Well, it's hot outside. The crab apple is in full bloom, the lilac is catching up. We've moved forward! In the wee morning, I look out from the porch onto this:
Within a few hours, the crab apple will have fully opened and the lilac will be just behind! For the next day or two, everything else will take a back seat to these two grand dames of the farmette landscape. Sorry, tulips. I know you're beautiful. It's just that the blooms of a crab apple are so fleeting!
Oh, the beauty of this tree! Of the path to the barn, snuggling between a number of crabs and peaches, all in bloom now!
It's stunning looking back at the farmhouse too.
Okay, the tulips still deserve our happy gaze.
Yes, the landscape is transformed. The farmette has moved on.
And so have I: the Great Writing Project is officially behind me! I have a release date for you: June 3rd. My book -- a memoir on growing up in postwar Poland -- has the title Like a Swallow: Looking Back at a Polish Childhood. You can pre-order it at Little Creek Press (the side bar link will lead you to it) or you can wait until your big pal Amazon (and Amazon.co.uk for readers on the other side of the ocean) lists it in the next few days.
This is what you call a soft release. I'm sure I'll write more about it as time goes on, but right now Ed and I are getting ready to plant trees and finish the tomatoes and redo the lavender bed.
(Walking through the young orchard, in bloom...)
And don't forget about baking! Snowdrop asked for rhubarb muffins (with instructions: use the recipe for rhubarb cake only bake it as muffins! Okay, little one, Done.)
She is here after school, in this summer heat. Climbing the suddenly stunningly beautiful tree.
(Inside, she reads the next in a series of actually very simple books on some of the great classic painters, but they're really loved by her, because they rip to shreds conventional ways of looking at a painting. This one is about Van Gogh, but you'd never know it. It's more about what a young child might see in a painting by him.)
And the swallows dart in and out of the garage, repairing their nests from years past, laying their eggs, waiting for the new generation of little ones to be born.
