Someone remarked on the increasing silence they noticed in the world around them.
Midwinter is a silent time, suffused with echoes and occasional sounds from strange places.
Places that are more difficult to pinpoint on the landscape…it’s a trick played on us by Mother Nature as she paces the dormitories of sleep and hibernation.
Candles illuminate the darkness, dispelling matt grey for moving shadows.
Jingles of Christmas on the radio, some lovely, most rapaciously dreadful, urging the listener to get out now and spend, spend, spend!
And so the radio is switched off and music switched on, low and evocative.
Midwinter enchants us all with memories of stillness and light, fires and food…times past, selected for our personal album of memories.
I found this photograph recently.
It was taken around Midwinter, in a photo-booth in London, when I first ventured away from home and Ireland.
Scents were what I most missed.
The scents of home, like turf and coal smoke, wisping out of chimney pots on rows of terraced houses.
London was filled with new, more exotic scents, especially places like Portobello Road Market on a Saturday morning, where Patchouli oil perfume lingered in the air.
Working patchwork, brings me back to early days, in London and the sheer wealth of fabric shops and stalls, Laura Ashley and the love of William Morris retro!
Colours, fabrics and textures continue to fascinate.
Natural fabrics hold most memory…perhaps because they are from the natural world, where energy is hosted.
Sackcloth and old lace cover a jam jar, filled with Honesty.
Cotton gingham of various colours in the kitchen.
Willow, wood and clay pottery, mugs and bowls.
The morning, washed by soft midwinter light…not to be bought and packaged for Christmas, but absorbed by the celebratory soul.
Blessings from this midwinter cottage…
Inspiring as always Colette. ♥
we called this old fashioned plant the money plant… I think it makes a lovely arrangement…. sue
womenlivinglifeafter50.com
Scents are so important. I lost my sense of smell a few years ago, it was a gradual process and I don’t know why it happened. It is the smells of the garden that I miss most, particularly plants like Lavender, Rosemary and my favourite of all, Hyssop. Then there is May blossom, Meadowsweet, the flowers of Broad Beans, Privet flowers and the gentle scent of Soapwort flowers. I still grow Sweet Peas and they have to be the scented ones, ha ha! As Geoff Hamilton once said, “what is the point of a Sweet Pea that doesn’t smell”. I wonder what your favourite scents are.
Lavender, Rosemary, especially as I use lots of essential oils and these are quite powerful, but unusual scents that carry on the air, such as willow, when burned and the combined sweetness of the air in the polytunnel on a hot day.
Beautiful!