A cup of violets

It’s been a day of contrasts, which has left me feeling a bit tired and dejected but also quite hopeful at the same time. I do feel guilty to be letting small things get me down when there are so many utterly awful things going on in the world right now, so I’m trying hard to be conscious of all my blessings. This tea cup used to belong to my mother (or possibly my grandmother) and I love planting it up with violets from the garden every February so they can sit on my kitchen window sill for me to enjoy.

The day started off very misty, but when the sun came through we had blue skies and lots of sunshine. I’ve had a beautiful new sweater arrive in the post, which I bought at a very reduced price in the sale, and I absolutely love (and so does Smithers). But another parcel that I was expecting, having received an email at 6.30 am from Royal Mail to say it was coming in a four-hour window this afternoon, didn’t arrive. Eventually when I checked the email properly I found it is due to be delivered tomorrow! (That’s odd, to get the email the day before I think.)

The final straw, though, was when The Traveller came downstairs and gently informed me that he had discovered more moth larvae in his room … I could have wept. Between us, he and I have vacuumed and moved furniture and vacuumed again and repeated the process several times, finding new larvae each time where previously there were none. We pulled out his desk from the wall, lifted all the cables and whatnot and had another good vacuum, only to discover that we’d inadvertently interrupted the internet supply. It was soon restored, but left us with one part of the house without wifi for some time. It all got a bit much and I felt so despondent. 

However, a text message from my next door neighbour went some way towards cheering me up. She said she’d seen a woodpecker in the tree in my garden yesterday, and wanted to know if I’d seen it – of course I had, because it comes several times a day – and she also said she’d seen a wren there too! I had caught a glimpse of what I thought was a wren in the distance a few days ago, but it flew off before I could look through my binoculars or camera lens to check it out. So her confirmed sighting of my favourite bird has really got me excited, and I’m wondering if my piles of logs and twigs and the little nesting pouches I’ve placed in the bushes above them will have tempted a wren to start nesting in my garden. I haven’t had a definite sighting of a wren since October 2020 …