Sunday Quote

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.  The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.

- Amelia Earhart

Weathered Vermont

You can keep shiny and new, give me the old and faded, the worn and weathered, the patina of standing up to time and growing more beautiful with every passing season and storm. 

Canadian Deer or American Deer. Crossing that is.

 

Our recent vacation in Vermont included a trek up to Canada, Lake Memphremagog actually, which was quite lovely.  We noted the also lovely Deer Crossing signs.  We found them to be rather festive little deer, with a note of frolicking that our American signs sadly lack.  To be fair, the American deerlings seem to be more elegant.  Almost the Noel Coward of Deer Crossing signs.
Obviously we prefer the Canadian ones, nearly reindeer-like in my mind (which in my mind is always a good thing).  Any thoughts on preferences?

 

 

Sunday Quote

Forget

Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?
A childlike sun grows warm.
A grandson and a great-grandson are born.
You are led by the hand once again.

The names of the rivers remain with you.
How endless those rivers seem!
Your fields lie fallow,
The city towers are not as they were.
You stand at the threshold mute

-Czeskaw Milosz

(posted on wall in a Vermont library)

Sunday Quote

Every man's memory is his private literature.

- Aldous Huxley

Flowers out and about

Some from our yard, some from walks, despite the steamy heat (we just about melted on our walk today) and long days of overcast skies, my lettuce and tomatoes are meh but the flowers are once again proving that they will bloom no matter what.  Little life lesson there, I am sure. 

Why do dogs sleep so much?

Someone cannot do more than lift his sleepy head when his noon time snooze is interrupted.  I think dogs sleep more than cats and our little Tucker has lifted napping into his own personal art form.

Corn Howdy

Down the road from us, pretty standard suburban neighborhood, some folks have planted corn.  I bet many more people than just me get the same kick driving by it every day.

Sunday Quote

...And we pray, not for new
earth or heaven, but to be quiet
in heart, and in eye clear.
What we need is here.

- Wendell Berry 

Ten years on

Hard to believe it is ten years since he passed. My Dad would have been 90 today.  Just the other day I came across a book I would have wanted to get him for his birthday.  It is so strange how time goes on.  This morning a huge owl in the tree in our backyard, one we have heard but never imagined to be so magnificent.  A Monday of memory and the grace of small magics and the not so slow turn of our orbits.

Margaret Mahy, Sunday Quotes

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.
Margaret Mahy, one of my favorite writers whose work had great whimsy and a sense of wonder about the world, has passed away.  She wrote for children and young adults, stories and novels and picturebooks and poetry from her home in New Zealand.

Sunday Quote

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.

- Patti Smith, Just Kids

Setting up a rock garden

There is the giant rock in my back yard, freed at last from overgrown clumpy bushes and mid-sized trees that had taken it over in the last decade.  Now I can see the back of the garden and the whole view is opened up.  Will post a photo when I can figure out the whole Shutterfly to blog photo thing hopefully this weekend.
Meanwhile, cruising the net looking for inspiration.  Some wonderful ideas already percolating from the beautiful photos at the blog
A Round Rock Garden - scroll down for photos of a wee garden visitor.  I would like a lot of lavender, such a gorgeous plant that we have had some success with in containers.  I learn I am in zone 7 ish from this blog on northeastern gardening - Long Island just being across the way from here.  Like the reference list from Wild Ginger Farm - and what an evocative name.  Landscape design here has some good references...I am beginning to realize this is going to be a work in progress for some time.  Looking for ideas for hardy herbs and plants that don't require a lot of pampering.

Sunday Quote

Sundays, quiet islands on the tossing seas of life.

- S.W. Duffield

Sunday Quote

It is a shameful thing to insult a little child.  It has its feelings, it has its small dignity; and since it cannot defend them, it is surely an ignoble act to injure them.

- Mark Twain  (art by JWM)

Send me a bird

Send me a bird, send me its song,
send me a story a lifetime long.

Send me some blue, send me some shine,
send me something I know is mine.

Send me a sign to know I am heard,
send me a reason, send me a bird.

-scm, emily dickinson was right, hope is the thing with feathers.

Happy 4th!

Sunday Quote

You can't give of what you have if you don't know what you've got.

- Elan Morgan, We Can Become Known

Rewriting the birth certificate

I was seriously born into the wrong country.  If only my mother had gone to Scotland and fallen in love with my Dad there instead of vice versa, I would be a native.  Of course, this would require that my husband returned to England and run into me in my, ahem, native Scotland and then we would still have our lovely children...my but rewriting history gets tricky. 

Sunday Quote

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson