shall I compare thee to a summer’s day

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

These sweetly scented antique roses currently blooming at my deck.

IMG_9683a the Jaune Desprez rose, bred by Jean Desprez (France, 1830).

IMG_9677 the Maman Cochet rose, bred by Scipion Cochet (France, 1892).

Weekly photo challenge Rare

a thing searcher

‘I don’t know what you’ve got in mind,’ said Pippi, ‘but I’m not the sort to lie around. I’m a thing-searcher, you see. And that means I never have a moment to spare.’
‘What did you say you were?’ asked Annika.
‘A thing-searcher.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.
‘Someone who goes searching for things, of course! What else would it be?’ said Pippi as she swept all the flour into a little pile. ‘The whole world is full of things, which means there’s a real need for someone to go searching for them. And that’s exactly what a thing-searcher does.’
‘What kind of things?’ asked Annika.
‘Oh, all kinds,’ said Pippi. ‘Gold nuggets and ostrich feathers and dead mice and tiny little nuts and bolts and things like that.’
~ Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

I haven’t been thrifting much these days. On my off days I rather be home, cranking up the a/c and browsing the amazon prime or eBay. On a recent tax-free weekend, I got myself  a new running shoes from Amazon and a sterling turquoise earrings on eBay.
But since today is the national thrift store day, please allow me to brag about a new addition to my vintage blue-green glass collection, the Hemingray-9 glass insulators … err $0.50 each from the Salvation Army.

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for what we give

IMG_9641 the Alnwick rose

IMG_9642 the Pat Austin rose

IMG_9640a the Heritage rose

As far as photography, I’ve been feeling a little stale lately, like I don’t really have anything new to offer. You know a few vintage finds here and there, some clearance score or favorite meal of the week. But maybe I’ve been thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe the trick is finding new ways through familiar things.
And most of my weekends feel decidedly less than glamorous (think: catching up on the laundry, watering the plants, hitting the grocery, and other sundry and not very exciting errands… like spacing around the garden.) I am growing 40 variety of roses right now, mostly the English and the antique roses. And the best thing that happened to me this week, despite the heat wave, they blooms.

Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give. ~ Edward Arlington Robinson

I am content

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more…
~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

Well I don’t grow strawberries, I plant hydrangeas. I love the apple green foliage, the blue blooms and the bushy shrubs. I dug a bed for them, I moved nearly every. single. piece. of rock and stone friends…
I am content with my ‘blue bed’.

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thanks for remembering us

And so that was almost a month of radio silence. Nothing much is happening here since the last post. A family visit during the Memorial Day weekend, then the dear husband caught a cold, and then the girl cat decided to get sick as well. Two vet visit, a cat scan 😉 , a corticosteroid shot and $400 later, it is determined she (the cat) has asthma. The husband is fine, the cat seems to be doing ok, and then despite chugging on a gallon of orange juice, I have been having this runny nose for the past few days. I’ll be ok.
Thank you for the lovely notes, comments and emails sent. I didn’t think anyone from the blogosphere would miss me, yet some of you do. Thank you for the sweet thoughts, which remind me of a poem.

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The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they’re not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can’t
throw out a gift we’ve never owned.

~ ‘Thanks for remembering us’ by Dana Gioia, Daily Horoscope