Greetings, everyone. Hope you all had a lovely spring. Ours went past in a flash, and here we are staring summer down. My goodness, the years certainly don’t go by any slower as one ages, do they?
As many of you know, I operate a small perennial plant nursery, and May and June this year were our very busiest ever in the twenty-plus years I’ve been doing this. It became evident early on that something had to give, and I prioritized severely, meaning that a.) The Blog, and b.) Housekeeping, and c.) Weeding, fell completely by the wayside.
Fellow gardeners will understand my mixed feelings at seeing this lovely but forboding vignette in my perennial border!
With a bit of headway now made in addressing the two-month-long neglect of the last two, I am feeling an increasingly urgent pull to get back into writing-about-reading mode. I did keep reading through my long blog silence, though my progress was often in pages per day versus chapters. No book-a-day, that’s for sure!
And I did read some marvelous things. Sadly they are mostly a bit of a blur, so I have that as an excuse to re-read them all in future, and talk about them then. Best to start fresh with July’s reads, I think.
Thanks to the Dean Street Press “Furrowed Middlebrow” imprint, I’ve made the acquaintance of some long out-of-print writers, and most engaging I’ve found them all to be. Ursula Orange, for example. After acquiring the three newly reprinted DSP-FM titles of hers, Begin Again, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and Company in the Evening, I treated myself to a well-worn first edition (1945) of Portrait of Adrian, which I’m just finishing up. I do believe that will be the subject of my next post.
In the meantime, wishing all a very happy summer, with time to seek out some cool shade and a comfortable chair, and sink into a pleasurable book.
And of course, seeing that it’s July 1st, happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians!
Though I must acknowledge that this year the holiday seems a bit fraught with angst regarding a variety of societal concerns, which I won’t get into here, merely to mention that the buzz phrases of the current discussion are “tradition of colonialism” and “indigenous experience”. Big serious topics, and I give them a nod, though I won’t be going any deeper than the most superficial referencing in this particular forum.
Leaves & Pages 
Lovely to see you back. I’m glad to hear you’ve been having a busy spring at the nursery.
Thank you! It’s good to be back. What a spring that just was. All a blur – way too busy. Enjoying it being over for the year. Though of course there are lots and lots of other things waiting in the must-do queue.
Good to have your reviews to savour again! Oh, and we ate many dandelion pizzas this spring and early summer!