back to the cafe

Here I sit, at an outdoor cafe table, with an "everything" croissant (do I repeat myself with things I like? yes I do!) and a cappuccino, and this time -- with my laptop. No one likes this set up more than I do. I may as well be in Sorede or Gargnano, or any foreign small town where the pace is easy, the streets are quiet and the coffee and croissant combination -- delicious. I feel like I am on vacation or in heaven or in some such idyll.

How lucky we are to have this luxury, this vaccinated luxury of feeling safe! How incredibly lucky!

My day began in the garden. I'm topping five or six hundred snipped lilies each day now. I always get going with garden work before breakfast. Morning garden tasks are peaceful and meditative and even beautiful. I look for the most precious vignettes from the day's offerings. Because the lilies change every single day, it's never the same presentation of flowers. I find favorite corners of the garden. Beautiful spaces, with froggies and birds and bugs and butterflies and of course Happy, the rooster.

Breakfast.

I had a phone call with my doc, whom I like because she is my daughters' age and she is whip smart and compassionate toward her many very sick patients (I am not one of those, thankfully). We talked about young kids (she has some) and how they are this month catching numerous colds and picking up endless viruses. Not COVID, but other stuff that floats around public spaces. All that dribbly stuff has come back and Ed and I have long decided that wearing masks in public spaces is perhaps not such a bad idea, even in low COVID times. (I do have some anxiety about the message it sends: wear a mask if you are unvaccinated! -- reads the sign at the cafe. If I wear a mask, will people think I'm one of the antis out there? Ed just rolls his eyes when I voice any concern about what people may think!)

I thought about all this when I picked up Snowdrop at French Camp.

Her new found friend was absent today. Sniffly perhaps. Oh, the disappointment! A friendship so quickly and intensely forged and lost the next day! Nonetheless, Snowdrop found things to love about her school morning and I had not a small amount of pride in her: not only did she rally, but, too, she went along at home with the hair braiding project: her afternoon baby sitter was celebrating her birthday today and she really really wanted to see Snowdrop in braids. The little one has big feelings about hair and where it falls (on her ears, please!) and still, she went along.

(And then she found something else with which to cover her ears!)

And Sandpiper was content to hear both sibling voices again...

 

 

 

And Sparrow was all smiles, because, well, it was that kind of a day and he's that kind of a child.

The evening was for Primrose, my loyal dinner prepping companion (via FaceTime)! We talked about cooking of course -- past and present.

 

 

I cooked up a soup, because that's what I do when someone packs me a whole bunch of ruffled green kale (it was in today's CSA box). Cooking soups is like snipping spent lilies -- it leads to a meditative frame of mind. And I thought about how good family life has been to all my grandkids! In this lies their greatest luck. Parents, siblings, cousins -- all of it. And I took out my large spoon and stirred some more, with a big fat smile pasted on my face.