We had an all day snow yesterday, and the weather folks say we got 22 inches. Best snow of the winter, and it isn't even winter anymore! I shoveled for a couple hours, and then Margaret and Hazel walked up while Matthew rode the four wheeler and plowed out the parking area, and a path for the oil delivery tomorrow.
I don't think there is any day in a year that is so beautiful as this. Bright white snow, blue blue sky, and warm sun that is melting the snow. Perfect.
My local library recently purchased a book published in 1904, written by a woman about the garden at her summer home in my town.
Gardening is completely new to her, and she freely admits the mistakes she makes as well as delights in the successes.
I loved the following which I think is a lesson we all must learn over and over again. At least this is my experience.
I have found it advisable, in buying plants from a florist, to buy from one whose nursery is either near by, or, at least, located where the conditions are similar to the climate. For they are more likely to fulfil the promises of the catalogue if they are raised in the same kind of climate as the one in which they will be expected to grow.
I have had gardens for a long time, and I still get wooed by a plant in a catalogue which grows perfectly the first year, or sometimes even the second, but then gives up the ghost!
At my age, one might expect to go to funerals. In New Tricks, Jack Halford played by the excellent James Bolam says that he goes to a funeral every couple of weeks. Well, very, very sadly the last five funerals or Celebrations of Life Tom and I have been to have been young men. I’ve written about two of them here and here. In between them there were two others, one a bit older than Margaret, and the other in Michael's class, and then last month was the fifth. This young man was a year, lacking two days, older than my daughter Margaret. He died on the local mountain he loved, doing what he loved to do, snowboarding.
There were hundreds of people there. The place was up a hill, and we were early enough to park in one of the parking lots. When we came out, there were cars almost down to the main road. He was much loved in the community. I didn’t know him personally, but I know his mother, and his sister is one of Margaret’s best friends, and Tom taught him in school. There is something about the small Middle and Senior High School which all the young men, but one, attended that is very, very special. The kids were close, and they remain close. And many, many of them stay in the area. They love this place with the same passion that we have. Some move further away, but they they come back home and get together with all the friends they’ve known most of their lives. It is an amazing school and area that brings them all together for a lifetime.
After about nine days of dark, cloudy weather we have sun today. The blog header picture was taken yesterday, and here is the same view today.
January - 5
I've always loved John and Yoko's Christmas song, and particularly these lyrics:
"And a happy New Year. Let's hope it's a good one, without any fear."
Again, Vanessa Redgrave's voice.
We would give children anything at Christmas, their passing fancies or their heart's desires, their frenzied crazes or the things they yearn for. We want to fill their hands because it fills our hearts. That is the secret of grownups everywhere.
Margaret, Matthew, and Hazel brought us our tree yesterday. They have done this for the past few years, and we are so grateful. They get it from a local Christmas tree farm.
Last evening I thought how lovely the tree is, unadorned and waiting for the lights and ornaments.
I've just ILLed Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd because I began reading a terrific post and saved it for a later time because I wanted to read the book before reading the blog post.
I was very struck right at the beginning because Miss Marple has been stopped in her tracks because of the ramifications of older age. I checked the publication date, and it is 1962 when Agatha was 72, three years younger than me. She was likely beginning to feel some of those things that seem to happen around 70.
Miss Marple has been warned off gardening by her doctor who comes by three times a week (think of that!), so she sits and looks out the window. She is resentful of the person she has hired to do the work, because he doesn't do that work. He is busy with his own garden.
And then she ponders:
One had to face the fact: St. Mary Mead was not the place it had been. You could blame the war (both the wars) or the younger generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or just the Government - but what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old. Miss Marple, who was a very sensible old lady, knew that quite well. It was just that, in a queer way, she felt it more in St. Mary Mead, because it had been her home for so long.
She goes on to note the changes that have come, and the one in particular - a "glittering new supermarket - anathema to the elderly ladies of St. Mary Mead".
"Packets of things one's never even heard of," exclaimed Miss Hartnell. "All those great packets of breakfast cereal instead of cooking a child a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs. And you're expected to take a basket yourself and go round looking for things - it takes a quarter of an hour sometimes to find what one wants - and usually made up in inconvenient sizes, too much or too little. And then a long queue waiting to pay as you go out. Most tiring."
I have always rather prided myself on being "modern" and accepting the world as it is, not the way it was in the "old days". But as I read the above in The Mirror Crack'd, I found it a bit too close for comfort. I have found myself bemoaning a bit about some trends that upset me. I, being a health food hippie from way back, am dismayed by how much candy and junk food children eat now. I have to keep such thoughts inside instead of passing them along to anyone because times do change, and of course, may well change back, but this is the new generation, not mine. The mothers and fathers do a lot of things way better than I did. Kids are busier than mine were. There are more activities available. It all feels too much to me, but I am also not in my thirties or forties. Seventy-five is much slower and quieter than my younger self. And I shall strive to be that "sensible old lady" like Jane Marple.
Before blogging, there were email groups online that I belonged to that talked about books. I have kept all my emails to those groups, and just came across the following, written about Champagne For One. The words are just what I would still say, and they were written in May 2006 a few months before I began my blog. The second words are from 2003.
I am so enjoying my visits to Wolfe and Archie as I read them all again in publication order, though as I have said, they really don't have to be read that way.
I go on and on to anyone who'll listen about the greatness of the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Some in the series are stellar, like this one, and others not so perfect, but I don't really look at them individually. They are all of a piece about the life. It's like checking in to see what Wolfe and Archie are up to. I love the old familiar words and descriptions of how many steps up to the door of the old brownstone, what Archie is having for breakfast, how the office is arranged, what Wolfe is reading, and of course the mystery he must work on to pay for his gourmet food and his thousands of orchids. Wonderful, wonderful books.
I love the way Archie repeats details in each book, in case the reader is on his
first Nero Wolfe story. "I climbed the seven steps up to the old
brownstone". "Cramer sat in the red chair". I love the house
descriptions. The plots are really secondary. Each book is a portion of
the lives of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I think between the Stout
books, and P.G. Wodehouse books, I really could survive without any other
reading material.
I am currently watching The Last Detective on Britbox. A character called Mod played by the late Sean Hughes quoted the last two lines of this poem. It is the eighth of Auden's Twelve Songs - April 1936.
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.
