What happens when you

have a week or two away

It is Sunday night. That Sunday night. The last one. Today was the last day of laziness as tomorrow is Monday which means I head back to work. For a week or two all routines and habits have been scattered to the wind. Soon it will be waking up alarms and home made lunches. I find my diary to start filling it with things to do and that need doing. It all begins again, this weird work dance of ours. As the evening unfolds, I’ve darted outside three times. Once to water the tomato plants, twice to capture sunsets on my phone. I’m holding on to this summery holiday moment, even if there wasn’t that much sunshine over our time off. It has been a grey kinda of holiday and I am in a grey frame of mind as I sit and contemplate returning to work, in my lap is a book I created 5 years ago. The book is bursting with pages stuck with layers of paper, made up of words, images, ideas and dreams, all collected together. I started this when I decided to leave the job I had at the time and I had questions that I did not have answers too. Questions, I realise that are actually deeper than “what am I doing with my life”. I understand now that this question is a starting point or stumbling block depending on how you approach it.

I sit and start to look through this magical creation. It is so beautiful and wonderful and weird. Little memories are scattered through it. As the light begins to fade outside, as an Airedale wanders around a garden which is still and beautiful, I realise that when book was created perhaps I wasn’t ready to learn what it has to teach me and I needed some years before I could understand fully it’s lessons. We all have books on the shelf that take us time to read and connect with. So instead of fearing the start of the work I think of what I will discover within the pages of my day and the pages of this book. I feel certain they hold some answers I am looking for. I turn the first page and begin…

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“why is your alarm going off?” It is 11.20am and each day my phone alarm has rung out where ever we have been. I sheepishly turn it off and look around me. I thought it might be fun to just take a moment when I was on break to stop at a set time each day and take a photo of something I see in the moment when the alarm rings out. Just short little bursts of unplanned creativity. Here are a sample of some of the images, all taken on my iphone.

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The garden over the break for the most part stood still, it was not warm enough to encourage thinds to flower. The lilies stood still for a good week and half before they are finally started to pop. Despite all stillness the garden had stories to tell:

• The Rata didn’t really flower. It started to hint it might fall into the crescendo of red that I love but nope, not enough sunshine. Just a few sparkles of flowers here and there and that was it. This is the complete opposite to last season where it was a very mighty and bold feature in the garden. The Tui that claims it as it’s own visited briefly but headed off once they knew no flowers were coming.

• Peas. I found little sprinklings of peas growing in the garden amongst the flower beds and found a new delight in wandering around the garden and finding a random pea pod to nibble on. Makes up for the fact that I didn’t have any raspberries this year.

• I spent 3 days sitting at my little work desk (it is an old sewing table so it is little) writing and finishing my full draft of my writing project I have been futzing with for the past year. It took some discipline to do so but I did delight in my new desk location, looking out across the garden which offered wonderful distractions when the words didn’t come.

• One of the distracts was s a white tail blackbird that calls the garden home. The tail is only partial white but it is enough to notice her and then learn of her habits in the garden. Equally delightful was watching a papa bird guide a fledgling in the ways of being a bird and realising that my garden is a good place to bring up baby birds.

• I felt a bit worried about the bee numbers in the garden, especially with weather that seemed to go up and down very quickly, sudden changes in climate is very hard for them when they out flying. I hadn’t noticed as many bumbles on the flowering plants in the garden until I realised that they had moved to outer edges, taking advantage of the many shrubs on fence lines that are flowering.

• A moment I love - when buckets become fruit bowls for plums.