2nd April 2012 Monday
We celebrate my husband’s delayed birthday in the company of dear friends and family at The Old Mill in Lyme Regis - stuffing ourselves with soft boiled eggs and lashings of toast - slices cut from giant crusty loaves still warm from the oven - and homemade strawberry and raspberry jam and peanut butter from white glazed bowls in the middle of the long wooden table - every mouthful a breakfast taste explosion.
I’m not hungry all day after that so we have a late supper. I’m craving veggies. My husband brings home long leeks and the first rose pink stems of rhubarb from the allotment. I cook up a golden rooty mash of parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes and Crown Prince squash, and stir in the soft fried leeks and the chopped wild garlic leaves that we collected yesterday, walking in sun dappled beech woods. We eat it with the purple tinged leaves of Russian kale, the bright pink stems of ruby chard and a slim slab of Alaskan salmon.
While it’s cooking I pull out the hose and water the parched pots of nearly-out tulips on the patio. The daffodils are already dying off, pale paper heads drooping, turning to the ground. There is one pointy bud on the magnolia tree beginning to unfurl the perfume of its deep magenta petals.
Spring offering itself up to the air of the garden while I have been busy with a kind of dying, shedding skins of loss.
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