Some Happy Scribbles…

If it wasn’t already clear that I am firmly ensconced in middle age, my new procrastination pastime of admiring the birds that have taken over our garden is definitive proof.

I cannot get enough of the tooting and peeping each morning when the sun comes up, the merry hopping and pecking across the lawn, the swooping and fluttering from tree to tree, and the nests they are busily building everywhere. We returned from a weekend away to find a large nest perched precariously above a shutter on our front porch with two fierce robins chirping and batting their wings aggressively whenever we enter and exit the house!

Watching and waiting for birds to take dainty sips of water from the birdbath on our patio is my current favorite form of non-screen entertainment, and I desperately want to get a picture or video of this exciting activity — but the birds are too quick for me.

So instead, I am taking millions of photographs of the tulips I’m growing in my cutting garden.

I am fascinated by the progression of these gorgeous flowers: from tight, bright and uniform, to open, blowsy and gorgeously faded.

They remind me of growing up and getting older, or at least my experience of it: when I was young, I desperately wanted to fit in and be just like everyone else, and hid much of myself.

Now, in my late 40’s, I am mostly comfortable being myself, and no longer spend as much time worrying that my thoughts and feelings are weird or embarrassing or odd or silly.