming your gardens... hahaha!  I adore him... both the man and the cat. 

I want to always be able to enjoy the little moments in my life; to never lose this zest for the usual and the everyday little things that are so important and awe-inspiring to me.  Life isn't easy for anyone, but we most purposefully seek out the beauty in the seemingly trivial if we want to be happy. So alas, go find your own rainbow my friend.  Look around you!  I know you'll find it.

Have a lovely week everyone!