What Possessed Me

A narrow escape from escapism

What a lovely week I had, reading your sweet comments. Thank you for your love and loyalty and patience. It's good to be with you again.

I should have a more exciting post to share, but things have been fairly quiet as I've steadily plowed through two seasons of "Homeland" in an epic binge of escapism. As much as I loved the show, it's a relief to have wrapped things up - I've been lying awake in bed every night, rigid and exhausted from the tension of stalking the world's most insidious terrorist in a highly dangerous covert operation, while conducting an ill-advised affair with another insidious terrorist. It all seemed a bit much, especially after having recently outrun a hoard of hostile zombie wildings, failed to save my ancestral home from financial ruin and battled Rome for supreme authority over the Church of England.

Which leads me to my motto: When life gets too lifey, absorb yourself in someone else's life and make it your own. As with all things, I take this too far (weeks of copious and inconsolable weeping over my boyfriend's tragic football accident come to mind) and last week, a small and potentially career-damaging incident reminded me that the blurring of fantasy and reality has its disadvatages.

So I was getting out of a taxi with my boss, and I noticed – using my razor sharp CIA-trained powers of observation – that the cabbie was driving off with our colleague.

Panicked, I whizzed around. "Clinton!" I screamed, locking Clare Danes crazy eyes with my boss. "WHERE IS CLINTON?!" 

Before my boss could answer, the taxi stopped. Clinton popped out and ambled toward us, AS THOUGH AN AL QAEDA OPERATIVE HAD NOT JUST TRIED TO ABDUCT HIM.

His obliviousness was apparently too much for me. "Jesus Christ," I gasped. "I thought you were being kidnapped..." and then – in a very small voice, because the crazy in my head had unwittingly unleashed itself and it was too late to stop it – "...by a member of a terrorist cell."

I won't go into what happened next (blaming the outburst on a surfeit of "Homeland," watching my colleagues surreptitiously reach for restraints, etc.), but what they didn't know - and what I failed to tell them - is that I could have taken that freedom-hating cabbie to the HOLE, given half a chance.

 

Image: Detail of an 1870s Odd Fellows banner with all-seeing eye, via Erie Basin.

The girl with the one-track mind

Now that it's officially spring,  I'm a girl with a one-track mind. 

All I want to do is poke around in my container garden, buy seeds, research plants, investigate balcony-friendly vermiculture, bury the bodies of plants I've killed, and admire my new beauties:

Well hellllllo, Medinilla Magnifica (second picture). If I told you how much time I spent Googling "sexy pink orchidy-looking plant with ginormous leaves" after I first saw you in Positano, you would issue a restraining order. And I would deserve it: two years of Googling is a lot of crazy. Now I leap out of bed in the morning just to stare at you when you're sleeping. Maybe I'll mist you a bit while I'm drinking my coffee, maybe I'll coo a little over your cascading pink blossoms. We're in the honeymoon stage and I'm enjoying this brief window of time before you start bitching about humidity levels and the indignity of having to live on top of one of Fauxhawk's ugly black speakers. At some point I'll stop trying to impress you, but for now, I'm your slave.

Wazzup, Princess Alexandra of Kent? We haven't actually met yet, but you're on your way to me now, you leggy little minx. And when you arrive, my little mail order bride, I'm going to grab you by your bare roots and...plant you.  Say goodbye to your sheltered, rarified existence - the balcony awaits.

With 52 square feet of balcony to play with, I have to be selective about the company I keep. I can't just plant any Tom, Dick or Harry.  This year, I ruthlessly dumped a Japanese maple - it was a weakling that couldn't hold up to the appalling neglect I'd subjected it to, and its demands were greater than its rewards.  But because I am a woman of excess, I'm thinking about growing up and down to save space: a new clematis winding its way up a climbing rose, a hanging pot of mara des bois strawberries. I have a whole Pinterest page devoted to my garden wishlist. It's a sickness.

The garden has been a nice distraction. It's greening nicely, and my clematis has unexpected risen from the dead in a Christ-like fashion, just in time for Easter. The last eight weeks or so have been hard. I'm really struggling - pushed to my limits, doubting my capabilities, confronting my short-comings. As an overly accommodating shape-shifter, I've never been good at standing up to people with difficult personalities, and this has been my biggest challenge lately. Sometimes I'm more pissed at my own spinelessness than at the dickhead who's being a jerk for absolutely no reason.

Anyway, my coping mechanism has been to buy myself flowers. Nothing expensive or extravagant - a bunch of candy-striped tulips here, a posy of hyacinths there. They bring me great pleasure and remind me that beauty has enormous healing properties. 

P.S. That's a Michelle Armas painting in that first pic - something else that has lifted my spirits lately.

 

Wanderlust: Bluebell Woods

Oh dear. What happened here? Did he drop dead from all the beauty?

Or is he doing that thing that dogs do when they come across something utterly irresistible (a piece of rotting fish, a desiccated wood vole): drop to the ground and roll around maniacally in an attempt to get it all UP IN THERE?

I'd like to think it's the latter. It's how I'm feeling, at least.  Spring is here and I want to roll around in it, I want carry its scent with me wherever I go. The ancient bluebell woods are calling, and I long to see them.

Best bluebells walks.

Brooklyn's own Bluebell Wood.

An interactive map for bluebell sightings in the UK.

Smell like a bluebell.

Image by Martin Mucky Dunne.