Faith in Nature...and Vodaphone

Just a few things in my whole long day ...

I buy big bunches of heavenly scented sweet peas and sweet williams from  the man who sells his vegetables and flowers from the back of  a trailer outside the village shop every Friday .

Their perfume .....and memories of my mother.... fill every room in the  house.

These are the colours I want to bring my new bedroom to life.

When I ring Vodaphone, the woman  I speak to is endlessly patient and persistent and even rings me back on the landline when we are cut off...mobile reception in this house in the country is dreadful...and I  know she won't give up till she has helped me understand what I need to do regarding how I use my data.

When I thank her for being so helpful she says I have made her day...and I reply that she has made mine. A kind voice representing a giant faceless company....restoring my faith in service.

Hanging upside down.....cute 

baby blue tit.

Juveniles  - starling, thrush, blackbird.

My favourite of the three...

This bee has some sort of red bundles on his legs...I couldn't get close enough to see what they were before he moved on to the next nectar trap.

An experiment - half a coconut filled with suet and seeds - I wasn't sure the birds would go for it - but they do and clean in out in a day.

Lovely to see the nuthatch...

Weeding in the border this afternoon...this campanula reminds me of my mother as well.

She is alway with me when I garden - I learnt so much from her about plants and about planting.

So good to see the little birds on the feeders - so often colonised by the starlings now

Later I set up a Direct Debit to a company who campaigns to save the bees...I want to halt the bee decline but I frequently feel utterly helpless and hopeless in the face of the world's problems.... 

So I feed the birds and water my garden pots.... and love my small patch of green beauty...  take care of it as best I can without using sprays and pesticides.....and hope that is enough.I have a deep faith in  nature...
 its constant growth and regeneration is certainly restoring my soul... especially if I don't let the weeds overwhelm me..... or the lupins. 

Not Rosemoor ...But Still Beautiful

We planned a day at RHS Rosemoor Gardens  - a dear friend and I - but we never got there.

We stopped on the way for coffee at the wonderful middle eastern  Baobab cafe in Crediton....ended up staying there for fabulous crunchy salad/aubergine/tahina lunch... and walking round the town later where we found roses growing

 

 in other people's gardens, 

in the park,

in the playground,

and in the church ( which was originally the first cathedral in Devon built in the ninth century) where 

the ladies of the church were setting up for a flower festival at the weekend.

The  floor of the church was strewn with buckets of flowers in water - some of them sent down from 

Covent Garden - like these chrysanthemums - their heads covered in white net bonnets to make them last till Saturday,

and some like these rattle grasses cut from their own gardens to add to the elaborate arrangements all around the church.

  Not Rosemoor but all still beautiful.

  Back home in my garden another poppy has opened in 

burnt orange

  fragile splendour.

And I get a brief glimpse of the bullfinch...and no photo of it, but this morning I catch sight of the  pink/ blue/white markings of a jay as is swoops out of the elm tree at the bottom of the garden beyond the stream ...can't believe my luck...hope it will come to the bird feeder one day...but maybe only when the starling family have departed ...if they ever do.

And now I'm too tired to write any more...and need to sleep like this pussy cat which was dozing on the giant oak stump in my neighbour's garden this morning when I pulled the curtains....imagining my  day would be one particular way and it turned out to be another....different but still beautiful.

Conjuring up...

After rain in the garden this evening...

This morning I am back at the Apple Shop - this time to sort out storage on my iPhone.

While I  wait for the doors to open I watch two men in the basket of a crane hang these open umbrellas from the domed glass ceiling of the Princesshay Arcade..lines of bright mushrooms in the sky.

I walk back through a quiet Northernhay Gardens,  with a heavy basket of shopping from

the Real Food Store - eggs and tahini, soap, spring greens and celery,

and loving these huge saucer sized roses in full bloom all along the path.

This afternoon I receive the first  3D sketches of the house from my architect. It's very exciting to "walk" through the new rooms imposed on the old ones on the computer screen...and already I can see things I want to change, lots of questions to ask, but will need to do the "walk" many times to get my head round it all...and try and imagine myself in the new space which won't just be line drawings of empty cupboards and bare walls and chairs you can't sit on.

This evening  after my session with lovely therapist, I want strong flavours in my supper - pungent garlic, turmeric and Greek basil.

They keep me tethered to the ground....help to keep at bay the panicking fear which I wake up with this morning... which takes me out of my body...makes me want to run away...to hide from my forever alone future... which feels overwhelming and terrifying.

New shock on top of old shock...reverberating through my cells...like electricity that I can't see. 

And tonight standing at the sink, washing up forks and bowls and  pans I find I can conjure up Robin - all of him - every cell of him ....as if he was standing right behind me...like he used to ....and I could lean into him....  lean against his chest and rest a while there.

And because he is so so real..and I can conjure our life too...it's as if I turn around it will all be like it was....and this now... this me... this strange kitchen will be the mistake...that never happened.

That Robin didn't die...that he's just in the next room playing games on the computer and when I've finished the washing up I'll make us a cup of tea and then....

But he did die. 

And I can't seem to conjure up my real life now without him.