1) May 7, as it happens, is both Tchaikovsky’s birthday and the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. I’ll admit I tried to get through Terror at Sea from 2007, which I hadn’t seen, but I just couldn’t do it. I found greater, more exultant solace in Tchaikovsky’s waltzes from Eugene Onegin, and from the Act I of Swan Lake. The latter I had peculiarly identified as “mine” my freshman year of college. And then, as with all musical obsessions, it faded.
1a) The former I was familiar with from my father’s collection of LPs. And this week I have been thinking a lot about both my parents and what they made possible. Mother, of course, grew up with piano lessons and recordings of classical music. Daddy, on the other hand, didn’t discover classical until he was in the Army and saw Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody one night. Hearing all that music changed his life.
1b) One week from today is Mother and Daddy’s 65th wedding anniversary.
2) The crocuses and scilla and daffodils have faded from the garden. Now the tulips are triumphant; the two beds the new neighbor planted last fall are radiant reds, yellows, and oranges. Violets, dandelions, and some sort of purple ground cover have asserted themselves for the next wave. The redbud tree is blooming. And today I saw that the lilac will bloom shortly, and the wide leaves of the pink lily-of-the-valley are unfurling.
2a) Also weeds and seedlings (among which I include dandelions). The only person I’ve ever met in my long life who enjoyed weeding was Mother. She’d’ve had a field day here! I had better get busy.
3) I made an astonishing cookbook discovery that could change the face of Dress Dinner Challenge forever . . .