Early morning
The silliest thing I ever did in the semi darkness of the early morning last week was to put concealer on my lips, thinking it was lipstick. When I switched on the light I actually started laughing. What a ghastly sight that was! I love to get up early in the morning, before sunrise. When I look out through the windows of our living room at dawn, what I see is an opaque green screen for several moments. Then, slowly, different shades and shapes are becoming visible and I see the wall of trees and bushes across the lawn reaching all the way up to the sky. A little patch of sky is visible and while I wait everything changes to brightness in the light of the rising sun many miles away. Then it’s time for morning exercises, coffee and a walk with Lani, one and a half mile, three times around the campus. That’s the perfect start of a new day.
The Flying For The Flag Bandit Flight Team
For the past two weeks, all over North Carolina as part of the National Hospital Week, the Bandit Flight Team, a group of six planes, has been doing flyovers dedicated to frontline workers working so hard during the COVID-19 pandemic. The planes had smoke on at the hospital locations. It was a beautiful sight from where I sat, in the middle of the street (read cul-de-sac), at a safe distance from three neighbors sitting in front of their garages. Down the street we could see more neighbors, sitting in chairs by the side of the road or hanging over the railing around the pond.
Gardening in my front patio
Every summer I create a little garden in our front porch. Sometimes I’ll have a Hibiscus, a gift for Mother’s Day, this year it is a Dipladenia with a mass of pink flowers. To my delight I was able to pull last year’s Gardenia through the winter, and thanks to frequent fertilizing with coffee grinds every branch now has a large flower bud. In a week or so they will all open and it will be a delight to sit amidst the fragrance and dream of Hawai’i. Five months ago, I bought a small piece of ginger root to show to the people at our dinner table what ginger looks like (sort of a show-and-tell). Afterwards it landed in the odds-and-ends bowl on the kitchen counter, where I found it again two weeks ago, all shriveled up. But… I saw a little spot of green on one of the knobs: there was life in this little root! It deserved a second chance. So I planted it in a small flower pot and watched daily as a little green shoot shot up from the soil: first a stalk, then a small leaf… Yesterday I transferred it into larger pot, an I can actually see the difference each day. Then there is the Easter Lily, now flowerless, waiting to pull back into its bulbs and come to life again next spring. And last but not least, I rescued a volunteer that had been growing in the pot with the Gardenia. It is some sort of pine tree, or hopes to become one with time and a lot of TLC. The garden hose is “on”, connected to the spigot on the side of the house. Because with this many plants in a hot summer as it will likely become I can’t very well do them all justice with the little watering can I have in my kitchen. Voilà my garden-in-a-nutshell.
It’s a Wonderful Life!
Until next time,
Ronny