Spring and Mrs. Daffodil

 

Every couple of years I reread Gladys Taber's Mrs. Daffodil in March. It's almost wrong to say this is a novel when it reads instead as Gladys Taber's autobiography, with names changed. 

For example, Gladys' bosom friend Faith Baldwin (see the illustration of Faith Baldwin at the top of every blog post of Dewena's Window) is named Hope Alden in Mrs. Daffodil. During their annual week's visits, they read each others' manuscripts--that's true trust--settle the problems of the world, and go antique shopping together.

I always laugh with Mrs. Daffodil as she recounts the various hired help she and her lifelong friend and housemate Kay (Jill) employ over the years whose ineptitude causes the two women to work even harder than usual. This also brings to mind the five years I had the most wonderful helper named Pam and what I wouldn't give for her now. 

And I cry for Mrs. Daffodil at the end of the book when she says of her husband, someone Gladys rarely mentions in her books, the sentences that tell so much.

She remembered Henry, but pushed the memory aside. Henry was an upright man, but life with him had been anything but one of those partnerships she read about. The truth was, she reflected sadly, that she and Henry had been entirely unsuited. They had just rocked along.

She said a little prayer for Henry.

I read Mrs. Daffodil before falling asleep at night through the first spring like warm days of March when the daffodils bloomed behind the barn, those in the wild area that looked as if some former resident had forked up mounds of dirt where daffodil bulbs had been tossed.

 

So warm were the days that James Mason and BreeBree went to the groomer for a short haircut.

 

And I read Mrs. Daffodil when March became her true chilly self.

 

I lit candles at night as the temperatures fell, especially this pretty one from Court that was a Christmas gift and smells divine.

 I finished Mrs. Daffodil and went back to some old Peter Shandy mysteries, and in the daytime I listened to biography audiobooks while doing some spring chores. I listened to this one in honor of my Star Trek trekki sons and found it to be a fascinating account of a complex man--both Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spoke. [Sorry, typo--Mr. Spock!]

I hung some spring tea towels in the kitchen...

 Cleaned out some kitchen drawers...

And up went a few little sweet things on the kitchen shelves--the Peter Rabbit cutout saved from Christy's childhood.

 I mixed up some buttermilk waffle batter one day for a special waffle breakfast with Tennessee country sausage, hashbrown casserole and eggs. Melted butter and hot maple syrup.

Attended by our guests, Christy home for the weekend and her big brother who dashed over to see her. If only I had managed to get her whole beautiful face in the picture!

And RH and I will be getting another visit from family Easter weekend, our granddaughters and their parents!

Can you guess where they were one day on spring break?

Now that's way too easy, isn't it? And I know you can guess how much I enjoy visits from family, even quick weekend ones. 

For such is the stuff of bliss, isn't it, dear readers? And Mrs. Daffodil? 

Secret Daffodils

 I'm daffy over daffodils so this picture our son took of our little granddaughter, not so little anymore, had to go on a kitchen shelf where I could see it during daffodil season.

Two of my pie birds sing sweet spring music to her. I'm sure she sings with them because she loves to make up her own songs.

When we first moved to Home Hill, built in 1935, I thought there would be spring bulbs sprouting up all over the 2 1/2 acres. I guess the farmer who lived here was too busy to fool with such fripperies, as were later owners.

Two Octobers ago RH did plant hundreds of spring bulbs but except for a clump of daffodils that sprang up around an old stump near the driveway, our first spring here there wasn't a single one.

 

Or so we thought.

Our second spring we spotted daffodil blooms hidden away behind the old barn in a long jungle of trees and shrubs that divide our property from our only close neighbor.

It's always been a bit of a secret place but this spring when Daniel and his family were spending the weekend with us, he and our granddaughters explored the jungle.

 

The small barn, open to the weather for decades, is scheduled to be torn down since RH finished building his workshop and carport. It's too far gone to save even though my first dream was to make it into a picnic shelter like we did with the chicken shed at Valley View.

 

It does make for a wonderful photo background for our beautiful granddaughters.

 

I can hardly believe they're growing up so quickly, one granddaughter almost as tall as her mom. Here's the whole family on our front porch that had not yet been cleaned up for spring--maybe it will happen by summer.

They were getting ready to see Nashville Children's Theater presentation of Peter Pan: Wendy's Adventure to Neverland.

 

My thanks to Daniel for sharing all the barn daffodil pictures with me for the Window!

Here's a picture of Daniel with the crew of HGTV's 100 Day Dream Home. They were celebrating finishing up their third season of the show that is hosted by husband-and-wife team Brian and Mika Kleinschmidt. On days that 100 Day Dream Home runs back-to-back on HGTV, RH and I binge on it for hours!

Daniel, Technical Director for the show, is on the far left with Brian and Mika the third and fourth from left. 

Embracing Slow

The Today Show featured one of my favorite books the other day, Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slowness (Challenging the Cult of Speed), published in 2004. 

I bought it years ago because I am a fan of slow, being naturally of that persuasion myself.

Honoré, born in the UK but now a citizen of Canada, writes about our frantically busy civilization:

Why are we always in such a rush?

We have forgotten how to look forward to things, and how to enjoy the moment when they arrive. 

Long hours on the job are making us unproductive, error-prone, unhappy and ill.

In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term "time-sickness" to describe the obsessive belief that "time is getting away, that there isn't enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up." These days the whole world is time-sick.

That was in 1982.

I wonder if the whole world is time-sick now? Certainly our health care workers and first responders must be. But for many of us, our neighbors and ourselves, we're no longer in a rush, are we?

For those of us who can stay home and are staying home, time has slowed down and given us time to enjoy the signs of Spring from our own window and yard. Time to appreciate the smallest signs of nature's rebirth. 

I'm very thankful that last November RH took a day to plant bulbs on this old farm property that only had a few clumps of yellow daffodils. He planted hundreds and yet they seem so sparse now, little clumps compared to the decades of bulbs planted at our old house.

It will take time to grow a Spring garden such as we had at Valley View where bulbs and violets were tucked around interesting shrubs and mossy rocks...

Not stuck out in the middle of grass they way they are here.

RH has planted seven flowering trees in our front yard in the three years we've lived here at Home Hill. This year we're seeing flowers on them but nothing compared to what they'll be someday similar to those in the twenty-six years we were at our old house.

Time. No longer guaranteed to any of us. And never really was, was it?

This past month we've treasured the few blooms we've cut and brought inside.

I need them in little vases in my rooms.

Even though they fade more quickly than when left outside. 

 I need them at the dining table.

And I need a few sprigs from the sparsely flowered lilac tree outside my office window where the mockingbird perches.

And I try to remember to pound the wood stalk so it will absorb water and not wilt quickly.

For many people these weeks at home have been a time of accomplishing projects in the house and garden. 

Our daughter-in-law who is a licensed medical aesthetician has of course had to close her business due to the pandemic and is at home enjoying her passion for gardening. Below is a picture of my new garden dachshund from this daughter-in-law who loves garden art as much as I do.

But her husband, our son who has run the family construction business since RH semi-retired in 2016, still works every day on houses that were heavily damaged in the tornado that struck Nashville and surrounding counties only a couple of weeks before the whole world was brought to a stop.

And so RH works with him and does our grocery store and pharmacy errands and tries to be as careful as he can. What he does not have time to do now is work on projects like finishing the front sidewalk and beds around it that he began late last summer.

Nor does he have time to work much on his huge project in the back yard, the double carport and large workshop that he and his brother have worked on all winter long. Now his brother is home being careful himself.

 
Did you notice the pretty scalloped trim on the front of the carport that my brother-in-law copied from a picture I gave him from Pinterest?

 See the beautiful light fixtures in this picture...

There's a large hunter green one like them in a box under my dining table awaiting the day that electrical is finished and the Hardie plank siding is painted.

When there is time. 

I printed out pictures of the pretty Swedish Red buildings I love from my Pinterest board and put them up in the kitchen when I realized that this building was going to be in my view from the kitchen window. 

And if it was, then by golly it was going to be pretty! And so RH plans to trim out all the windows and doors of the workshop in crisp white against the Swedish red and add a small sitting area by it to look out over the pond.

All of which will take time. 

Meanwhile RH has two and a half acres of grass to mow on his days off and yesterday began some patio garden cleanup. 

I looked out and saw him taking a little snooze in the sun and thought he would be the perfect prop for Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slowness. 

We have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.

For those of you who have contemplated slowing down your world after it returns to normal, I can highly recommend this book. Mine is full of highlighted sections, much of which introduced me to the Slow Food movement back when I first bought it.

As you probably know, the Slow Food movement and even the fascinating Slow Cities movement began in Italy, and as I reread portions of this book this week my heart hurt for the Italian people who began this movement and live by it so much more naturally than we here in my country do.

But I choose to believe that there will be good things to come out of this time, all around the world, and embracing slow might be one result.

Especially as it might relate to our children and grandchildren and their future world. The last chapter of In Praise of Slowness (Challenging the Cult of Speed) is titled:

"Raising an Unhurried Child"

One can only hope.

How are you and your family doing now?

I do so hope that all of you are well.  

    

Garden Catalogues and Secret Crushes

Thank you so much for your condolences on the loss of my mother. My sisters and I have sometimes floundered after we found ourselves without our beloved parents here on this earth. 

And during this time of mourning people all over the world have entered this frightening era of pandemic. I'm guessing that most of us have turned to the comforts of home and garden.

I struggled to find what topic to write about this first post back. Nothing seemed adequate after reading so many inspiring posts from my blog friends. So I will instead share some pictures that were meant to be posted in late February when I stacked up some garden books I had been reading. 

  
The book on top, Beverley Nichols' Green Grows the City, the Story of a London Garden, was a gift from a dear blog friend, Melanie of Comfy House, who knew I collected his books and generously passed this one along to me after she read it. I loved it so much that I've read it twice!

I have about eight of his books and must admit that I've been a little bit secretly in love with this Englishman from the early mid-century for many years, the same way many of my blog friends are with Monty Don today. Okay, I admit I'm a little bit in love with Monty too, thanks to Netflix. And there's even another home and garden writer from the early mid-century who I have a huge crush on but he's for another post--or a hundred posts.

What one thing can I share with you from this delightful book? I don't have time to tell you much here, not even about his obnoxious neighbor Mrs. Heckmondwyke. Maybe this from the end of his book will strike a connection with everyone to whom home and garden have become so much more important now:

So we will close these pages. And as we do so we both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace. 

Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White is a classic that anyone whose heart thumps a little faster when the first garden catalogue arrives in the mail after Christmas should enjoy.

Mrs. White wrote garden pieces for New Yorker readers for many years that extolled the education to be found between the covers of an excellent garden catalogue, and they're gathered in this book.

Here's a little from the Introduction, written by her husband E. B. White--and yes, I have a tiny crush on him too. (Mrs. White, on the other hand, would scare the dickens out of me were I to be in her presence.) 

There seems to be no limit to my literary crushes. Here he compares his wife, to whom he is completely devoted, to the English garden writer Gertrude Jekyll:

Unlike Miss Jekyll, my wife had no garden clothes and never dressed for gardening...Her army boots were liable to be Ferragamo shoes, and she wore no apron. I seldom saw her prepare for gardening, she merely wandered out into the cold and the wet, into the sun and the warmth, wearing whatever she had put on that morning...her clothes had to take things as they came.

 And if you want to read more about the marriage between these two extraordinary people, Isabel Russell's account of the eight years she was Mr. White's secretary in their home in Katharine and E. B. White, An Affectionate Memoir, is a wonderful place to start. 

And here is my treasure of a garden catalogue, Dreer's Garden Book 1930. I can't even remember where I got it, I've had it so long. 

Although Baker's Creek Heirloom Seed Company is my current favorite seed catalogue to read like a novel, and I buy at least one thing from White Flower Farm every year just to keep receiving their pretty catalogue that isn't nearly as thick as it used to be, every Spring I enjoy turning the pages of this old catalogue. Aren't those sweet peas beautiful?

Even the black and white photos are interesting. Have any of you ever grown salsify?

 I love the illustrations in this old catalogue!

What are your favorite garden catalogues? I know some of you already have seedlings started in sunny windows and under grow lights. 

And could anyone please help identify this ground cover that RH took a plug from a friend's yard and stuck in a foam cup? I took this picture the other day but it is now full of pretty purple blooms. 

Did you notice the little Golden Guernsey cow in my kitchen window? We rescued her from a yard sale decades ago because that was the kind of milk that used to be delivered to our kitchen door in our early married years. 

One book in my stack of books pictured, Elizabeth Lawrence's The Little Bulbs, I've skipped writing about because it's worth a whole post involving RH driving me around Nashville looking for the house belonging to the woman who had once owned the book and made copious notes throughout. I love finding books that the owner has written in, would pay twice what I pay for a book that's not annotated. And I admit that I write in almost all my books. If they're not written in that probably means they didn't touch my heart.

Do you write in your books? 

Want to share your own secret crushes with us? 

I hope you and your loved ones are all okay during this fight against a mutual enemy. From my heart to yours, wherever you live, whether you are a blogger or one who reads blogs, please be careful, please thrive and flourish.