Winter in the Garden

and happy Friday!

“Chill air and wintery winds! My ear has grown familiar with your song; I hear it in the opening year, I listen, and it cheers me long.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Winter garden

HAPPY FRIDAY!!! We made it through the week of fickle weather. This past week’s snowfall has not been bad as it was last year but it is has been unpredictable. My Viejo and I along with a few of my colleagues were checking weather at least every hour to see if and when it was going to snow only to realize it would change every other minute. In a few group texts with my cousins and girlfriends we checked in comparing or weather conditions. We even shared moments of exhaustion as some of our kids having 2-hour school delays and some home with no school leaving a few of us working from home. It is fascinating how we live 15 minutes, at most 30 minutes away from one another and the amount of snow covering our neighborhoods were so different.

Winter strolls through Pacific Northwest gardens within, around and outside the city brings tranquility to my otherwise busy mind. Just being in the snowy gardens feel almost as if the world has stopped rushing around. Everything is still.

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Stay warm…

A Crisp Winter

“It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.”

~ John Burroughs

Remembering Winter: in Black and White

“Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.”

~ Bill Nye

As we’ve entered into Spring, the magnolia trees reminding us its beauty, schools on their breaks, and sun giving hints to warm days head. Within all of this lingering is the continuous cold days hinting back at the humbling few moments the furnace stopped working (thank goodness for fireplaces and space heaters), car doors frozen shut, and the Christmas Eve snowfall that filled many childhood dreams. As calming and reflecting this past Winter has been I am ever so happy to the warmer Spring days ahead.

At the Sugar Factory

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday was the start of my birthday week with two of my favorite gals treating me to a brunch at the Sugar Factory. I have no doubt I consumed enough sugar for two days. We started off with drinks, of course. The drinks themselves seemed like a desert. A sparkling cocktail was garnished with hibiscus flower, a yummy caramel macchiato martini topped high with whip cream and for me a red velvet martini with a rim decorated in cream cheese frosting. Talk about a desert!  We ate. We talked. We laughed and poked fun at each other in a way only friends with a long history do. It was a perfect way to end the weekend and a lovely way to start my birthday.

Winter Fog

“LIVE TO THE POINT OF TEARS…”

~ Albert Camus