Three Beautiful Things

1. Seeing a familiar face coming up the stairs at the station. 2. There is the promise of nasturtium flowers in furled buds with a snip of red and yellow showing. Maybe tomorrow or maybe the next day. 3. No one feels like eating much -- but there are some bones of cold chicken to pick at, and thin slices of bread and butter.

1. Breakfast in the garden during a heatwave. Down the wall and over, the tidal sounds of next door's bathwater, and someone else, further away, sings softly. 2. Sat deep in the sofa in the draught from the open window, we can hear people going up and down the hill. 3. Peering through binoculars at the moon-by-daylight, viewing the great craters and the shadows in the dust.

1. I make a remark about the edit I've just done -- really just for good manners and to tell the writer that I see the labour that lies beneath, and to acknowledge that this short text will be very good news for the body concerned. The writer reciprocates with context, including a level of drama that very much pleases my nosey self. I love the way measured corporate sentences hold safe a whole world of human beings and their outlandish doings. 2. We get the impression that he is very pleased with his maths work today. And we keep looking at each other saying, 'He's very pleased with his maths.' 3. There's no lemon left for my soda water -- but I remember that some mint has been quietly and competently growing in the garden.

1. To dip-sample my small library of poetry and micro texts to find a quick consolation. 2. Pinks, striped with red like seaside rock, scented, if you care to bend down, of cloves. 3. I have in my stash just the right stickers for her revision notes.

1. A friend once said that my gardening method is a lot to do with editing. I think of this as I pull out this herb bennet, but not that one; and finger through my pot of lawn daisies to pull out herb robert seedlings, but let it grow where its fern leave soften hard edges; and cut back the seedy mildewed alkanet so that it will again in due course give more twinkling blue flowers -- for the bees of course. 2. There is something in the scrub at the side of the path, rustling and fluttering, now before us, now behind. I catch a flash of cream speckles, and then quite suddenly, there it is on a fallen branch, bright eye and tilted head -- a song thrush. 3. Under the front door step -- two buttercup flowers yellow bright as make-believe suns. 

1. I'm rather achy, but Saturday's work shows in the tied in sweetpeas and the tomato plants in their grown-up pots. And my to-do list is a little less weighty. 2. There is something so nice and glowy about seeing my daughter folding backwards into the kneeling camel pose stretch that I cannot manage. 3. At tea time, seeing me drooping over the kitchen table, Nick assures me he has supper in hand and sends me upstairs to lie down.