around here

Lilacs, the flowers of my childhood.

 I inhale their fragrance like I'm dying for air 

and they are my oxygen.

 More big books about India:  A Suitable Boy, Shantaram and The Far Pavilions, and the non-fiction book, India, by Flora Annie Steel, pictured here, published in 1905. An excerpt:

"A quail calls from its hooded cage. A municipal sweeper, coming along with his broom, propels an evil black flood along the gutter; and that tall, spare, bronze-faced man in a white uniform who rides along at a foot's pace, his keen blue eyes everywhere, is the English police-officer.
   
He stops, says something to a yellow-legged orderly at his heels, then passes on.
   
Therein after, there are tears in some balcony or liquor shop, since order must be preserved in the bazaar."

cats

painting

Lilies of the valley, lemon tea bread, cherry blossoms, and those lilacs...

In May, everything seems possible.

p.s.  Spam has been showing up in the comments, 

so I've turned on the word verification. Sorry--I hate it too.

a country weekend

The sun shone through the trees and it was just warm enough that I didn't need a sweater in the afternoon. Wading in shallow water, ferns unfurling, wildflowers popping up...

All the greens:
spring green, apple green, moss green, forest green...

Checking the frog pond for tadpoles or frogspawn. Frogspawn reminding me of a favorite poem, Death of a Naturalist, by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. (Read the entire poem here.) Remembering as a child in Virginia collecting frogspawn in jars and tadpoles in buckets...

...There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,..

-Seamus Heaney from Death of  a Naturalist

country kitchen

The kitchen in the house in the woods is finished.

I love the red cabinets with soapstone counters,
the farmhouse sink, the mushroom wood floor,
and the black island with Carrara marble top.

I love having more windows and fewer upper cabinets.

Dishes go in drawers with nifty dividers.

The tiles are beautiful, but there are more of them in more places than I expected. (One of the problems of a long distance project = miscommunication.) They are subtler than they appear in these pictures (you can get a better look below), but a little bit goes a long way--and they seem a bit busy. I'm going to live with them for a while and then see how I feel.

I don't love the sage paint (darker than it appears in the pictures). It needs some toning down, especially with the colorful tiles, and at some point I will repaint in cream.

I love the red beadboard on the back of the upper cabinets (which are off-white).

The reds in the kitchen are reminiscent of barns.

Upstate New York, where the house is, 

is dotted with family dairy farms. Many have gone out of business,

but the barns still stand.

It's a comfortable, spacious and warm place for family and friends, and already feels lived-in.
We've owned the house and spent many weekends there for 11 years,  and will retire there one day. It's become the place where our family gathers--and this kitchen will get plenty of use and love for many years to come.

the 42nd parallel

One day it's winter, I'm lethargic, depressed, and the next day it's spring and I am bursting with energy and ideas. I'm sure that yesterday there were no buds on the trees.

I'm leaving today for a 3-day weekend in the Catskills
and when I return will these lilies of the valley be blooming?

Is spring the time of bell-shaped blossoms?

The gaudy scent of viburnum washes away the grays.

Everywhere I look there is something new.

Spring comes late to the Catskills too.

It's the same latitude as Boston, 250 miles west--almost a straight line as the crow flies, to our house in the woods. The 42nd parallel north also passes through Wyoming, Corsica, Albania, Kosovo, Mongolia, North Korea...

The 42nd Parallel is the name of a John Dos Passos novel, which I've never read, but now plan to do so. It sounds ambitious, passionate.

And the new kitchen is finished. It was a big project. I'm nervous. I'll report next week.

Enjoy your weekend--I hope spring has found you.

Jen

thinking and not

 From my 5th floor studio window I watch the freight trains. There is something anachronistic about them in this age of Fed Ex and the Internet. Mythical, romantic even, like I'm in another century. These could be logs from 1913, traveling from Maine to a shipyard in Brooklyn or Baltimore.

They reminded me of this old photo I have of a ship being built.
(Click on pictures for a better look.)

Oxen!
(Oxes?) (Ox's?) Ox, plural.

Georgia O'Keeffe painted objects so that the viewer would see them in a new way.

I keep trying to capture things in words and paint. Not actually the thing, but its essence.

Painting is totally absorbing. I like that I don't have to think.

Also:

Japanese cherry blossoms circa 1890
apples

Xo Ox

flowers in the painting studio

These were a gift from my husband's colleagues. 

Something about the arrangement troubled me. 

He thought they were too stylized.
For me both colors and arrangement lacked harmony.

  Well aren't you interesting, I thought,

 not giddy with love in my usual way.

But I grew fonder of them, 

especially when viewed from above, 

and took them to the studio yesterday.

I made some quick sketches 

and contemplated the many ways to paint a flower,

but there is nothing like the real thing.

Spring is later than usual in New England (and the Catskills too I'm sure, though I didn't get there this weekend) and my garden is bare, but I'm enjoying the many blossoms and friends, the warmth and love and laughter over at Jane's Flowers in the House. 

flower power?

Patriot's Day, the day of the Boston Marathon, is a holiday in Massachusetts. It's a family and friends day when you bring your lawn chair and heaps of orange slices down to Main Street, cheer the runners and pass them juicy refreshing citrus. I wrote about it here last year. 

It's particularly cruel (and surely intentional) that so many of this year's victims have had legs and feet amputated, and such a terrible juxtaposition to a joyful day.

I titled last year's post flowers make everything better. Not  everything, I say today. And yet, when someone is hospitalized, our first impulse is to send flowers. 

Flowers don't make it everything better, but maybe they help, in some tiny but essential way.

xo,

Jen