kindergarDen

it’s flip flop warm and sunny for the first time in a week.

i love the way young nasturtium plants stretch so enthusiastically toward the sun. i imagine them pleading in little voices, “pick me, miss, pick me!” when the teacher’s selecting the lucky person who’s going to get to feed the class gerbil.

LB

snapshots from Edinburgh

my aunt Morag (on left) enjoying her 60th birthday dinner…as did everyone else. that’s 8:30pm, and the sun was beaming…

dinner started with Stornoway black pudding… the best i’ve ever tasted…
and ended with party favours… tablet. from DiRollo’s. yum.

a glorious 2 hour dander through the botanical gardens…

i found a little piece of AZ in the glasshouse…

and hugged a tree in honour of my niece…

perfect haddock from Armstrongs of Stockbridge in The Orchard…

a grand couple of days was had…

LB

secret love

i have an online news alert set for the South West USA and was shocked to see the reports of fires in Oklahoma and Texas. yet another sobering reminder of the power of nature and the fragility of human life in its path…

my eye was caught by several place names – Wichita, Amarillo, Choctaw…

the Choctaw Ridge in this song is, as far as i know, in the Mississippi delta, but no matter – the report got me to remembering a car journey, possibly through France, when i was about 9, in which i got into country music thanks to a mixtape my dad had playing on the car stereo. it was this song that did it.

it’s been a couple of years now since i (port fueled) sang this at our (much missed) sessions in the kitchen (sometimes at the cottage or at Pádraig’s)… it remains for me one of the most haunting songs ever penned. and i think it always will.

LB