Bon Voyage

As the rest of the world fills up the seed trays and begins the journey of hope that is March for a vegetable gardener, I am headed back to Paris with not even a pair of garden gloves in my luggage. All is on hold until mid-April.

I am thinking about beginning a new blog that is about travel. If I should do so, the link will be right here. And from time to time I will post here about the garden side of my travels.

My amaryllis are just now starting to bloom ... to them and to you I say

A BIENTOT !

Be Careful What You Wish For ...

I am spending this week before President's Day as I did last year, skiing with my husband in Stowe, VT. We were both raised in New England and we have the memory that there is no snow too big to bring down a Vermonter. When we heard that the coastal Nor’easter was headed our way, we were VERY excited. It would arrive on Valentine’s Day. We would watch the snow fall as we ate our romantic Valentine’s Day dinner at a nearby restaurant. The roads would be plowed, all would be accessible and we would go on with life as usual because that’s what New Englanders do!

Well let me tell you about our romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. First, the restaurant we had planned to go to called to say they were closing because of the snow. Well since it was called Michael’s on the Hill (hill being the operative word) we forgave them. We then planned to go to an Italian restaurant up the mountain road … BUT

The parking lot at the inn where we were staying had not been plowed and despite a mighty effort on our parts which included a solid 40 minutes of shoveling we realized, all wheel drive or no, this little Subaru was not going anywhere. The innkeeper offered to drop us off at a place just up the road on their way out to dinner. This now being our third choice for a romantic Valentine’s dinner, we were starting to suffer Stockholm syndrome. But when we entered the door, we were greeted with the news that they had closed the kitchen and soon would be closing the bar. We begged them to sell us a bowl of cold chili and armed with same we headed back to our room in a driving snow, dodging large snowplows as we walked back along the Mountain Road. So much for a special Valentine’s dinner.

Then this morning we got to the mountain only to discover that all but two lifts had been closed due to the wind. Perhaps tomorrow. So forty inches of new snow sits out there on the mountain nearly all of it inaccessible. Grrrrr.

Perhaps the lesson here is … all things … even snow are better in moderation.

And the other lesson … even a cold bowl of chili and an orange shared before a fire with the one you love the most in the world is pretty romantic after all.

"... a small town holds each other up, and lays a good one down"

The memorial service for the father of a friend brought me back to my summer home for a few days. Our town is the agricultural heart of the island and it was the Agricultural Hall that was the heart of the town yesterday. We gathered there in front of the hearth as one by one, children, grandchildren, colleagues and friends gave testimony to a life well lived.

I am sitting here this morning in a living room awash in sunshine. I spy my resting garden out the window. The ground is hard. All is still.

When I awoke on Thursday morning, and heard the radio announcer say, “Today is Thursday, February 8, 2007” I realized that had she lived, my mother would be celebrating her 90th birthday. One of the ways I pass my time in the winter is crawling out on the unfinished twigs of the family tree. I had been working for a few days on one of my mother’s great grandparents because of an email I had received. I was in the middle of that task when the phone rang. It was my mother’s brother, calling from across the country to remind me of my mother’s birthday. I hadn’t heard from him in over a year and it had been on my mind to check in on him. We caught up on family news and reminisced about mother. It was just the right way to honor her memory.

Here’s to lives well lived … and to stopping and remembering along the way.

Reprise

Just in case you missed this one last year, here ... back by popular demand ... is Sue Watkins' take on seed catalogues and the dangers they pose.

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