Time-Jumping

Meet my green geisha vase that I bought at One Queen's Folly. I love her unapologetic shapeliness, and the fact that she tolerates only roses. No carnations for this girl.


The colors are starting to soften the edges of everything--this dusk wraps me, and everything, in one communal blanket. I'm sitting in my blog chair, a second-hand Queen Anne relic left over from my college days in my brick 1940's bungalow, and the back door is open to birdsong and wafts of invisible honeysuckle clouds that bowl me over in my own romanticism.



One smell of that honeysuckle and I'm either jumping into a country song ("Had to get the honeysuckle out of your hair..."), or back into my nine-year old self, climbing my backyard chain link fence laced with the stuff. I used to scale that fence nearly twice daily in the summers, making my way to the baseball fields where I knew could buy bulging packets of Big League Chew bubble gum to share with the neighbor kids. My first crush lived two doors down back then, and we got special permission from the neighbor who lived between us to race each other through her yard. It was the summer after Michael Jackson released "Billie Jean" and we found ourselves, in our innocence and confusion, trying to decipher what the lyrics might mean. I cried my heart out for that little boy as my parents and I drove away from that Northern Virginia neighborhood toward what would be our next home at the next Army base in Washington State. Ahh, honeysuckle, you take a girl back.

A Batternberg Lace Tablecloth in a Backyard Pavillion, a gentle breeze, a good book, a cup of hot coffee, and a glass of iced-water... What more could a girl need on a Saturday afternoon?


I've had a most restful day, and although I know I will pay for it later in the form of late-night insomnia, I'm sipping a cup of coffee at 8:36 p.m. But it's so delicious and satisfying that I can't stop myself. I spent most of the day on the back deck reading Joshilyn Jackson's latest The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. I love reaching that point in the book when you know that it's good, and you know that you like it, and you know that it's got you. In between pages, I'd glance up to see which bird had managed to muscle his/her way into the feeders, and snap a photo of every kind I could. I made a pancake breakfast and a hearty homemade chicken soup for lunch, which I shared with the boys before they became bored with my casual laziness and bounded for more exciting pastures. I slept for a good four hours after they left...

Mr. Grosbeak, now just what are doing this far south?

Now the crickets have begun the hum of night, there's a far-off dog barking, jovial (but not obnoxious) laughter from a Saturday night shindig in the yard behind my own, and every once in a while, I can hear the very singular call of a peacock from the farm down the road . And then there's my own hound dog lapping up water and the clinking of her name tag against her bowl. I can't remember a time when I've been so happy with my life.

My hound dog naps in the sunshine, paws pointing toward a four-leaf clover.