Right about now I start painting on the walls, and this February is no exception. The gloom and the freeze finally gets under my skin, and up pops a vine or a flower. (The purple bird, which is less visible, looked like a mosquito according to Merry, so I shortened the beak a bit.) Chances are the flowers will get painted over in the summer time when I declutter the house for gardening season, but for now it brings us a little early garden cheer.
In fact, most of the color choices in our house have been made during the winter months (which constitutes most of the year here anyway), so we end up with warm punches like this (taken from the front hallway)
and this
and plenty of plants, including three fairly happy ficus trees, one of whom (yes, WHOM--my trees are WHOMs) towers over my desk.
And I bought the Wazoo women three bouquets of roses from Aldi. I usually can't bring myself to buy flowers any more since I grow real roses in the summer and after you smell a real rose, the floristy, plastic-smelling ones just don't do it anymore (like tomatoes--I just can't buy tomatoes out of season after growing my own). However, the roses were bought and actually smell like something if you sniff hard enough, and now they are in my favorite, pre-death stage--that is, when I snip the heads off and put them in a bowl. Luscious!
Then there's my favorite mystery plant, whom (yes, it counts as person too) somebody (I honestly can't remember who) gave me last summer. I put the little lady in my kitchen window, which is particularly gloomy since it faces another house, and she has just been flourishing all winter long. I think she might be some kind of sunflower, though why she lives and grows baffles me and delights me to no end.
Growing alongside my little Norfolk pine (who I received right before Elspeth was born), she reminds me that winter, while necessary and occasionally delightful, will not last forever and that growing happy things,
like this little garden bug I found curled up in the corner of her crib, sound asleep, flourish in the cold months with a little warmth.
