Blood Plums

This is the last of the plums. We've had good crops of cherry plums, green-gold greengages, and blood plums this summer. Blood plums, the last to ripen, are my favourite of all plums.

Mr Pip looked so hopeful

I shared it with him

Lake walk late evening

Despite the dog's best efforts

This evening we got to the lake a little later than usual. 

It feels as if the summer is finally cooling down a little, gentler and autumnal.

Birthday Banquet & phone

I have started to use a mobile phone. For the first time. With trepidation. But I need to be able to ring people and services - and to be rung in turn - if I make a long trip.
Today I finally worked out how to download pictures from the mobile phone. Early this month Yin and I went to Kambei restaurant and celebrated his birthday with a (modest) banquet.

Last fruit

I'm eating the last fruit from the garden now. 

Perfumed quinces 

and equally perfumed feijoas.

also the last handful of tomatoes from the wilting vines.

Red Poppies and Crimson Rosellas

One hundred years since the Gallipoli landing, and I loved the kindness and care in the hand-made poppies. Remembering with love. 

Then this afternoon, looking out the window after rain, I saw the Crimson Rosellas.

The second rosella can just be seen at the far right.

The instagram effect is not deliberate - just an inept photographer.

now frost

Each night this week has been colder than the last - 2 degrees below zero, 3 degrees below - I'm wrapping up my aloe vera  plants in old, woollen doggy rugs to keep them alive overnight.
The washing is snap frozen on the line and the dog sniffs his water bucket in a worried way and comes back inside to drink. He doesn't know what to make of the ice in his water  bucket.

I love this weather. It's so sharp and sparkling. I've got woolly socks and jumpers and gloves, and with the days beginning to lengthen again, the dog and I catch the dawn as we crackle over frozen grass and leaves on our morning walk. No wind.  It is foggy and mysterious when we set off, and I love that too.

Pink Umbrella & Snow

First day of August, Camp Street Ballarat

more umbrellas... you can just about see the pink one up on the right 

watching snow through my umbrella

Autumn colours

Mr Pip admires the Autumn colours

A quiet Easter

On Good Friday I ate my hot cross buns in bed. And read three books. And a magazine. And three sale catalogues.
With great pleasure, I discovered I wanted nothing in the catalogues.

On Saturday I wrote and knitted until late in the night. At 12pm I was still wreathed in a web of knitting,  dreaming away, working by lamp and firelight.

It was the quietest Easter-time for years. No egg painting party, no outings, no Easter egg hunt - just a little family lunch on Sunday. 

I didn't even go out to the Highland Pipe Band Competitions.

A chocolate bilby, a chocolate wombat, some eggs.
No rabbits.
Chocolate Rabbits aren't really lovely symbols of fertility to me - they bring to mind Malthusian overpopulation and destruction..
(No offence meant to any bunny in its right place).

I've been feeling a bit wobbly lately. The rest was very welcome.

Shared magic

I had a present from across the ocean and another clime.

Suzanna, maker of many a magical image, has shared a part of her winter-to-spring season with me

 

So here is The Groundhog, measuring his shadow to see if winter has ended yet. When my candles are lit at Lammastide now, he'll be there too.

Spring poem to chant for Proserpine

What shall she have,

Earth's youngest daughter?

Green combs of willow wands,

Mirrors in the water.

Where shall we go

To do her birthday honour?

Clematis above the rocks

hangs her silken banner.

Heath lights tapers through the bush -

White, and red for morning;

All the tight-balled wattle boughs

Overnight are turning

Each into a golden fleece

Rich as Jason plundered, 

Where across the shining weir

Winter floods had thundered.

Reedy singers call her home,

Little Proserpine,

Cuckoo's flute, dark bittern's drum, 

and wren pipes fine.

Old as moss in glacier lands -

Earth's youngest daughter -

Clean as worship in the hills -

New as lambs and laughter.

Mary Finnan wrote this poem. She  was born near Geelong in Victoria in 1906. She was an artist, teacher, unionist and Red Cross worker. Her poems aren't in print now. I'm going to the State Library soon to look at some of her books.

I've known this poem by heart since I first found it in an anthology of 'bush poets'.

 Proserpine/Persephone's story is a myth that has always resonated for me, as a child and later as a mother. 

 The story of Jason's quest and the plundering of the golden fleece is a good one to tell in goldfields country. 

Outside Geelong is the little town of Ceres where my mother's family lived and farmed in the 19th century. Ceres is Proserpine's mother, of course.

Spring

Daffodils early in the morning

And daffodils late in the afternoon.

Snowball season in Ballarat

Snowballs are seasonal here in Ballarat, unlike Melbourne where you can get them year round. Wilson's keeps them in jars by the cash register - but only in season - and deprived of them during the hot months, I awaited winter with anticipation.

Three weeks ago the chocolate shop in Mair Street put up a sign  'Snowballs in Season'. Yes! I bought a bag of snowballs.


Then out along the Clunes Rd this morning I stopped at a milkbar (which will have its own post later) and bought two lovely fresh snowballs. The milkbar owner confirmed that snowballs had only been in season "about three weeks".

 Snowballs are delicate, moist marshmallow balls with a shadow of a chocolate coating and a flutter of shredded coconut.

I'll make the most of them while they're around!

Solstice clean up

I've spent a week's leave clearing out, cleaning up and just thinking about things while I watch winter settle down.

In praise of shorter days

Now that the days are shorter I'm getting up in time to greet the first light of the morning, without any effort at all.

and the moon is out earlier, so I can catch her when I'm walking the dogs.

Samhain offering

For Ceres and Proserpina, for Demeter and Persephone.

Yes, I am mixing my seasons and myths, but  the year is turning to winter, here in the south of the world, and violets are flowering - my mother's favourite flowers.