Sweetness

Isn't that an interesting word - sweetness.  Old-fashioned. I'm surprised it's still around, sounding so sentimental and all.

I want sweetness. I crave it.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight. 

You see it sounds quite wonderful in this quote from Shakespeare,
and also in this one by Browning:

How sad, and bad, and mad it was,
But then, how it was sweet.

But now I think we associate the word sweet with babies, and food, or we change it, bored with it, to slang.

I have had to go from sugar-sweet to honey-sweet.  It's a major change, and it's definitely hard to adjust. There is a fairy-tale I vaguely remember, where there are three princesses, one with sugar-sweet, one with syrup-sweet, and one with honey-sweet lips.  Guess which one the prince chose to marry.

                                Sweet idleness


My favourite word would be "bittersweet".

BRINGING THE GARDEN INSIDE . for now...

I have a fondness for yellow roses.   All roses, but especially yellow roses.  So if I am lucky enough to find them, I will buy them – to feed the soul, as they say.   I am also a lover of glassware, especially if it is pressed glass.  I usually can only afford the recently made glass , but much of that is actually  quite nice.  I love my spooner, which has a nice woodsy pattern on it, acorns and oak leaves, I believe.

In the picture below is my pitcher and tumbler set, which is made by Fenton or Mosser,  the color bing iridescent black amethyst, in the Dahlia pattern.  There are also two china vases by Franz, with purple dragonflies.  They all remind me of a garden  in full bloom, and also the gentle beauty of a garden meadow.

I like to put together these little vignettes? or still lifes? throughout my home, to remind me always of the summer season, even though the snow is falling gently outside.  I have no white rooms in my home, because it just seems much too sterile and harsh.  And there are no pictures depicting winter either.  However, I am not a traveller to warmer climates in the winter -  I am like Mole, enjoying the cosiness of my home, dreaming, until spring comes round again.

What does it take to become undone?

Remember that song, “She’s Come Undone”, by the Guess Who?  Really, who uses that word anymore? The only other instance of hearing this word is when actor Johnny Depp uses it in the movie “Chocolate”:  “I am undone.”  He makes it sound like a wonderful thing.   “Undone”.  I like it.

 The reason I am thinking about the word, and its meaning is because I have recently finished reading Helen Humphrey’s The Reinvention of Love.   

                Who we are is not just determined not just by the choices we make , by how we sew events together into

narrative.  What gives us the true measure of ourselves is how undone we can become by a single moment.

This is the reflection of Charles Saint-Beuve, who was Adele Hugo’s lover for a brief moment of time.  It is that moment which defines his life – but this is hidden from the world, not visible to observers of his exterior life.  It is an interior event which transcends linear time. He falls in love with Adele when her hair falls down out of her combs.

                All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a

                place of propriety.  I was undone.   Nothing would ever be the same.

Adele’s daughter is not just undone; she is unraveled. Unrequited love.  But it determines what her life becomes.  Victor has her committed.

Romantic love.  The reinvention of love?  It was the time of the romantics. I wonder what our time says about love.  How do we define love now?  Do we still become undone? 

Humphreys gives us a fictional biography that shows us a man's richly detailed personal thoughts and feelings, more about his inner life than his accomplishments. Real-life biographies never seem capable of this, which is why I am usually dissatisfied with them. I will keep this book in my library. 

 
Undone 

 

Blackbird House

Wild sweet peas are mentioned often in this "novel" by Alice Hoffman.  I know it's called a novel, but to me it's a series of short stories, which I love reading anyway.  I read the novel in one day, following the connected stories right to the conclusion.  Lost children, white blackbirds, witches - these stories read like fairy tales.  Each interconnected story mentions sweet peas at least once.
This brought to mind memories of my mother, who faithfully grew her annual sweet peas every year.  The current garden I have allows only for shade plants, but this book brought back the strong scent of a bouquet of sweet peas picked from her garden.  There is no other scent like it - the smell of a gentle summer wind, I think. I loved to have a vase full of the white blooms, (wrapped in wet paper towels, and taken home to set beside my bed), filling me with a calmness and serenity that I often  haven't had enough of in my daily life. I must remember to plant some this coming spring at the other house. No, not just some - many, in every colour.


I love this book cover, (Amazon.com)  which is the one that I have.  Red shoes - just the perfect pair for a witch, or other ethereal being, don't you think? I would love to own a pair of old-fashioned red shoes like these.  A field of wild sweet peas would have done just as well, I think, for the cover, but I do covet that pair of shoes.



The wild sweet peas seem to be magenta in colour.



Here are the white sweet peas I remember.  Sweet peas are April's flower, and my birthday is in September, which is the month of the aster.




Asters are beautiful, and they are a shade of my favourite colour, but their scent cannot compare to that of the sweet pea.


I found this clip art, and I think it rather captures the melancholy mood meant to be evoked by the novel.  Apparently there is a children's story called "The White Blackbird". I will have to find it and read it.

Blackbird House was a good book, although the stories did start to run together.  . The mood of melancholy became almost too much when the stories were read all together at once; rather like having not just one, but hundreds of vases of sweet peas in one room.  Maybe I will reread this book again with that goal in mind.  I will read each one separately and reflect on each, so as to make a good thing last longer.