Beautiful morning

 As I write this, it's really only a bit to noon, but the fan on the porch is whirring a breeze my way, and the air is still a cool 73.  I've been on two walks already, taking advantage of the shady paths.  

On the way around the circle, one neighbor tells me she's been hearing so many birds this morning; she names them...a red breasted woodpecker among others...she has an app for identifying them by their sound.  I meet another who walks with me a while...we straighten out Life's affairs along the way.  On the second walk, in another area, one I used to enjoy while I stayed there briefly, I walk to deliver a guide book to a couple soon off to Switzerland. 

Even earlier than that, in the lovely 65 degrees of seven a.m., I had gone out to wait for Alexander to say a good morning before school, meanwhile pulling weeds and all those brown flaccid daffodil leavings.  I'd woken by 5:30, ready for the day.

Writing now, I too am hearing the enthused voices of birds...I have to identify them by sight since I don't have the app...a pair of cardinals taking turns among the elianthus, several finches busy pecking around for fallen seeds, rustling the tall stalks of the false indigo and the light purple thing I can't name, and a woodpecker I can't see, busy on the pine tree (I wish that were my photo above, but alas, I can't get birds to stay still for a photograph).  

Outrageously, at the side of the road in front of the house, two bluebirds, with their startlingly deep hued wings wide open, fight each other so fiercely they don't pay me any mind.  What they are at odds about there is anybody's guess...territory? food? jealousy? When they finally each fly off in different directions, their voices screech as if cursing each other.   Or maybe me? I shrug it off.

If this kind of day has me ready to burst out, yesterday was another story.  Our Memorial Day gathering over, the house already put to rights easily enough, being outdoors then meant barely an early 20 minutes sweeping the front steps and pulling invading grass from the front walk. The humidity was 86% for one thing, and the rising temperature mattered worse because of it. 

So I stayed in the house, dabbling at this and that, not very productively...a 6 on wordle, worse on quordle (the game cheated with a proper noun).  Looking for an activity I could do with some success, I started a wash and changed the bed linens. 

In between loads, I picked up one book for a few pages, put it down for another's few pages. Both were interesting, but I wasn't.  A neighbor stopped by for a brief chat ("I thought you weren't home at first," he said.  "Your kitchen light was out.").

As I was out of my chair anyway, I opened the porch, sprinkled some water on my newly acquired bamboo plant (a passed-on gift from one of the graduate-school graduates next door) and walked right back inside again. On the sofa with my feet up, I wrote a few thank-you's.  Up again, I wandered room to room, fixing a few out-of-sorts things and re-organizing the leftovers in the frig. 

Souls rising from woodland home, 2024

Late afternoon I shuffled into my workroom to address a piece that has had me frowning for a few months.  I think it's done now.  I checked my card calendar for June birthdays (the very first one, there can be no card for, alas...my husband's), and then, out of a vague, "someday"  idea of having a showing of art (because it's beginning to crowd me out), I began to pull bottom-shelf paintings to see what could be salvaged. 

Salvaging the day was what all that was about. By evening, I forced a decidedly desultory walk, after which I sunk into a few episodes of Shakespeare-quoting Rumpole and went to bed early.   

Yet, as it often happens, that ramshackle yesterday cleared the way for a more livesome one today. My list now has only one ordinary chore on it (it's summer, so I'm ironing linen wear).  For the rest, the more creative ventures.  Time to dig into the box of thick wisteria vine I took from a friend's chopping to make a new outdoor hanging...with fabric? metal? wire?  Time to see about a front panel for Alexander's tree house...barn door maybe?  Time to look up the new summer American Dance Festival schedule...Paul Taylor?  Ballet Hispanico?  Time for this blog.

Here's hoping your day livens into one you can make something interesting happen, too.

Bookish wanderings

Good morning.

The art table showing no inspiration and the inside chores already checked off, what is there to turn to but books on a clouded day.  Fortunately I have quite a pile ready...all kinds.  Besides the stories they house, impatient to be released, they are marked by the way I have received them, and the whom received from, tales in themselves.  

I'll begin with the one I've nearly finished...only a chapter to go, but the most recent to arrive, a Mother's Day gift from Joseph, who remembered that his friend Rachel and I had talked about it at dinner last week:  A Really Strange and Wonderful Time, by Tom Maxwell, once a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers whose music zippered open old and new listeners in the late 80's and 90's.  It's about all the music in what was known as the Chapel Hill scene (or scenius, as one pundit put it), and it involved a few friends of mine whose adventures in and out of the music world mirrored what this town used to be like...a place to start anything, to try anything, to mix it up.

I wasn't here for most of those two decades, but Rachel rightly guessed that I'd find touchstones to interest me.  The language of the book is music-business talk, mostly, about which I'm clueless, though it doesn't stop me trying to decode the culture just too young for my years.  There is, in fact, such youth in it that Maxwell, who can't call himself young anymore either, still vibrates with it, and that endears me, a lover of the many different lingoes we choose to write and talk.

A lot of the way books come to me has that catalyst.  This next one hasn't arrived yet...it's only in the first stages of writing, in fact...but lunch yesterday with John May gave me an enticing glimpse into his newest project, about the Algonquins of Virginia. It follows the one published this week, on the Jamestown colony. His excitement over his newest research and ways to describe this to-be novel, especially his fascination with the language and its various translations..."the literal ones are so elegant!"...I'm ready for it.  (More amazing is the fact that though he and Alice have just moved house, a huge endeavor over the last four months, his study is up and running and producing text.)

It was OneTree books online that sent me to the library to pick up Anne Enright's Yesterday's Weather, chosen over her latest novel because I've been in the mood for good short stories these days, and the two I read last week, off my own bookshelf, weren't really doing it.  But as I came up the B aisle, a yellow and orange cover caught my eye. and sure enough, this line on the inside front cover made me take Carol Birch's Orphans of the Carnival home, too: 

Julia stood apart from the other carnival acts.  She was fluent in English, French and Spanish, an accomplished musician...

That's how I first found the slim volume I have now taken out for the second time...Kaouther Adimi's Our Riches, about the famous bookshop and printery in war-torn Algiers who sent Camus out into the world and which epitomizes the tribulations and triumphs of small bookstores everywhere.  Its storyteller fascinated me...so inclusive that it determines you along as if a hand on your elbow guided you from street to street.  And yet listen to what I copied down that first reading:

    There are some cities, and this is one, where any kind of company is a burden.

It's true enough...I know a few cities like that; though I had never been to Algiers, I have read that place now.

At home, all that yard work sent me to The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year, Margaret Renkl's calendar of garden insights.  Randomly opening the book, I found  "Praise Song for Solomon's Seal," at the end of week 11:    

    The purple-tinged stalks pop out of the ground with their foliage tightly furled, but very soon the leaves will open up like a teenager who has just learned she's beautiful, like a lonely person finally loved.

 Oh, those bittersweet memories of Solomon Seal (and other) plantings I cannot keep the deer away from.  I will read one chapter each week, beginning mid-May , and complete the whole next April.

My tables, floor and walls fill with books sent by friends, sometimes memoirs they or their spouses have written, but also books they have taken to heart. The most poignant of which latter was given me by a dear friend, but it isn't really a memoir at all: the  award-laden, star-reviewed novel, Reparer les vivants by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French and called in English The Heart. 

"I read The Heart in a single sitting," Atul Gawande notes in the beginning pages, but I have picked it up and put it down countless times after barely a page, its elegant,  overriding, language ripping up my memories.  I doubt I will ever finish it.  Still, it stays on my table.  And I am grateful for my friend's offering.

Outside, the little roadside library flourishes with things in, things out, so now and then I catch a good one there, wondering who left it, wondering what I can leave that entices in return.  I found Maeve Binchy's A Week in Winter there.  Short and Binchy, it served me a night's reading about one of my favorite subjects...turning a downtrodden building into a guest house.  (Not that I have ever had the push to do that...it's the spirit of it, the dream of another, more energetic, life.)

Do you read as I do?  Interestingly, of the two book groups I attend, I doubt the traditional one, whose monthly lists seem to come from the Times book list or other book groups, even old college reading lists, would take to any of these...indeed, they've regarded skeptically those I have recommended so far.  

Fortunately, the non-traditional one, where each month we bring what has meant something of import to us, is the more curious, more intense, more questioning and discursive...it has no trouble ranging out anywhere. My kind of reading aloud among friends...through and between the lines.

Viva la libra!

Entanglings

 

Good morning from the porch, where I am watching new star jasmine acclimating themselves to the fence in back.

Back in March, I'd ordered 6 small ones from Southern States, but it wasn't til yesterday that they called to say they were in.  Not quite what I wanted, they admitted a little sheepishly:  the order arrived in 3-gallon buckets.  I laughed, and told her I'd take two of them.  "Instant gratification!" said the register attendant.  

Well, true.  Already they are spreading themselves out to make a lovely view from my kitchen window, and will curl around for a little porch view, too.

I am happy to grow things from small to large, but this time I won't have to fight the deer off for the tender sprout beginnings, as I have for the chocolate vine babies, the honeysuckle, and the clematis.  I gave the clematis away, but the chocolate vine, though with barely any leaves left on its upper tendrils, is still climbing possessively up the fence wires.  It shows a spirit I admire.  

Meanwhile, the birds seem to be enjoying the looping plant encasing one of the old iron gates at the edge of the yard behind the small patio I built...I can't remember its name...it will have tiny summer flowers.  There must be a nest nearby of red and brown wrens, for I see those more often, along with a bluebird and a cardinal couple, hopping around among the plant and the iron chair and table.

The point I think I am slowly coming to is that, although I talk about my "garden" and the "gardening" I pretend I work at, this yard is a mass of things crunched together, entangled in ivy and vinca in the back, or scattered here and there on the front slope.  Real gardeners might call it a jungle, with good reason.  But because it is roofed from April to late November in deciduous trees (and grows in poor, you could say non-existent, soil), after March and April's energetic planting and weeding and arranging and re-arranging, I let it all go where it wants and will.

I've even decided that this year the wild purple mint that is already sprouting in the driveway can encroach all it wants.  There are other weeds to pull, and I as usual will do a few each day, as well as pick up the endless twigs and branches the trees rain each morning.  Until the mint reaches its 12-inch height, and then I will yank it out where it's getting too big for its roots.

So I apologize if previous posts have intimated that I am more a gardener than I am.  I've decided that I like my jungle of green, sometimes unplanned, often surprising over-growth.  I like to see what does and doesn't make it, year by year.

For instance, the bulbs I planted last year, in what was previously a wildflower garden I thought had failed, came out magnificently in March, but now that they are spent, here come the wildflowers again reaching, pushing themselves through and around the folded-over daffodil and iris leaves. 

 Likewise, the peony I thought was dead by winter has, Phoenix-like, sprung up again, with a healthy bud, maybe two.  

The two small magnolias which have grown barely an inch or two a year since Tom Krenitsky brought them to me from his magnificent magnolia preserve have sent up signs that they might bloom at the top this year.  (Tom advised me just to let them be what they will be, no care needed.)  

So I keep watching them, and others, as they mature, or not, making a wilderness of yard and sometimes mind.  And will do so long after I can't pick weeds anymore.

  

Happy garden to you all, however yours grows.

New windows

 It's deep gray this morning, and my plants and I are waiting for promised rain. So far, it's only come in such light drops that there aren't even puddles forming.  I'm usually a morning person, but except for putting on a wash [I  just broke off to dry them], going for a focused grocery run, and making distracted mistakes with wordle and quordle, I haven't been able to settle into something.

Yet I've had that opening line on my mind for hours now.  I wonder what it is about the urge to write that washes into you, until you abandon everything else on the list. (Though there is the silence, too, when no words come.)

Last week, I had new windows put in the house; they are bright white emblems of what I need these days...a new view on life.  In a few days, I'll be traveling west again for sort of the same reason, a change of scene and heart.  Old friends to see, places to return to or rediscover, new routes to try out of the familiar.  Melding the past and the present, those days away dig themselves in and out of sorrow, a release, a pleasure.  A spur to engage the future.

Like those windows, it's mostly the same landscape I see through them, but by a new configuration, a new brightness.  The season helps.  Spring leaves things underfoot, as it opens up all the color and beauty we have been missing on the barren ground.  Walking along the front slope, I see flowerings I forgot were planted there...or perhaps they arrived on the wind.  It's a haphazardly growing slope, but I enjoy the surprises there.   And in the one sunny spot, at the end of the driveway, daffodils threw themselves up brilliantly. Though most are drying on their stems now, I've still got one pot bright.

The back fence garden, on the other hand, is being newly, deliberately laid out (too early for surprises yet), and so it is, in fact, a new look.  I'm enjoying that, as well, seeing its length not as one long outlook but as separate images through one back window after another.  The surprise there is that, though I didn't plant it with those individual views in mind, it just came to be that way.

My new windows have only one drawback...they've run away with any far travel this year.  Still, it's worth the sacrifice, not only for new ways of looking out, but for the satisfaction that I'm helping ready the house (and myself) for a new stage of life.  Whenever it happens to come for me.

Ought

 

My dear readers,

It's been months since I wrote, weeks filled with all kinds of distractions.  I'm sorry not to be in touch. 

Today is spring, which has been flowering prolifically hereabouts, the daffodils, especially, blooming in waves front and back...including beautiful, complicated ones I planted from a mixed bag last fall.

I did write in late February, but never sent it: all about how I was struggling to puzzle out the back garden.

I'm about to update that today, but before I do, I thought you'd like to see for yourselves what the struggle has been about.

Part I:

February 23:  Ought...as in I ought to be on my way to the garden shop to pick up mulch, paving stones, plants and vinegar for my back garden, standing unresolved since the back fence was installed, defining a space so different than before.  You would think, with a list like that, that I knew what I was doing.

I don't like fences, but this one was necessary if I was to claim that back jungle.  Like the writer who promised his editor that he'd begin his awaited novel as soon as he polished his tennis shoes, this morning I read, painted, checked airline flights (to where?) and even cleaned the bathroom in another attempt (conscious or unconscious) to avoid facing the giant unknown:

I don't know how that back garden should look.  I ought to, but I don't.

It's been a puzzle obsessing me for weeks.  Seeking advice, letting visions of greater grandeur than I can afford...or find tolerable...clutter my thinking. I can't number the times I've woken to an idea and said, "That's it!" only to undo it by improbability (too complicated; too expensive; won't last; won't grow in shade or that down-to-China depth of clay, tree roots and rock) or, like today, an equally down-to-China depth of inertia.  Ought.

It's not that I've done nothing.  I've collected pots and art for hanging on the wire between the fence posts; arranged a small area of stones in the lowest bowl of clay nearest the house; dreamed of star jasmine  that would entwine, elucidate, bring spring and fall shape and color to the landscape there, even bought large bags of potting soil in hopes.

But now I am thinking I ought to go back to the word "puzzle".  Like those 1,000-piecers my sister, nieces and I like to do together (though I am not as adept at them as they are), why not think of that back wasteland as a puzzle put together piece by piece.

Frankly, I have never been much of a whole-plan thinker.  I paint, collage, wire and sew without knowing what image will emerge.  I write by starting with a few words, which engender more words, line by line til I get to a point I might or might not have intended. I make meals by opening the refrigerator and building with whatever occurs to me to use, changing guest menus even at the last second. 

Even my life (a conversation with a friend the other day is reminding me) has been a piecemeal endeavor, each decade or parts of decades looking, if mapped out, like a jumble of mismatched eras that somehow got me here, together in one piece.  After that, the back landscape should be a piece of cake.

Well, all that comes down to what I do next:  hit the garden store.  Maybe with all the pieces jumbled out of the box in front of me, I can begin.

Part II.

Today: The garden store yields more treasures than foreseen.  I wander around, choosing raised garden boxes (no point in trying to grow anything in that clay and rock); dark  grasses to rise stiffly from new pots; and instead of the mulch I envisioned along the fence line, I choose pebbles and rectangular patio pavers, because...

...suddenly I see there should be a path toward the near corner of the fence, where a cluster of pots will brighten the view from my kitchen window.  The picture is beginning to emerge.

I bring them home and, with some help from Joseph to haul the bags of stone (heavy) out of my trunk, we set to work putting down the path.  I've already lay some of the stone, so now the pavers claim the rest.

I fill pots with new dirt, transplant some old plants and dig in new plants, roll pots into place along the fence.  For a few days, I continue this, shifting things around until I am happy with the composition.  My neighbor gives me an old chair I paint turquoise to sit at the end of the path.  It has no seat yet, but it will clearly be a destination for a quiet sit.

At a new garden shop I spend an hour with the helpful owner ("I love listening to gardener's plans!" she tells me as we walk lane by lane through everything) and buy a few more helibores for the front slope and three clematis I want to climb up the fence wires from the raised boxes.  I plant, water, spread organic fertilizer.

The next morning I look out onto my work, happy.  Then I look further down the fence.  Overnight, the vines have turned to spindly stalks.  Deer.

Despite my repellent, despite hair in the dirt, they've enjoyed their dessert in the dark.  One flower remains testimony to its once-potential.

But it's still growing.  I wonder whether to rip them out and try another vine, moving these to a more sheltered spot.  I order three or four Carolina Jessamine, purportedly indigestible to deer and rabbits.  We'll see what happens.

Once bitten; twice shy.  It's warm enough now to plant my Valentine's gift of a raspberry hydrangea outdoors, but I am on the offensive:  in a large pot borrowed from the front steps (once the home of a gardenia that grew too big for itself), I nest the hydrangea where I can keep an eye on its blooms.  Then I fashion a cage of chicken-wire over it (one dessert is all the deer get).

I'm still working, front to back along the fence, but little by little the pieces are falling into place.  Next, more stone winding further back, and then Alexander's tree house...and finally a secret path toward it.

I know exactly where everything will go. 

Wood with a gift for burning

 

Frank Harmon draws and writes this morning about the cold we've had...alligators in the east freezing, children skating on creeks not known for freezing over, and birds going about what birds do, even in this chill.  He is inside with a wood fire burning, about which, he notes, the climate people are confused whether that is environmentally good or bad.  I wrote back to him what first came to mind, and then decided to share it here:

"A wood fire burning in the fireplace.  Warmth of body and soul.  Wish I had one here, too.  Graduate students living in a farm house way out in the country halfway to Pittsboro, we had three fireplaces, one in each downstairs room.  The cozy front room where we built the bookshelves was my favorite.  I burned old wood all winter and sometimes into the spring, and read there."

Do you know that poem by Adrienne Rich, I asked him, and now ask you, about the difference between being lonely and being alone? It's called "Song"; I listen to it often these days.  That last stanza,

If I'm lonely/ it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore/ in the last red light of the year/ that knows what it is, that knows it's neither/ ice nor mud nor winter light/ but wood, with a gift for burning.

Last week, feeling the cold sneak through these old aluminum-framed windows while I sat reading, no fireplace to warm by, I called the window man and ordered new ones.  It's been on my continuing list of things to make sure the house is ready for when I'm old.  As I walk each room, doing what I usually do, I keep an eye on what needs to be changed or bettered (re-fitted, the elderly-care people say) for aging here.  I've kept my eye on such things ever since I first walked into this house, the only one for sale inside the small circle I drew on the town map, outside of which I firmly declined to consider living.

Despite the scepticism of some ("I wouldn't buy it," from my perfectionist cousin), I could see its potential for the long term.  I could spread out in first years, and consolidate in later years, leaving room for others, should I need them (not for loneliness, no...I know the difference between lonely and alone...but for care.  As it happened, theirs as well as mine).  There were lots of windows for light, and being high on the hilled street, walking distance to everything, gave it a wonderful outlook.  I bought it exactly ten years ago, never questioning, and thus began its renovation toward age.

Two weeks ago, I began the 12 months toward my 80th. (There's a funny story about that, but it's for another time.)  The years of the 9's have, historically, not been kind to me, or me to them, although this one began with lots of friendly and loving fanfare and gifts, for which I'm grateful.  But I'm more intent than ever on keeping up with that list.

Even Joseph felt it time to have the talk with me..."But what if...?" he asked me over again, attaching clauses rife with possible crises as they occurred to him.  Thankful as I was, I had to smile...it's a younger person's question, after all.  We who are about to age know it has no answer.  And, anyway, do we really need to know?

Because we can renovate all we want to or can do, but there is a double edge to that word re-nov-ate:  a freedom in knowing the future is wide open to reinvention.  In the last light of the year, ice-fast on the shore, still there, with a gift for burning.

Movie nights and days

 

I've been waking up earlier and earlier these days, my head full of ideas of things to do, changes to be made, better ways of thinking and acting.  January, my Capricorn month, has always been the time of energy mode...papers, shelves, closets and fixit house projects, yard projects, life patterns.  If by February some of those are unfinished, they mostly languish for another 11 months.  But in January, it's amazing what things get done, morning by morning, concept to completion.  Note, however, that "morning by morning" doesn't include much past the second hour of afternoon.  No matter the month, I slump by then.

Waking today, my first thought was to make a list of the movies I watch after that  witching hour when I can do no more...or, more positively put, during those later knitting and tea hours, especially on these cold and (like today) rainy days when a walk is out of the question.  

Except one or two, these won't probably be found on a Golden Globe list.  A lot are quirky, more are lighter than air.  And, also with a few exceptions, the ones I most watch were made before 1950.

I could be defensive and say that I don't watch film the way other people do, but there's no reason to be defensive.  I just don't.

So here they are, stories empty of car chases, guns blazing, cities blown up, mean men acting out political hubris in war and business, and strange creatures with molten heads running the world.  These are watch-in-winter films, in no particular order of importance, except the first.

1. I Know Where I'm Going, with Wendy Hiller (she wasn't Dame yet).   It didn't take me half a second to begin with her.  Set in Scotland during the war, the film has a lot to say about a country's home pride and those who muscle their way into it.

2. The Young in Heart, with Billie Burke and Paulette Goddard. Billie Burke has been a movie idol of mine since, as a teenager, I borrowed a book from the library on her life.  She dated Enrico Caruso, but married Florenz Ziegfield and said she got up every morning before he did, so she could do her hair and put on her makeup.  The next ones won't be a surprise.

3.  Dinner at Eight, B.B. again, with two other comediennes you won't regret watching strut their stuff:  a comedy, with tragedy woven in, it is one of those movies made of a showy extravagance, when people went to see films that for little over an hour could relieve their minds of their economic reality.

4. Merrily We Live, with B.B. and Constance Bennet.  No tragedy in this one. Only slapstick, or what you will recognize as "screwball comedies", with butler.  

4a. My Man Godfrey, in which William Powell deals with Carol Lombard over an ash heap he's living in and becomes their butler.  Don't bother with the one made after 1950.  Lots of re-done film after that time just didn't come up to the original, no matter who got to play in them.

5. Grand Hotel, with some of the same actors from #3 and the brilliant addition of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.  Plenty of tragedy and also redemption.

6. Dancing Lady, speaking of Joan Crawford.  Yes, she really can dance as well as be dramatic.

7. Good Girls Go To Paris, with the wonderful Joan Blondell being her spunky self.

7b. The Stand-In, where Joan Blondell makes her mark again, this time with Leslie Howard on a movie set. Humphrey Bogart is in it, but I watch it for those two.

8. The Animal Kingdom, Leslie Howard here too, with Ann Harding and Myrna Loy (from the Thin Man series, though she plays a very different woman in this).

9. Sin Takes A Holiday, another Constance Bennett...a very old one, in which her diction is quite mannered...not sure who directed her that way, but you can ignore that lapse, and enjoy her weird situation.

10. If Only You Could Cook, with Jean Arthur and a gang of gangsters who save the day.

11, 11a, 11b. You Can't Take It With You, Easy Living, and The More The Merrier...all with Jean Arthur and a full cast of famous people from those other movies above, doing silly, sometimes inspiring things.  If you like movies with seduction scenes, there is nothing better than the one in TMTM.  Easy Living, on the other hand, will have you turning to your calculator.

12. The Rage of Paris, with Helen Broderick, a character actress I'd follow in any film, and also Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. from #2, bringing his comic charm.

,

13. Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday had to have won some major prize for that game of gin rummy she plays with Broderick Crawford.

14. The Philadelphia Story, with Katharine Hepburn and all the people famous from that era.  But that's probably on everybody's list.  Never mind.  Instead watch #15.

15. Holiday, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who's also in #14, but believe it or not, this one's better.  Their acrobatic scene was "borrowed" by Gene Kelly for Singing in the Rain...I spotted that, Gene.

There are lots more old ones in my like box, but in case you think I see only in black and white, I'll put in some newer ones. 

16. The Kindness of Strangers, with Bill Nighy.  Any movie he's in is worth it.  I don't know how I found this one, but I'm glad I did.  He plays a Russian, sort of.

16a. The Last Bus, with Timothy Spall.  He's in Enchanted, too, but you'd never know it by this film, in which he travels with the help of strangers across a country on a very emotional mission.

16b. Finding Your Feet, with three British actors I couldn't live without seeing, including Timothy Spall, who apparently can play anything.  And dance.

16c. Calendar Girls, with all the best British actresses except three, and I'm sorry they're not in it, too.  I would have loved to see what their characters made of themselves in the nude.

17. In Your Dreams.  It's Turkish, and made me want even more to go to Istanbul.  Trouble is, you can't find the film anymore.  All it says is "error" when I try.

18. Still Breathing, set in the King William district of San Antonio, a strange little film, but I like it, and Celeste Holm is in it, and the Alamo.

19.  The House by the Sea. It's in French, but you will recognize the story from old family stuff, I'm sure, no matter who your family is and even if you don't know French.

20. Amour, also in French, a beautifully done, but searing, emotional story we should all watch.

21. Louise en Hiver, about an old woman who is stranded over the winter at a seasonally abandoned beach.  It's a quiet, slow but pointed film about survival, animated in the plain gentle way of children's picture books. 

22. The Women on the Sixth Floor, French again, about class and counter-class with a bemused character who goes between.

22a. The Gilded Cage.  French and Portuguese.  A good story about who we are when we can be who we are outside of who others think we are.

23. Queen to Play, in which Kevin Kline takes second best to Sandrine Bonnaire in the game her character learns.  In French totally.

24.  A Little Game, a charming little New York tale to watch right after #23.

25. A Tuscan Wedding, purely for the fluff and looneyness of it.  It's in Dutch and Italian, believe it or not. "You can smell the Prosecco in the air!" says one of its more pathetic characters.  And she says it twice.  To her dog(s). 

26. Twelfth Night (1996) .  Yes, Shakespeare, and the best film of that play ever done.  I could watch this every week and not get tired of it.  Bonham Carter and her co-stars take over Shakespeare's language as if it were their own.  Really.

27.  The Elephant and the Butterfly.  Another good story about what we learn from others in childlike ways.  See it along with The Sense of Wonder.  Their titles could easily be interchangable, I'm realizing now.

28. The Farewell, with Awkwafina, who made a serious character out of her own life story, I think.  She's the Golden Globe winner for this.

29. This Beautiful Fantastic, one of my favorite garden rescue films.  Tom Wilkinson is in it.  You might want to pair this one with Greenfingers.

30.  Little Forest, about food and the hunger that drives us to it.  No, it's not a documentary...it's a real story.  But like #17, In Your Dreams, it's hard to find any more.

30a. Tasting Menu.  Delicious all around, though it does have a man or two with doses of hubris.

For the travel-hungry, some armchair-travel films...Perfumes and Haute Cuisine and Food Club and A Five-Star Life and Learning to Drive and The Station Master and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and The Grocer's Son and Border Cafe and Bagdad Cafe and My Afternoon with Margueritte and A Man Called Ove (not the later American version) and the Australian Strictly Ballroom...

That should get me (and you) through the last cold day of March, if we do more than one film on a couple of afternoons and evenings.  Which I often do.

Oh:  Here's one for all you Hallmark fans...Chicklit, where the men in the pub go clear off their gourds so they don't lose their evenings of pints.