Five Things about Camellias

1. The fully blown flowers drop like severed heads - some Japanese think this is bad luck.

2.There is a cafe somewhere, inside a great camellia bush. Everything is wooden. They serve sweet bean soup with rice cakes.

3.There was once a reddish tea dress with a drooping bias hem that would stir up and then soak up the wild nights and bruise like a wilting bloom. We all wore her.  She would take us out and we would rarely come back.

4.Some Camellias are sporting.  This means that they throw random blooms, like the pale pink one in this photo.  If grafted, the new plant is genetically different.

5.Ms Hillside has two sporting camellias, escorts to the great magnolia in her front yard.  She reckons her nan chose deliberately over the top shrubs because she was by no means an over the top woman.

Sifting

my happiness is like this sand

I let it run out of my hand

John Gould Fletcher

On the way home we pulled over. Joe wanted to visit someone and there was no-one else to visit, so we visited the river.   We found the first warm patch of sand for the season, watched two young ducks bathe in the shallows, and met a few rocks. 

My hunt for tangible, constant, rock-like happiness is ill conceived. Today, I'm thinking of happiness as sandy. It's shifting. There's plenty of it. It gets into everything and anything. It's the product of a watery grinding process.

Hello Dolly

I  looked at the calendar today and realised I have been moping, miserable, and maudlin for one and half months straight.  Almost a personal best.  Dear Ms Hillside made us lunch and we ate under the tree she calls "The Dolly Parton of Magnolias". Hard to keep up the weeping when large pink and white petals are slapping you across the cheek. And your very healthy son is stuffing grass down your back. And the air, like the best of friends, is not too cool and not too warm. And the hard boiled yolks are as yellow as yellow.

Homage to Hard Labour