The gypsy room...

Autumn has not shown its full-true face around here yet, but days have that sleepy, golden look they get just before summer slips over the edge of the world.  I am excitedly waiting for those magical October days.  So many unsettling things going on around the world, so much pain and hurt.  And why can't us humans make peace instead of hate?  Haven't we tasted enough of that already?  I feel cold inside at times. But My Heavenly Father is a golden fountain, splashing me inside and out with warm shining love. Wishing I could go hide away in my little gypsy room and be enfolded in peaceful thoughts.

I'm leaving you here some of the images floating in my mind right now... My lovely gypsy room. Enjoy!

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.

The lost garden...

She couldn’t say exactly when she had fallen asleep or when had she began to dream… but she had no doubt this had to be a dream… it just had to be! A dream so real though, that she saw herself standing there, right in the center of this garden in her dreams, in fully awakened senses…  

Oh she remembers having being there before… in this overgrown, disheveled, yet still lovely garden. She remembers living intensely and happily there once… but when, or how log ago was this? She couldn’t remember… 

This was certainly a magical place… and yet, somehow, it was the wrong magic. What she saw made her shiver… she didn’t like it at all… what she saw was an unloved garden… for how could one love something and forget to confer it the proper love? The efficient, tender loving care a loved garden requires?

The girl saw that weeds had taken over the lovely pebble paths, that the morning glory grew rampant, taking over places where they should have not been, and she saw that the English ivy that had been once removed from its roots had appeared again and it was now digging its tendrils into the walls of the house, tearing it apart… like water expanding in a crack…

The girl saw too that grape vines and the Virginia Creeper had taken over an entire area, hanging thick over shrubbery and trees like swinging curtains… a storm must had passed through the garden at some point, for the girl saw that her favorite tree had been cracked in half; its lovely white trunk exposed and bared and now the once perfect shaggy leafy mane stood hanging over shrubbery and adjacent trees like a sad broken brown crown.

In the flower beds over the right, the mint had grown rampant and it had taken over the place almost in its entirety…. but the saddest thing of all were the roses… oh the lovely lovely roses. 

The Orchid Masterpiece Climbing Rose the girl had planted that spring just before she left her gardens had not survived… its remains quietly rested on a bed of weeds…

Half of the long canes of the Golden Shower climbing rose should had been pruned right to the ground, because half of the rose hadn't survived the winter and it wasn’t doing good, but nobody seemed to notice these things, or care about it… oh but the girl could. She could see and hear beyond what the average human could see and hear… and thus she heard the garden’s song...

 

The girl was sure it was a sad song… a song that spoke of abandonment and neglect… and deep deep down from the bottom of the garden arose another song.... she heard it too, and understood.  It was the song of regret sung by her own little heart… 

Quickly, the girl pushed apart the tall garden phlox growing around the rose bushes and foxgloves, and there, among the weeds growing freely on the flowerbed’s floor there she saw something else… the vision of another garden… a garden far far away sitting right on the way of the southern winds... the girl smiled happily. Her little heart now softened and purified. She then said her goodbyes to this garden, and left.

PS:  Our voyages have taken us to the west coast these days, and right now we are in San Diego where my husband is attending some meetings while I enjoy the sceneries and little shops in the area… and think of you too, and how close I may be from some of you! 

It truly is a beautiful place, with beautiful trendy people and the breezy warmth and palm trees and amount of flowers certainly add to the beauty… you feel as if you’re walking in Paris or in some other European city… oh oh and I’d discovered a little Goodwill close by that’s just amazing… I may have to go there again and get me a new skirt ;) Did you notice that on the photograph I posted on my previous post (taken at the Desert Garden on Balboa Park) I was wearing the exact same skirt and top I had wore last time I visited the house in the rose, five months ago? Yes, my profile picture on the right was taken during that visit. Embarrassing… ;)