The New House

One of the themes of my year has been the deepening of many old and new friendships.  When she learned I had bought my new house, my best friend sent me the following beautiful quotation: "With the eyes to see it and the hands to create it, we can recover the home that the soul desires"--A. Lawlor

This morning, writing fiction in the sunshine at my new desk, I realized that for me, as for so many other writers, "Narrative imagination...[is] a basic evolutionary tool of survival"--Aleksandar Hemon.   Now that I have cleared off my desk, I can begin to recover the place of my dreams.

Both on the page and off, my world seems more brightly colored than it has in a long time.  At the Boalsburg farmer's market this afternoon, I bought two deep reddish purple hibiscus and a tiger orange and black daisy plant for the front garden.  The man who sold it to me said that, I needed to be patient; the hibiscus would not emerge until at least the middle of May.  So I should not call him in April and complain that it didn't make it through the winter.  He added, as I was leaving, that if I were lucky, the daisies might come back even though they are, technically speaking, only annuals. I am going to hold onto this metaphor.