Blessings. I has them.

Okay, so a lot in life is currently awry if not completely cactus, but every time I go out into the back yard, the smell of the jasmine all down the side fence wafts over to me in sweet little gusts.

The whole back yard smells like flowers.

And there are other less heady but equally climby and spilly things further down the back.

Given that one of the things getting me down is the treacherous weather, reverting to grey and wet and windy and freezing after that glorious brief breath of spring, it's hard to believe that half an hour ago when I took these photos, the sky looked like this.

Nature notes: it's that time of year again

Would you say it was good or bad feng shui that I have redbacks busily spinning and weaving around the hinges of both the front and the back security doors? (This house has only two external doors.)

I mean, on the one hand they are living creatures. And on the other hand they are, well, you know.

In other news, on my way out to the supermarket I saw a sleepy lizard calmly poised at the edge of the footpath, waiting to cross the road. Which means I've left it too late to get the back yard mowed again, and the poor yard-mowing dude will probably end up with a mangled sleepy or bluetongue in his mower again. It's a jungle out there.

Freesias

This is the First Freesia of 2010.

Not only are freesias beautiful and strong -- they very rarely get chewed to bits by snails and bugs or battered by the weather, and they pop reliably up and flower every year without any help from me -- but they also smell divine. It's probably only a matter of time before we can blog smells as well, but in the meantime you'll have to imagine it.

Spring ...

... in three more sleeps.

But then, as the cold winter's night began to close in ...

And then, in September, they lose their winter coats

Casting nasturtiums

What would Charlotte think, I wonder, if she knew people were not only still reading her masterpiece nearly 200 years after she was born, but enshrining it in an international publishing house vintage logo on coffee mugs?

There is something oddly satisfying about the combination of Charlotte's immortality with the fragility and mutability of flowers that'll be dead in a couple of days -- but will come back next and every Spring, with, bless them, no help from me apart from the odd caterpillar massacre.

Also, the yellows and oranges are nice, don't you think? And I do love that stripy one.

In praise of the winter solstice

Stephanie at Humanities Researcher is off tonight to a winter solstice feast, where seasonal poems will be read. I will be celebrating Solstice Lite with ceremonial mulled wine up in the Adelaide Hills with my mate R tomorrow afternoon and proposing a ceremonial toast: roll on earlier sunrises and later sunsets. But I love the idea of a seasonal poem, so here is my absolutely favourite winter one, Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight'.

The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud -- and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which flutters on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And make a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the traces of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Enough already

The first three weeks of June are my least favourite time of year. It's officially winter, it's got seriously cold, and the days are still getting shorter. I hang out for the solstice and when it arrives I make mulled wine to celebrate. Quite a lot of mulled wine.

In the meantime the Weatherpixie over there on the right says more rain and so does the Bureau of Meteorology. Apparently it's going to stop for a few minutes tomorrow and Thursday and then it's going to start again.

Yes, of course the rain is a blessing, particularly here in Adelaide where a matter of weeks ago we were staring straight down the barrel of the gun and the death of a city looked like a real possibility. For the people down at the Lower Lakes and the Murray Mouth I think it is already too late (ask the Ngarrindjeri people about that), but here in the city and out in the country it's filling the creeks and the rivers, the reservoirs and the tanks and the dams. It's saving the gardens. People's lawns are growing back unbidden. Animals are fat and happy. Paddocks will soon be covered in the soft green fur of incipient wheat and barley. You don't get that from occasional little gentle drippy rain, you get it from the regular roaring, thundering floods of the kind that washed away half my back yard last night when the heavens opened and terrified the cats out of their little furry minds.

Now whether it's my advancing age and concomitant decrepitude, or the fact that I don't trust this house and its outbuildings not to leak or indeed fall down or blow away, or the fact that the phrase 'extreme weather events' seems to describe accurately what's been happening for the last few years, or more nebulous and less tangible anxieties being projected onto the weather, or some hideous combination of all those things, is something of which I can't be sure.

But there's one thing I'm completely sure of. I really, really need it to stop raining. Just for a week or so. Please.

Three colours: red

The forecast says that late tomorrow morning it will start to rain and won't stop for a week, so that's my Thursday morning taken care of: up on the ladder scooping the mixed organic muck of eons out of such gutters as I can reach without actually risking my life. Today was a perfect Adelaide autumn day: still and sunny, with high creamy-bluey slightly cloudy sky and the earth still so warm you wonder whether you should chuck in one more go of Dynamic Lifter for the hell of it before winter sets in.

But by the time the rain clears we will be on the cusp of May, the air and the earth a week colder, the days a week darker and more closed-in. So today was probably the last of those soft, bright autumn days for the year.

Still, there are compensations, like the colours of autumn as it moves into winter: the vine doing its annual flashy thing,




lamb shanks,




and happy rugged-up cats.

If there are strange yellow things in the garden, it must be Spring