winter – Page 14 – don't confuse the narrator

for everything there is a season

I took this photo today; elsewhere in garden, the violets have been in flower for a couple of weeks.

I don’t doubt that for everything there is a season. It just isn’t always the one you’d expect it to be.

hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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kings, sages and magicians

Today is January 6th: el día de Reyes, the day when Spanish children finally get their Christmas presents. (Although we were told that Santa took gifts to children all round the world, he doesn’t visit many houses in Spain as he leaves it to the Magi to deliver the parcels – or coal for those who’ve been naughty – on Twelfth Night.)

It would make more sense to me if the kids got their toys at the start of the school holidays so they had something to keep them occupied, but I guess los niños españoles spend their time watching TV and adding more and more items to their wish lists as they see the different juguetes advertised during the half-hour commercial breaks.
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that time of year

The fact that it’s almost Christmas doesn’t mean I am any less busy, so, having no time to write, here’s a festive photo:

And an old, but seasonal, poem, slightly tinkered with. Well, it was a poem with line breaks, but the page format splits the long lines so awkardly I’ve given up and pretended it’s just prose:
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December images

In no particular order, and with no revision, a few notes that may find their way into poems later on:

Five days torrential rain, then:

Sparkling sunshine;
the orchard
smells of cider.

Mushroom white
figs moulder on the bridle path;
I slip and slime
down to the road.
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