Nourish Me

felt like spring

Felt like spring all weekend up my way, all sun-and-blue-sky days, despite Thursday's snow.

According to this, of course, it is spring. Which explains a few things, but also makes me realise that I've been shut up inside against the cold for too long. While successfully navigating my first proper shoulder stand last Wednesday night I actually felt Jupiter slip into Leo, just as I'd been told I would. Strangely comforting to feel something, long held, shift inside. Suddenly, it feels as though there's a lot to do, but that's Pre-Spring for you. I'm just about ready. 

Above is one of the arches that lead you into Sunday Reed's vegetable garden, recently restored to its original beauty. (Her cookbook is rather good, you know). Been thinking about art a lot more of late, of how I miss its presence in my daily vocab. Shifts, indeed.  

 

red

 

Bright red in a cold, wet, misty winter is always nice to see, no?

gold

If spring has a colour in these parts, it's not green, but yellow,

in every conceivable shade, from palest lemon to the deepest of cadmiums.   

On some afternoons, if you are very lucky, the light is actually gold, waxing toward warmer days ahead.   

Makes all of us in our little camp happy.

 

 

garlic shoots

If David Hirsh hadn't mentioned in his Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden that, small cloves [of garlic] can be planted closely for garlic greens to be harvested in spring, I know, left to my own devices, that I'd never have come up with anything so ingenious. You know those tiny, tiny inner cloves? The ones you deem unpeelable and, therefore, practically useless? Plant them. In autumn, when they start to send out their inedible shoots. They take up very little space and, hey hey, it means that come pre-spring, spring and beyond, you chop, and use them as you might very stinky (in a good way) spring onions, et voilà. Fresh, beautiful garlic flavours without the need for the jarred stuff.

 

 

nesting

A single magpie chased a small flock of rare black cockatoos across our patch of sky on Friday afternoon, forcing the latter to swoop low and cry out, a dance driven by the comparatively tiny magpie to protect a nest somewhere high up in the trees. For six weeks before the Solstice tipped our planet happily back the other way, the temperature on the hill barely rose above 6 degrees. Most days were engulfed by mist and fog, and for a time, the ground would be frozen solid upon waking, a crunch underfoot borne of frosts, the likes of which I've rarely seen. Our little house - merely somewhere to sleep - became a refuge, something that had not, until that point, happened. Two weeks ago a break in the clouds showed the first hint of joyful waxing light, and that people, that was all the hint I needed.

I've decluttered, I've scrubbed, I've washed windows inside and out, re-alphabetised bookshelves, lugged furniture back and forth and even, in a fit of unheard of girliness, carefully laid out a swatch of pink sari fabric and arranged my Precious Things. Pre-spring fever is here, however prematurely it may at times feel, and I intend to make the most of it. This weekend left us tired and happy, windows and doors flung open to milder weather, to sunshine and fresh air and the promise of warmer soil. So even if winter decides to drop back in from time to time, the snowbells and jonquils are awake and there's no going back. Winter be gone; and like that, my heart is lifted once again.

 

 

off

Off to Bali for two weeks I go, for a much needed hit of vitamin D.

This little cluster of delicate babes are the first of our cherry blossoms. When I return, I am hoping the whole tree has exploded into pale pink. 

See you then, then. x 

pre-spring

This photograph neatly sums up how our winter, our autumn and yes, even our summer has made me feel. Cold, wet, and grey, with a chance of spiky black stabbing bits getting you in, say, the eye if you're not careful, showering you with raindrops to boot as if to prove some depressing point. Victoria's lack of seasonal shift for most of 2011 - just a slow, pathetic drip toward winter from last September - seeped into my thinking, got under my skin.

One morning late in June, quite unannounced, tiny signs of spring began to emerge. One snowdrop at a time. Then last weekend arrived with glorious warmth, dry and blue-skied with temperatures to match. On Sunday, I wore a single layer and even then had to push my sleeves to my elbows. Bliss.    

Was beginning to think I was losing my tiny mind.

This chart, taken from this site, makes so much sense. Of course early settlers were longing for the more defined seasons they had at home in Europe finding themselves stuck on the other side of the planet, so far from what they knew. Of course they longed for the familiar, but that we still, 200-odd years later, stick to European notions of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter is kinda dumb. I love this chart - it explains why jonquils and snowbells show their faces earlier than the calendar months would have us believe.

Also, why I am sneezing as though it's spring...it IS spring. Pre-spring.