Thursday, June 16, 2011

Lilies in the wind

The stinking lilies (left) are all out - I suspect they have a posh name, like Turk's Cap lilies or something, but their ammonia smell means that for the past 35 years I've thought of them as stinking. The Philadelphus, just behind them, is also beginning to come out, its sweet scent just making itself known over the ammonia. The sun is shining, albeit fitfully. I should be feeling mellow.

But I'm not. For a start they're too early: these are real end-of-term scents, the scents of warm summer evenings coming home late from school concerts or prizegivings, and it's not just that I am no longer involved in such matters upsetting things. The lilies were out before the end of May, presumably hastened by the almost-forgotten warmth of March and April, and now they hang over the path beaten out of shape by the rain that dominated last month. And warm it is not: after a promising start we had cloud and now there's a brisk and chilly wind. This may be global warming, or it may just be another example of the variable weather of the west. Either way, it's got me jangled.

I think I need another holiday. But we've not yet passed Trinity Sunday ...

6 comments:

  1. I am sorry to read of your displacement yet you articulate these feelings so well as to give us hope by your words.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am sorry to read of your displacement yet you articulate these feelings so well as to give us hope by your words.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dearest, please parse the following for me: "and it's not just that I am no longer involved in such matters upsetting things".

    Is it the lack of involvement that's upsetting? Or did your involvement heretofore upset things?

    I'd like to know!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think, my sweet, that the rambling uncertainty of my feelings may be reflected in my syntax. Please understand the words "the fact" between "just" and "that" and the words "which is" between "matters" and "upsetting", and consider it a replication of the sloppiness of the spoken word that is here skillfully replicated.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Done with such grace and artistry that I think I'll award you both ears and the tail!

    But is "skillfully" a vestige of your American travels, mayhap?

    (The word for verification is "guite". You may apply three of those letters to me, should you so desire!)

    ReplyDelete
  6. A vestige rather of predictive text and my inherent mistrust of my own spelling - it was always my mother who was the infallible speller chez nous!

    ReplyDelete