apricots and peaches

Happy Easter. I am a bit late, Easter Sunday is almost over. But in this secular country, we have Easter Monday tomorrow, another public holiday with all shops closed - apart from the bakeries until lunch so people can stock up on buttery sugary Easter baked goods. Wikipedia tells me that Easter. Monday is the second day of the Octave of Easter, which is where I leave it because that's the first I ever heard of. Any excuse, my radical atheist father would say. As far as I remember, the story was like this.

I am looking at the list of stuff I want to do and wonder how did I ever fit paid employment into this schedule. Not that I have done anything from that list for the past week. Yesterday, I spent watching an entire season on the adventures of the Bavarian Voluntary Mountain Rescue team, both in winter (on ski!) and summer and marvelled at various dramatic rescues of ignorant, ill equipped and poorly shod tourists in the Alps. What had me hooked was the strong Bavarian accents of the women and men who go out at any time, sprinting up steep ravines like young mountain goats and the way my inner linguist Franconian, albeit born in Upper Barvaria, was proudly and successfully able to reject the subtitles. 

We had a small bit of rain, nothing substantial. I marshalled my meagre energy levels and watered some of the plants that have not been eaten by slugs and increased the level of warfare against the ants under the patio stones. I told them that there is plenty of safe and comfortable space elsewhere. 

Here are our baby apricots. 

And the furry baby peaches.

 And the vegetable bed, with some extra potatoes in pots in front and two bolted fennels in the back left.

And the last of the tulips, this has been an excellent tulip year but I think I will replace all the fancy ones with a wild variety that bees and other insects actually feed on because the big showy ones here are totally insect free, they could be made of plastic for all the good they have to offer to biodiversity, namely null, nil, zilch.

Health wise I am three steps forward, two steps back, in other words, it's fucking slow. But this an old cranky body, so patience.

And so I have managed to write a post without doom and gloom despite the fact that I could. 

Crazy times don’t have to make us crazy. They can inspire new levels of coherence, meaning, and purpose. There’s nothing like a rocky sea to make people find their best compass.

Douglas Rushkoff