Nutty + sherbet-y

Guess what?

I’ve been slowly hobbling about my neighbourhood, building up my strength after a month of boring asthma, sniffles and related infections. The hills are proving hard work, but I’ve got the flats pretty much nailed and am well and truly on the mend. Hurrah!

Everything in my neighbourhood has changed so much! Many of the flowers of early Spring have exited stage left and a bunch of cute new contenders are budding and blooming, all jubilant colour and dew-dropped petals! Swoon.

There are roses EVERYWHERE in every colour: dolly pink, the most sherbet-y yellow, the moodiest deep burgundy, the prettiest peach, the most tentative lilac. I snapped my way around the streets, gasping at both the showiest gardens, smiling at the shy, straggly patches of intertwined weeds, clearly looking like a cuckoo.

These gardens are gorgeous and glorious at the moment! So gorgeous that I walked up and down the same streets as I slowly wove my way to the park, trying to look at the flowers and foliage on both sides of the road thoroughly. It’s beautiful out there.

After the weaving, I headed to the parkland where the ants had been busy tunnelling miniature Star Wars-like structures, carefully gathered spheres of soil marking the way in.

I sprung merry pairs of rosellas galivanting in the flowering gums, delighted dogs cantering across the paddock, workmen leaning on their cars staring through the leaves as they chattered.

I heard radios droning from kitchen window ledges, saw empty blocks where houses stood a month before, spotted people walking with their masks pulled down under their chins and others with them stretched from eye-line to neck.

I saw a pair of glasses (another!) propped on a wall beside trailing geraniums, beneath towering gums. This assemblage of bushy and cultivated mimics the way we are, doesn’t it? We’re often pretty and pleasing and manicured at surface level but underneath it all, truly at the heart of things, we are much more earthy and nutty and unpredictable and wild.