Spring stirrings

Winter drab

My seeds are in the mail and will arrive soon. I'm trying sunflowers for their sappy green shoots,  for the first time.

It is a beautiful, spotlessly blue day. Snow is dripping in rivers from the melting rooftops.

I went to bed three hours earlier than usual and woke up twelve hours later.

I would like to garden but the Frenchman and I must sit down to choose some photos, first.

It is his birthday tomorrow and I am wondering how to celebrate it without frightening him. It may all come down to steak tartare.

The violets in the gravel have buds. The corydalis has remained feathery and green all winter. There are volunteer seedlings on the terrace floor - clematis and pansy. It seems like spring.

Climbing rose shoots

And this morning, while I sat and read in bed and drank coffee and ate my delicious Sahadi's croissant (new, since their renovation. I suspect the pastry is flown in from France, but I must confirm this), I read these words in Faulkner's The Town, and marveled that it took me to page 95 to get a grip on what was going on and also that a human being can write like this (my friend Lily, can too - I mean, not in the same way, but in a way that makes you marvel). Faulkner being Faulkner, I cut out some inbetween bits...

"The poets are wrong of course... But then, poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in the truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it."

"No, that's wrong. It's because you don't dare to hope, you are afraid to hope. Not afraid of the extent of hope of which you are capable, but that you...cannot match it. Knowing always you won't never be man enough to do the harm and damage you would do if you were just man enough. And thank God for it, or thank anything else for it that could give you any peace...in which to coddle it on your knee and whisper to it: There, there, it's all right; I know you are brave."

Well, it seemed momentous to me while I was drinking my coffee and eating my croissant.