It's dark out. The girls are asleep. The house is quiet & sleepy. There's a blackbird piping in the crepe myrtle outside my window. The garbage truck is groaning it's way up the street. I can't sleep so follow the lamplight out into the loungeroom where William is putting on his layers for the ride to work. Neckwarmers & thermals, fleecies & bicycle jackets. It's odd seeing him at this time of the morning, like I've walked in on something private, his morning solitude. It's usually a few more hours before the house stirs, the girls wake, we enter the day tousled & bright eyed. The days are full right now. Full of sunshine & bare feet, warm breezes that carry violet perfume & birdsong & dry washing on the line...outdoors...for the first time in what feels like a long time. There's cornflower buds busting at the seams & sprays of frothy, white blossoms & magnolia trees dotted around the neighbourhood singing in the spring. There are chook eggs, finally, at the bottom of the garden & perfect little spider webs glistening not with the heaviness of fog but with glorious, golden sunlight. There's wattle in the bush & hayfever to be had. There's billowy puffs of cloud in the sky which block out the sun, but if you lie long enough in the grass they blow by & the sunlight glows through your eyelids & warms your toes. Spring, she is here, & it's all so very exciting.
On the flipside, our pretty girl Stella died yesterday. We are all feeling rather teary & sad. She was one of the chooks from the first batch we hatched three years ago. We sang her a little song & dug a hole, laid some camellias & the first blossoms over her. "Night night" said Niamh when she saw her, then off she pottered, up to the chook house "chicken, chicken? she calls prying the lid off the feed bin. A few handfuls of grain from her teapot, the chookies keeping one step ahead of her.
I've been baking scones & roasting what may be the last pumpkin for the season & I think I've come up with a vanilla almond cake recipe that fits the bill. My nights have been full of stitching & knitting for Zahra's birthday next week. Miss Juniper Kitty is all put together & now I'm working on a spring wardrobe for the adventures she's going to have. I've been thinking that storing Miss Juniper's clothes in a kitty cat size suitcase, something she could take with her on all of those adventures, would be just the ticket, but I'm not sure where to get one. Does anyone know if such teensy suitcases exist & where one would find them? I tend to get ideas in my head about these sorts of things, particulaly about how I'd like them to look & then go out looking for this picture in my head only to run around in circles not really finding anything that matches the picture or better yet finding exactly what I need only to find that the price tag says something absurd upon which time I return home empty handed & fall in a dishevelled & disgruntled, google eyed heap on the couch.
There isn't much, if anything left in old man winter. I was feeling sad about how quickly the darkness & rosy lamplight, early bedtimes & frosty mornings seemed to pass, but oh, that fresh violet breeze & sun starched laundry, you just keep on rolling.
