Good morning everyone! Happy Tuesday! Happy new Willard! Specks, you ask, what CAN she mean? MUSICA

Shadows through leafless trees grace our clapboard house as the sun comes up over the harbor on this beautiful spring morning.

Forsythia’s in bloom at the end of our driveway, part of it planted by Mrs. Bowditch (who lived here 1949-1989), her legacy and gift to the neighborhood, and part of it planted by us! Blooming again, as it does every year, thank you very much!Sometimes, as you know, I find things I have written (or painted), maybe never used, tucked between my books ~ like this ⬇️, which I typed at the top of a page, then printed it out, then ended up using as “scrap paper” on which was also a messy list of favorite songs (I write them down as I think of them), for MUSICA. I had just given the list to Judy for Monday Musica on Instagram, read this, and was marveling at how much this paragraph fit my life right NOW … it was undated, and clearly it was summer when I wrote it . . . but as far as I’m concerned, it’s perfect for now . . .

Yes, we made it into a  little vase!

Reading that, now I’m DYING to feel the kitchen floor under my bare feet!! Something wonderful to look forward to! And, go ahead, put on a sweater and seek outside, just this once! It’s heaven outside too!

Joe’s been taking down the storm windows, just like everyone else around here, just like we do every year, putting them in the barn . . . a few at a time as the days become warmer . . .

Seek outside, and bring the beauty inside ~ there is such HOPE in it, and your window sills will love it! Forsythia’s not toxic to curious kitties so they can love it too!💛

We have a bumper crop of Cardinals this year . . . here is a female who may have caught sight of me taking her picture from my kitchen window. This year I am determined to see a baby cardinal…Google showed me what they look like so I am better prepared.

She’s a beauty! 

I love the colors of each season, changing them out is part of the celebration. I’ve been going through my house gathering everything that’s yellow or pink . . . redecorating.  I’ve had two parties since we last spoke! Reconnected with our friends which is what feeds US!🌸

Little vases and yellow birds . . .

Daffodil, and rabbits in a yellow cup!My decorating is a testimony to the antique barn, the yard sale, to the slow gathering of little things that make life sweet! Not caring if they are perfect, or if they are valuable, only caring if they want to come home with me.💖 Sort of the way you choose your rescue pets.💖 For the earth (which doesn’t really need more stuff!)! For the seeing eye. For the heart.❤️

I put away all the brown and navy-checked dish towels and got out the yellow and pink.💝

I used jelly beans as table decorations and while we hung around the table after dinner, just talking, being together, slowly but surely, everyone, grazing like bunnies on the lawn, ATE them!🥰 I hadn’t occurred to me, but I will do it on purpose next time!🧡

At the end of my TGIThursday Girlfriends party, everyone took home a little harbinger of spring!💛

Our mornings have turned pink too … I was just outside taking this picture when I was reminded of watching the moon cover the sun yesterday! We weren’t in the path of complete bloto-nation (can’t remember epic phrase used by media, path of oblivion? Something like that, but bloto-nation works), but we had a good view and got our happy little moon-crescent shadows on the driveway and it all reminded me of how much I love to celebrate the moon that belongs to everyone!🌓 MAS MUSICA

I have a file of moon photos, taken from everywhere, from our front porch, rising above the desert from our window on the train, in the English countryside, above ancient gravestones, next to church spires and lighthouses. My own personal moon in Capricorn makes me do it, structure is my name, fascination is my game, and what gives us more structure than the constant, dependable, and beautiful moon that asks nothing of us? 🌠 If you live to be a hundred, you’ll experience about 1,200 wonderful magical full moons in your lifetime. It sounds like a lot, but it’s not really enough.💘

I loved how yesterday was a pure celebration, moms and dads and kids and grandmas and grandpas! We count on the earth, count on the seasons, count on the universe, to keep its promises, to do what they’ve always done . . . and we’re always ready to celebrate ~ the first red leaf in the fall, the first dancing daffodil, the first snowflake, our first tentative step into salt water, every year, all these firsts . . . even the way the shadows change in our houses… keeps our senses alive and ready to make a party of it. 🌸🌸🌸 Yesterday was a really big party ~ not often are we all on the same page like that these days!😲 It was the perfect start to Earth Day! I just LOVE April!🌸

We think of everything being so dependable that we melt down when an earthquake shows up out of nowhere (despite it being very much like an eclipse, only scarier), or a blizzard, where they DO NOT BELONG. But the MOON is still so dependable in this constantly changing world, you can plan parties around it!👏 Like we did yesterday! I’ve loved planetariums since my first AWESOME visit to Griffith Park Observatory with my 4th grade class . . . the excitement, the sharing of this first look into the heretofore silent unknown, something no one had words yet to express, the lights dimming until it was dark, our chairs leaning back to the dome of stars appearing in a black sky, some of us up on our knees, necks crooked, eyes wide, thrilled to see the planets revolving, the constellations appearing, a booming voice saying words we’d never heard, telling us about Pegasus and Zeus, folklore and mythology, ancient Greek and Babylonian traditions that go back to the 18th century BC, BC ~ inconceivable! It didn’t turn me into an astronaut as I was uninterested from the very beginning in leaving the earth for any reason, but it did make me starry-eyed 🤩… and it enlarged my curiosity . . . and it even made me feel forever connected to ancient children!

And every bit of it is all still worth running down to the harbor, one of us practically in her jammies, to take pictures.

What so many people talked about feeling yesterday, staring up at the sky like earthlings have done since the beginning of time, under the shadow of that same old moon, reminded me of what I wrote about after my visit to the planetarium on board the Queen Mary 2 ~ when, like yesterday, we were given lovely insight, a moment to wonder about our place in the universe.💖

It’s one thing to be in a planetarium on land . . .

XXX

But, it’s something else to be in a planetarium while on a ship at sea . . .

. . . where every day was automatically, unavoidably about the vastness, unpredictability, and wonder of ocean and sky, then suddenly, this, a very different perspective, where we became much smaller, not only in this sea and sky, but aware that we were connected even by tiniest parts of our world that can’t be seen with the naked eye. I felt the deep beauty of it, the boundlessness, the gift, and the sadness too, welling up. Suddenly, in that planetarium sky on board the ship, we watched our sun, our very own star, disappear into the cosmos ~ and we disappeared with it . . . specks with an outsized entitlement to it all . . . this was the part I didn’t catch in the 4th grade, when I discovered we were so much more than I thought we were, but the part that’s called wisdom that we (hopefully) get as we get older, is the part where we realize we’re so much less than we thought we were.💖 Sometimes feeling like a speck is a good thing.

Put it all together with moments of unity and connection as we experienced yesterday, we say more, more, more! we want more!… is there ever enough, no, I don’t think so! The adventure continues! 🌠🌠🌠 We never stop learning.💖

As for home, a couple of things we have loved streaming that I want to tell you about, the first is The New Look, about the lives of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel after the Germans invaded France. SO good! Details of history! You’ll love it. Twelve episodes on Apple+. (Now I’ll be looking for a Granville Rose in Dior’s honor, in his sister’s honor, for our garden!) And the other one is (of course) A Gentleman in Moscow. Set your minds at ease, after only 2 episodes I already know it is doing justice to the magnificent book, which if you haven’t read, run don’t walk and get it ~ (unless you have something against utter charm, then forget it of course)!!!💝 

We are still walking the walk every morning, through the leafless woods, in the cold sunshine, out to the water, an ear pod in my ear, another in Joe’s, listening to the same book from my phone. Right now we are listening to Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. So far it seems to be a  light-hearted story about a family of daughters learning about their mother’s almost-famous life as an actress ~ she is telling the story while they pick sweet cherries on their farm in Michigan . . . it might be a little TOO light-hearted for me, but it’s not over, and Meryl Streep is reading it, so I’m not complaining. It has themes that could almost be her own life she’s reading about. Makes us exercise, we look forward to “reading” so much!

One last thing, for my California girlfriends … I promised I would tell you if there was going to be an “estate” sale for the things we let go when we were there. And there is . . . it’s happening on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 19-21. It’s not worth buying an airplane ticket (there are no quilts in the sale, and no Beatrix Potter figurines!), so unless you have a penchant for old post cards, or maybe 30 years of collected wine corks (I heard the seller, Mike, is charging 25¢ a piece for them!), or menus from restaurants and ships we have known and loved, this wouldn’t be the place for you… I hardly remember what else is there, but here are a couple of photos I took before I left, the one corner Joe had begun to decorate for Mike… and then the whole room, as far as it was at the time. I have no idea how it will be set up, but the address is 2416 Lopez Drive in Arroyo Grande, CA, if you’re in the neighborhood and want to take a look, go straight down the driveway to the barn on the left.

I hope you have a wonderful day and that all your flowers bloom and each time it rains you can see them grow by inches… I’m having a No Mow April to go with my No Mow May … I loved it last year!