When I go to my friend Mary’s house for my annual visit, we often rent movies for our evenings. Both of us like to get up early and retire early, and we’re generally too lazy to go out after a long day of gardening, biking, hiking, beaching, shopping, and eating. (We try to cover all these bases every day, especially the eating.) Often Mary has a list of chores drawn up specially for my arrival, so those must be covered too. Last summer, lots of painting was involved.
Month: May 2013
Some of the Art
I’m pretty awful at museums. When we were young, my sister Katherine and I would be taken by our adventure-loving mother to various museums, often along with my friend Sharon and her mother (grown-ups needed other grown-ups to talk and smoke with). We went to the Wadsworth in Hartford, the Peabody down in New Haven, and even to some of the museums in New York City, where I liked the dinosaur bones almost as much as those irresistible paintings where somebody’s head was cut off and bleeding on a platter. Continue reading
One Night in Siena…
…is not enough. That’s what happens when you set up a trip in ignorance, which seems pretty much a given when you are in fact ignorant about your destination: things that look great on paper suddenly don’t make much sense. Oh, well. I’d been planning my second trip to Italy before I departed for this one, so no big deal: Siena is alive and well and in my future. Continue reading
"How meet beauty?"
My feelings about Rome turn out to be complicated. Continue reading
OK, so. Well. Back to the garden.
It’s late May and we were gone for two weeks, during which it actually rained. You can imagine. I’m sorry I didn’t take any “Before” pictures. Spent all day yesterday hacking back the Mexican primroses from the sidewalk garden. That it not a nice way to talk about a wildflower, especially such a pretty one, but they do have takeover tendencies and look very raggedy once the first blooms are done. They’ll be back.
Italy, Part Two: Rome
A long time ago I wrote a poem that I liked perfectly well because I was young and full of poetry, and I liked how it started: “Who am I to talk?” Turned out I was the only fan of my poem; everyone else who read it thought that if I weren’t the one to talk, I should just shut up. Continue reading
Not My Garden, but Italy: Part One
This is a story of a dream deferred long enough. I’d worn out every sensible reason for postponing Italy when, as will happen, my 60th birthday arrived. In my mind, birthdays involving a zero demand special attention. “You know what I want, right?” I found myself asking my dear husband Floyd. Continue reading