When we moved into our new home we found a lovely lime tree just off the side of our back porch. CatGirl made a superb key lime pie from the fruit and we’ve using them in various recipes and beverages. The limes were uncharacteristically tasty and sweet.
Lo and behold, when I was snapping pics on the back porch today I looked up to the tippity top branches of the tree and discovered…lemons. So I guess it’s a lemon tree. Yum!
My New Year’s resolution: to fill my life with more vanilla. Seriously, it is my favorite scent (apart from the musky odor of John’s skin).
I’ve had several goes at growing heliotrope (pictured above) and each time I’ve either given it too much sun, too small a pot, or forgot to tell a garden-sitter to water it (they are surprisingly unobtrusive and thirsty little plants). This year, I commit to growing it successfully. Because life is so much fuller when one grows vanilla-scented flowers…
Oh, and now that the new year has begun, I will indulge and buy some of my very favorite vanilla almond tea with a bit of my Christmas gift money. I tried to go wholly fairtrade with my tea and it just hasn’t worked for me yet. I need my afternoon cup of comfort…
A pic of some climbing roses on an arbor at the Huntington Library. Taken in the rose garden today on my way to the Japanese Garden.
Stole into the grounds before they opened to the public this morning (I didn’t do anything too sneaky–“readers” are allowed access to the grounds whenever they want). Spent time in the Japanese garden all alone until a worker came to feed the koi fish. Felt a lot of peace and renewal there. It was just what I needed.
Isn’t the sky the most amazing color of blue!!
🙂
h/t to Superhero for this gem
Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
-Mary Oliver
The photo above is of a red leaf lettuce plant in my garden. Yum!
I picked these strawberries in my garden this morning. Along with a bagful of lettuce for my lunch salad. I also picked a zucchini and some basil for our homemade pizza dinner tonite.
Yum 🙂
UPDATE: This really was today, this is not a ‘classic’ post from summertime!
Watering the garden around midday and the children from the nearby preschool walk by. They squeal with delight as they say hi to their beloved elephant friend Ned, who lives in our garden. Ned guards the flowerbed along with a few other friends including a dalmatian puppy, a turtle, a koala bear and my wingless cherub.
If you look close at the pic above you can see Ned’s outline in the background. 🙂
I’ve been a bit depressed about living in SoCal for a few weeks, ever since we returned from Boston, really. I felt like I wanted to flee away to somewhere with four seasons, somewhere where people wear wool. All of your lovely pictures of autumn leaves made this longing even more intense. I wanted to look out my window and see red and orange and not green, green, green.
So this was on my mind as I was in my garden a few days ago. I decided to go on a hunt for color, to see just how many different shades I could capture in 15 minutes in my plot. Below are a few of the results:
PURPLE
RED
PINK
ORANGE
YELLOW
GREEN
BLUE
After I came home and sorted through my photos I felt a bit better. I made myself a big salad with garden lettuce and thinly sliced up a zucchini and drizzled it with a bit of flavored vinegar & oil and spiced with some cracked pepper (yum).
True, we have little seasonal variety here–just a range of somewhere in the 70s and 80s year-round, but the local food is good and the gardening opportunities abound. I suspect that someday we’ll be living somewhere we I get true seasons again. But for now I’ll stop complaining and just enjoy being here. 🙂
A picture from my garden meditation time yesterday. My roses are still blooming (joy)! This one smelled so fruity and flowerly–I so wish you could’ve been there with me…(and I did pluck just one from the bush to add to my kitchen sink windowsill).
A quotation that I have been pondering the past few days:
“If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.”
~Gelett Burgess
I want to be open to new ideas, to continue learning, growing and changing. A life lived with fear and rigidity is not, for me, a satisfying one! I think life is too short to not be open. We should be absorbing and experiencing many new things…to tread in places where we are are unsure. To be like this rose–showing our most vulnerable inner places and sharing it with everyone, even those who may not recognize the courage that it takes to be open.
I came across the wee little spider in this picture as I was snapping flower pics on the Alcott farm. He was so hard to see, as his color blended in perfectly with the yellow of the petals on the sunflower. But what a delight it was to capture his image on film. Charming!
On another note, I keep thinking about this post from Liz. What does is mean to be a cancer survivor with so much enthusiasm for life who finds no one to dance with? And what about those moments when you realize that your body, your disease make you unappealing or untouchable? And what about the Gilroy test–the true test of love:
“The Gilroy test is the one true metric of real love. So-named because my aunt once had a large orange cat who was the most beautiful cat in the world before he got kitty leukemia and started wasting away. I was kind of an oblivious twit when I was a teenager and must have made some unthinking remark because my aunt spent some time gently explaining to me that it’s very easy to think you love someone when they’re beautiful. But that the test of real love is whether you love them with the same intensity when they’re ugly.
“Everyone gets ugly from time to time,” she told me, stroking Gilroy.
This photo and Liz’s post evoke such a jumble of emotions for me, especially the connection between love and beauty. Can we only love what is beautiful? Or is true love the ability to see beauty in all things? I think the latter. My heart soars when I see how gorgeous my kids and my John and my flowers are. But they are beautiful to me because I already love them, not because they are inherently beautiful. Does that make sense?
I think our recognition of beauty is more about being aware and in tune with our surroundings than it is with seeing what’s inherently visually appealing. An example: as I rode my bike home from the library in the dark last night, everything was beautiful to me–the sliver of moon in the sky, the taste and smell of the humid air, the taut feeling in my leg muscles as I pedaled home, and the joy of nearing the end of a well-spent day. In being completely there I felt so satisfied, so full of joy. That was beauty.
