Quiet, cool mornings in May...blooming

 

Good morning, from my porch.  A little bit of rain last night has cooled the morning and set the birds singing and rustling the filled-out leaves of every tree.  Romeo, one of Joseph's cats, is in hunting mode, crouched, place to place, looking for small gifts to bring to his doorstep.  (We have a tiny resting place behind the irises for such.)  I am his snitch.

This weather is reminding me of how such lightness of air pulls me out into it.  Waking, I thought to take a walk early; then Jim texted, entertaining an early lunch.  Opening the porch door, though, sitting down with my first cup of hot water (coffee or tea comes later), I went back to my laptop to write to you.

Socializing has heated up these days, so this morning's quiet makes a calming point to begin the day.

Monday we celebrated my niece's, brother's and nephew's birthday; day before that a brunch for Mother's Day.  In consequence, the house is filled with vases of flowers...lovely roses and hydrangeas in one, sweet-scented  pastel roses from a neighbor's yard in another, a tall  bouquet of mixed flowers for Mary Ellen in a third.  On the kitchen sill, too, I've been keeping tiny glasses of individual blossoms each week, culled from wherever I find them around the yard.  This week it's white alyssum from the pot out by the driveway, but I've already spotted next weeks...some wild pink roses growing despite the overbearing ivy in the back.

The flower glasses remind me of (indeed, I was inspired to it by) my cousin Gloria Myers, gone now almost two years, who along with her weekly grocery shopping would pick up a bunch of flowers and divide them on her kitchen window sill...something to cheer up daily chores.  I think of her and the way everything in her house was just so...white, open, full of light.  I miss her.

Two Sundays ago was the memorial of a good friend, held in the Arboretum on campus, where he hardly ever missed a day wandering through.  This coming Sunday, a friend from Black Mountain (the painter Alexandra Bloch...she of the fabulous desserts, as well) is coming for lunch.  We'll walk first in the gardens, catch up with our lives, enjoy the blooms there as David would have done, and as I often do on my afternoon walks.  And then join Mary Ellen and a new neighbor on the porch to lunch on _____?

First, the back yard after my attempt to neaten it last spring;
second, the jungle it's turned into.

 Meanwhile, the first step to my new Garden with a Heart in the back came yesterday in the person of Steve Winkler, who has helped a few of the neighbors design and keep theirs.  Betty York introduced us, and we walked along the ivy-ocean getting acquainted with my inclinations.  He's a young fellow, quiet, with a good eye, knowledgable about what grows; he's well educated in landscape from both schooling and experience.  He likes the idea of stone and wood (as I do).  When he came back later to measure, he stood a while looking it over.  "I'm out here dreaming," he smiled.  Yes!

One of the birds in the huge tree by those wild roses I have my eye on has been twirping solo for a while...usually he or she (I think it's a wren) has a mate to converse with, but this time there is only an air-cooled echo to answer.  Maybe he or she is trying to give me its ideas for a garden, too.  I'll keep them in mind.

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Oh, and the total lunar eclipse on Sunday...here is the moon the other night readying itself to be outshine (as, I suppose, all of us must do...)