My beautiful neighbors broke through their fence one day…
Posted in Umbria, Weekly photo challenges
Tagged escape, freedom, gifts of life, horses, Italian countryside, photography, postaday, Umbria, weekly photo challenge, Writing
Today would have been my mom’s 84th birthday. It’s the second birthday since her death, and some of the wind is still knocked out of my sails without her.
Thinking of her today, I remembered all that she loved, and there was a lot. Her family, her piano, her dancing, her ocean.
But most of all, her true love was her magnificent horse, Negro (the Spanish pronunciation “naygro” meaning black). She rode and jumped him with abandon, as she did life, up until she was about 74 years old.
These 3 photos were taken on her 70th birthday. Happy birthday, wherever you are, my sweet mamma.
It’s the small things one notices, and then the certainty. The season has changed. Spring is here, but it’s only just awakening.
Beginnings ripple throughout the countryside and suddenly there is color and sound and flight where there had been darkness and snow. I wonder if plants do have a secret life, secret from humans, that is. I just bet, when they’re flowering and leafing, they feel as excited as we do during our own awakenings.
I took a walk with a bee this morning. No kidding. I had gone down to the creek for my morning walk, and on the way back I started collecting sticks from the forest floor. They’re the best kindling for our fires as they’ve fallen naturally from the trees and have gathered lichen–great material for a fire starter.
So there I was, walking along holding my sticks, and I realized I had been hearing a buzzing sound for a few minutes. I looked down and sure enough, a brown, fuzzy bee was kind of hopping along just in front of my feet. The forest floor is oozing with moss and other strange mucky things from the recent rains, and it’s producing some beautiful white and purple flowers.
This little bee was ecstatic, jumping from one oozy mess to the next, then to the flowers, then back to the tips of my boots. She stayed with me for about 100 meters. Once in awhile I got ahead of her as she fell, intoxicated, into another patch of flowers. Then, she was back, hopping on my boot.
A breeze funneled down the path, whispering through the trees and making the world around me shiver. We reached the fork in the path, and I looked down just as she took off from my boot. We went our separate ways.
As I walked back up the hill toward our house, I thought, huh, I just took a walk with a bee. Well, it’s spring. Stranger things can happen I suppose. When I rounded the corner, I said, yep.
Writing in Umbria 