Burgeoning

It's the third hope-themed Tiny Tuesday, and the garden is full of new beginnings. As well as the hundreds of previously blipped catkins, there are tiny new strawberry leaves peeping through last year's dry, brown ones, tightly furled leaf buds on trees and shrubs, and the buddleia is burgeoning with great enthusiasm, promising another summer of honey-scented blooms and glorious butterflies to watch and photograph. In the extra, the extremely tiny pink buds will soon open into the year's first blossom, little, delicate flowering cherry blooms on fine, bare twigs.

Apart from my ten minutes outside playing with the macro lens, which is becoming more familiar but still feels like my new toy, I've achieved very little today. J's PA M, back just twice since being unwell, contacted me early this morning to let me know that her children's primary school has confirmed Covid cases in every class. With our usual caution, we decided it was better if she didn't come. Her two children tested negative this morning, but she said it's hard to test them, and we know they have been in contact with the infection. I don't know how long this will run on and how we will decide when it's safe for her to come back,  but I've been surprised it hasn't happened before now. 

The good things today are that P felt well enough to return to the kitchen, making tasty leek and potato soup for lunch which I appreciated the more for my two days of basic cooking, and J and I managed to time things so that I could join the Quaker poetry reading group on Zoom this evening. It's the second series of this group, which I enjoyed in the spring, and for the first meeting we each took a poem to share. I decided on the short (and somewhat unseasonal) poem by R.S. Thomas which I blipped in November. Next week, we will all be choosing poems by Emily Dickinson.

This brings me up-to-date with my blips; I posted my mono Monday seed heads earlier today so if you missed that, you might flick back to it. Next, I hope to start catching up with other journals, though it will take a while to revisit everyone.