Apologies!

Sorry everyone, not feeling great just now, hope you will bear with me?

Bryant Park

Bryant Park, a photo by flickrnipper on Flickr.

I love the way tree branches slowly wave in the moments before rain.   They are almost like very bendy people moving in slow motion.  Suddenly the rain arrives and mists my view of the golf links, enshrouding the green distance that only moments before was somehow detailed by the impending shower, made sharper- clearer and brought miraculously nearer.  We have a massive fir-tree outside, too near to the house's alas, so at some point soon it will have to be dispatched and I shall be so sad.  After a rainfall he droops with a thousand diamonds, his branches softly wave in the breeze, gently holding their reflective cargo, hypnotic and soothing when you lie a-bed unwell.

We have so much rain, always.  So that everywhere, green abounds, even here in the suburbs of the town.  I remember once arriving back here for a visit when we lived in Abu Dhabi, sitting on an airport transit-bus being driven from one Terminal to another and being dazzled by such overwhelming greenness.  Abu Dhabi... must be nearly 35 years since I lived there.  My thoughts move swiftly to other places and return always..always to my favourite, New York, and Bryant Park.  The NY Times predicted years ago it could become one of the city's most attractive breathing spots. Fulfilling that prediction it has become a haven, nestling amongst the skyscrapers of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue.   Bryant Park is an oasis of trees, green and pause, a place to breathe, rest and 'kick-back'.  There is charm and whimsy.   A children's carousel and an eatery named Witchery, a fountain to cool the dusty air and your fevered brow and all the whilst the tall surrounding buildings seem to enfold and enclose rather than encroach, as you sit beneath a bright sunny yellow umbrella sipping a large frothy cappucino, reading a book borrowed from the shelves loaned by the adjacent NY Public Library or simply people-watching.

Sunny fields

Photo: 'féileacán'  Flickr




There were burnished seas like this stretching as far as the eye could see in the flat plains of Poland as we drove to Warsaw many years ago.  No doubt they are still there now....this minute. Fields of sunflowers turning their heavy heads, golden and brown towards the sun. Swaying in vast undulating waves.  And there still sweeping across them a hot black ribbon of  road, sweeping through mile after beautiful mile of massive, open flatlands.  Polska meaning 'the people of the flatlands', always invaded by advancing armies in wars because it's mostly lowland with very little that is mountainous.  There were hills where we lived but they weren't very big, just small rises really, but there was the great river Vistula ploughing across the land in rippling majesty or in Winter thick and slick with huge ice-flows.  Farmers drove their farm-carts along these roads always standing not sitting, whilst the main vehicles were massive trundling lorries or tiny Polski Fiats often with great tall, fat men folded up inside them in order to drive.

The sun is shining this morning but there is a mist, a proper Autumn morning.  Soon leaves will begin to redden and  in a week or so the children are back to school and we move on - we move onwards, to Christmas. Carols and baubles, tinsel and glitter, and breathtakingly a whole new Year.

Reverie..

There's something about hearing the rumble of an aircraft when you're soaking in the bath in the summer.  Somehow the droning of the engines seems to hypnotise thoughts and gazing through the window towards a pearly sky I am suffused with feelings of languor and heart's ease.
Outside existing time seems stretched, swimmingly, smoothly.  I could be elsewhere.
In a garden of my childhood beneath shadowy trees, espying swallows swooping, swirling, drowsily hearing sheep bleating, and the rising falling 'peep-peep' of the swallows call as they fish the balmy air.
Or with unalloyed happiness sitting at a table in Bryant Park, New York, under a sunny lemon umbrella.  Blissfully transported by the garden of gravel paths and calm amidst the frenetic city of boundless energy and excitement.

Same old....

'Nothing is new.
Each gate squeaks to remind us of the other hands that have pushed it.
Each pair of eyes that encounter me for the first time have memories shifting behind them, like sand under tides.'
from: 'Eve Green' by Susan Fletcher.


Whose hands did the perfect pale lilac gloves enfold?
The gloves were lying flat in amongst the jewellery of times past in a shop called, Memories Antiques.  It felt strange to draw the thin, soft and cool
leather upon my own hands.  Gloves are so personal somehow.  Like watches they seem to embody something of the essence of a person.  Who was she?
The stamp inside says, 'Made especially for Kendal Milne, Manchester, Real Kid, Made in Luxembourg, Washable'.  They held no hint of perfume but only a slight musty aroma of age.
Kendal Milne the upmarket, exclusive and perhaps oldest department store in the world, once called the Harrods of Manchester until Harrods Group was taken over by House of Frazer in 1959.  They dropped the name Kendals back then, but everyone local who shops in town always still calls it, 'Kendals'.  I can remember being taken to lunch there by my Father and Grandmother, I must have been about six, but I clearly remember being so impressed by the extravagant tea-rooms, dressed with oriental rugs, palms and velvet-covered seats.  There were waitresses in little black dresses with white frilly aprons and caps, silver cutlery and linen serviettes and even musicians discretely playing. Whilst overhead I'm sure I remember that the ceiling was all glass, a dome shape and totally enthralling.
Did 'she' sit there once long ago?  Wearing her perfect hat and suit with her wonderful lilac kid gloves, escorted... by her Beau?

I'm reading 'The Art of James Christenson - The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James', and right at the beginning of the book he writes of meeting up with an old friend whom he discovers never takes his 30 minute drive home from work in the same way.

'That resonated in my own life. Like many people in this age of getting there faster, I sometimes lose sight of the journey in the light of the goal.  What my friend had done with a simple change in his routine was to leave space for the unexpected within the bounds of ordinary life.......My friend Ralph found a simple way to keep his evening drive from becoming routine.  I like that idea , that within an ordinary life you can leave space for noticing the world around you and keeping alive the inner universe of imagination.'
The Art of James Christenson - The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James

I was suddenly taken back to a memory of walking to and from school aged about six or seven. Remembering how I used to pretend I was a foreign person, who had never been that way before, so everything I encountered I was meeting for the first time.  The small red-brick houses with their walled or hedged gardens contained plants I'd never seen before, the tall green trees, waved their leaves in patterns on the pavements in a sunlight I had never walked into before.  The small side-streets led away right and left to hidden pathways I'd never trodden before.

'In the universe of the mind lie treasures and surprises, fertile soils and elegant creations, new angels and old dragons, visions of other worlds and the quiet contemplation of death.'
The Art of James Christenson- The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James.