Week 7/2024
Warm breezes and hellebores
Hello!
I hope you have had a lovely week.
Firstly, thank you so much for all of your beautiful and supportive messages last week, they are so appreciated. I’m sorry I haven’t been responding but I read them and had a tear in my eye for several of them. Thank you also for your wonderful response to my request that we KEEP GOING with our weekly posts at this time when I have reduced capacity while I am writing. What a response! You’re fabulous. Our February poem will be mega.
This is our community post in which we together chart the seasons as they turn, week by week. We are currently doing all of that in the comments, while I am semi-detached writing The Almanac 2025 (here’s the link to the 2024 edition, if you want to see what it’s all about), and it is working out very nicely. At the end of the month there will be a compilation of all the best, most February-ish comments.
So here is the challenge in case you are new here: think of something that feels very ‘this week’ about the week just passed. What happened this week that couldn’t have belonged in any other week of the year? What did you do/see/feel/smell that was particular to this moment? Take to the comments and tell us, then pop back in and see everyone else’s.
Here’s mine:
Hellebores and breezes
One of the main things I have been noticing this week is…is that warmth? There have actually been breezes that feel…gentle? Very odd. It surely can’t last. But it also the week that my hellebores reached their peak. They always do this, by which I mean literally exactly this - two stems, a few flowers - and they’ve been in this spot for at least five years. I think I might need to try mulching and cosseting them a bit this year and see if I can coax a few more out of them this time next year.
That’s it from me, now over to you. Everyone is welcome to contribute, and I can’t wait to hear what you’ve been spotting and doing this week.
This is an anniversary week for me. I'm four years cancer free. And I'm taking joy from everything I see around me: the tiny white bells of snowdrops dancing in the breeze, the yellow spears of daffodils unfolding gracefully into trumpets to announce Spring, and the sun's extra hour of light which invites me take a late afternoon walk to feel its presence.
Awakening with the Dawn chorus; in particular a blackbird’s solo. A week of not just morning audible delights, but visual ones as those beautiful sunrises make their appearance-reds, oranges and deep purples. Signalling, that it won’t be long till my journey to work will no longer require any artificial lighting. Nature’s will be enough!