February Face

aka much ado about weekend moments

( a little note to email readers – for a more visually pleasing experience, you can also view posts here: A Table in the Garden )

Friday and a quiet house,
the steady trickle of snow from rooftops
gathering in unsightly murky puddles below.
I’m huddled indoors with candles, music, coffee,
–  my warm island in the middle of a sea of sleet and sludgy snow.

An island where green stems push through the brown-paper folds of their bulbs, 
upright, sprouty, springy.

Just me this weekend.
Tomorrow evening the walls will echo
with conversations and laughter around the dining table,
as friends comes over.
We go way, way back,
and a special bond has formed over the years.

Last weekend, another picture.
A weekend that felt just right in many ways.
Lightness winning over the heavy, silent white. 
Golden light mingling with heaps of snow,
flakes drifting down like feathers.

Coffee wafting through the air then too,
immortalised in stains on white sheets
and pages of books.

A Saturday drive along a tree-lined road,
the sea hidden under a blanket of white,
but whisking thoughts to a summer’s afternoon.
How it would glisten in cerulean and sapphire,
diamonds twirling in pirouettes.

We arrive at our destination,
an old wooden villa,
the ice-laced sea stretching in every direction.

We devour slices of pear & cinnamon cake,
the scent of coffee mingling with the waft of a crackling fire
and the crisp February frost beyond the windows.
Inside the log-structured house, the air so light and easy to breathe.

Sitting there by a window overlooking a veranda now relinquished to the cold,
that old dream of an old house jolts awake in an instant from hibernation.

An old villa with wide wooden floorboards,
a fire crackling in the hearth,
a veranda with stone steps for the first milky coffee of the day.

But for now, time to let Amandine the cat continue with the daydreaming,
while I pull on those wellies,
head to the shop,
then fill the kitchen with cococtions...
Maybe an attempt at pear cake? 
I'll share the recipe here next week
if it works out. 

"...you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness..."
~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing


With love,

Rebecca