Playing hooky

I found a forest!

Well, not really, it was more like a tiny clump of trees. Jane Austen would probably have called it a copse, or something. But in any case it was green and gloomy in the best of ways, and the pine-needles that softened my every foot-fall were made maculate by patches of sun blossoming over the shade.

Yesterday Winter played dress-ups as Spring, and it was the most glorious day you could ever see. All morning, I kept leaving my tiny cupboard of a windowless office to see what the garden was making of this gift of a day.

(Here is the tally: two more daffodils burst into bloom, bringing the total to three; tiny buds appeared all over the once-bare pomegranate tree; the daphne bush tossed perfume willy-nilly into the temperate air; and the snowflakes? the snowflakes burst into bloom by the hundreds.)

And then I would go back into my study and work some more. Read, research, write. Carefully crafted words, self-editing, crafting some more.

But my heart was in the sunshine, in the unexpected warmth of the breeze. And, by mid-afternoon, I couldn't take it any more. I hit "save" on my unfinished story and stepped out into the day, into that false, imaginary spring, and went exploring.

I let my feet take me wherever they would, following parks linked within parks like chains, all over north Melbourne. I foraged wattle and snow-gum leaves and gumnuts, and then I walked some more. When I found the tiny forest, I sat down on the soft, dry pine-needles, closed my eyes, and breathed in the silence.

Breathed it in, breathed it out. In again, out.

As I walked home, carrying my basket of leaves and flowers, it was with a lightness that would suggest I, too, had put on Spring for a day. Even the work that was waiting for me at home, which endured well into the night, could not dampen my spirits. I put my botanical bounty into a big old jug, and got typing.