My marvellous Kent Claret vine ... I bought it from Victoriana Nursery to keep my ever-faithful calendulas company. Friend Wendy recommends the grapes for grape jelly.

Happy harvesting … my Great Auntie Bee's watercolour of farming life as it used to be, painted in 1950.

The creative mind in action … Coppicing days, Pheasants Coppice, Bishopsbourne.

History …In the garden of Serre de la Madonne, Menton. Seems I wasn’t the only admirer.

Happy birthday! ... My 50th Birthday Party 9th September 2010 at Jenny's, also with Hilda, Becca, Vittorio, Robin and Yvonne and Bianca - Caprese Michelangelo, Toscana. A very special day.

Birthday girl ... Mrs G picking flowers on the morning of her 80th Birthday, a few seconds before she realised that I had arrived.

A carer's calendar

Do you care for someone, possibly better than you care for yourself?

Who takes care of you?

This Carers' Calendar does.

For January, your Carers’ Calendar poem is about Snowdrops.

The illustration is a photograph of a batik made by Hilary Watkins a decade ago; the colours of the batik have mellowed over time, un-noticed day by day, but easy to see over the years; a bit like the care you give, perhaps.

Please look after yourself.



Snowdrops

YOU appeared
As answered prayers do,
Through two hands held together,
Faithfully.

And now, with sky-facing palms,
You sing between your two arms of green,

Single unsolitary snowdrops,
Silently ringing ear-rings,

First decoration of our flowering year.

Singing a song that sings quietly inside all the smallest of things,
And, less loudly, in the large.

Of things that are and yet to be,
Beneath the sky of January.

- 31 i 2017

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