Things of early spring and late winter, and other oddments.

I have decided that if I don't make one of those patchwork posts, of bits and pieces taken from camera and notebooks and envelope backs, I won't post at all, and waste not want not.

~

I go to Le Grand Pré to pick up tickets for a performance of flamenco dancing at the end of the month.  It is a vast place, in an enormous space, with glorious views across the bay, and, it seems, about two scheduled performances of anything a month, from September to May.  I suppose the schools must use it, and conferences.  Nearby, though, I spied a mimosa, just about to flower, and a very fine donkey in a paddock behind it.

Yellow globes of early spring, but then also these tenacious holders-on from autumn too, a yellow crab apple tree, its fruit as big as eggs, and miraculously still intact and glowing through all the frost and wind and snow we've had, like the golden apples of the sun.

I bit into a dropped one.  It was quite sweet, but the tannin was mouth-scouring.  The birds don't mind. 

 ~

On the matter of birds, lately it seems that the jays have taken over the niche that the magpies used to occupy in the garden.  The magpies are still about, but they keep more to the fields and hedges and roadways, while the jays come more boldly near to the house, which is an odd reversal.  Sometimes there are several of them, dancing about on the tops of the hedges and perching in the trees.  It occurred to me, watching a pair of magpies hopping about on the road, that the jays still seem rarely to come down to the ground like that, but then I looked out of the window the other day and saw one foraging on the grass.

~

The white van's windscreen, convex like the mirror in van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding, holds the entirety of the plane tree and the morning's blue and rose-cream sky behind it within its scoping, passive eye.  It stands in the car park, square, banal, rude, mechanical, discreetly offering this perfect vision to the the world.

~

 Blue hyacinths.  They loll about shamelessly, as if drunk on their own perfume.

~

As I tip the glass into the big déchetterie skip for recycling, I feel a momentary pang of remorse, to see the empty  Croft Original bottle and squat brown Marmite jar, abandoned and forlorn among the Bordeaux and beer bottles, and jars that once held green French beans and apricot jam.

~

Result!

~

'I'd say that metaphysical acrostics,

Rightly taken are as good as joss sticks.'

( Geoffrey Hill, from Oracles)

~

On a day of cold wind and sunbursts, the emerging grass and winter wheat take on that wildly hopeful sheen of green, glowing back at last at the sky and the stripes of winter trees, like a smile, a refusal to stay sullen any longer.