Flower Hunt

I have been trying to find out how to grow Chrysanthemums, not the scrubby bushy mums that are available at every plant seller each fall but the gorgeous kind that photographers take photos of and come in your bouquet of flowers. I can't imagine Mrs Miniver arranging the bushy kind of flowers can you?

Not These,
but these,
and these,
You would think it would be fairly straight forward but I am having a very hard time. I can't find anyone on-line or in real life or in print who can tell me where to get and how to grow the pretty kinds. The Portland Chrysanthemum Society is playing hard to get but I am going to be persistent.

I just named my house Starlings and chrysanthemums will grow at Starlings.

Last week I packed up my books, my lucky baking powder can and painted over the deep purple of my bedroom with beige. Preparing to sell your home has got to be one of the hardest things to do. How can we sell our home for money to strangers? How can someone else sleep in the room where my babies were born? How can some one walk up the stairs never knowing how may times my children have slid down them? I am painting over the art work and the smudges hiding all of the work and love that has gone into every surface of this house.
It is just a house however, it isn't really our home, our home is our family and our memories in our hearts.
It is just as though I am throwing away the really cool packaging that ought to be saved.

Welcome October

I love October and since I am busy with wedding preparations I leave you with the wisdom of Mrs Miniver:

"It was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it.... She unwrapped the chrysanthemums and arranged them in a square glass jar, between herself and the light, so that the sun shone through them. They were the big mop-headed kind, burgundy-coloured, with curled petals; their beauty was noble, architectural; and as for their scent, she thought as she buried her nose in the nearest of them, it was a pure distillation of her mood, a quintessence of all that she found gay and intoxicating and astringent about the weather, the circumstances, her own age and the season of the year. Oh, yes, October certainly suited her best. For the ancients, as she had inescapably learnt at school, it had been the eighth month; nowadays, officially, it was the tenth: but for her it was always the first, the real New Year. That laborious affair in January was nothing but a name."

From "Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struthers.

Putting Away Summer

"Just a year ago she remembered, she had stood at that same window putting the summer away and preparing to enjoy the autumn. And here she was again: only this time it wasn't chrysanthemums she was rearranging, but values." -Mrs. Miniver

I have been putting away summer. Relieved that autumn has come at last. This morning it was hot and muggy and finally the rain came and broke the summer. Autumn is here.

Often I find myself in the middle of mundane tasks and I think, "This is my now, my present. One day I will think this same thing and this moment will be a memory just like all of the other moments when I have acklnowledge the present."

September Deliberations

The problem with September is deciding what to wear.
The weather is still fine and it is perfectly acceptable to wear light summer clothes but the smell in the air and the angle of the sun suggests fall, long trousers and cozy knits. Boots and stylish scarves.
Each day I stand in my closet debating whether to wear my garden dress for possibly last time this year or wasting the sunshine and wearing my jeans...

Recumbent

I am sick. Properly sick or maybe Mrs. Miniver would say with a delicate vagueness that I was "laid low". I'm suffering in stoic semi-silence (wherein I only complain to people who ask me how I feel or to people who accidentally get close enough to be coughed on). But it would be better if I had a Scottish nurse to watch my Vins and Judys and Tobys and to deliver hardscrabble advice along with mustard plasters. (No fancy tisane for her.)

She would rout this thing fully.

Parking Lot Bliss

I love how parking lots are no longer burdened with those cement barriers; the ones that tell you when you've pulled in to the parking spot far enough, thank-you-very-much. Do you know how much it costs to fix a car that's driven over one of those innocuous looking lumps? And besides, I think I know well enough when I've adequately fitted my car into a parking spot; I don't need a piece of cement to school me.

Mostly though, I very much enjoy taking advantage those parking spots that are empty on both sides by pulling all the way forward into the next spot. I adore it. The joy that comes from saving seven and a half seconds by not having to drive backwards when it's time to go home makes me feel, in a word, smart.

Those double empty spots can be elusive and it's not every day I'm able to acquire one. But when I do it's like a gift. Like the universe saying, "you are so clever...why don't you take a little extra time in Target since you are so efficient."

By the way, the universe also says to browse the book section to get library book ideas and to buy the toffee popcorn canister on aisle 12. Honest...it's not me, it's the universe.