Three Beautiful Things

1. Today, I get to hear the morning birds and see her turn to look back up the hill. 2. I buy the best tangerines squatting fat and bright in their oversized skins. 3. Our youngest bans us from the kitchen and cooks supper. She has done all the little things that we would do if we were not always slightly frazzled -- like hiding the heap of things that gets abandoned on the end of the table, serving lettuce in a bowl instead of the salad spinner and grating a piece of parmesan.

1. In one hand I have Clive Oppenheimer's book about volcanoes; in the other my phone with Google Maps -- this is so much better than following along with an atlas. 2. While dusting, I find the book I was looking for a week and a half ago. 3. Ginger, garlic, onion, chicken and beans lined up behind the pan in a comet tail array.

1. We are swathed in mist this morning, like we've been laid in tissue paper for storage. 2. Already, someone has made webby nests full of tiny black eggs in the tops of the nettles I was growing for the kitchen. 3. I test her on her science and think that she knows a lot more than me -- I never got my head around  the whys and wherefores of waves.

1. It is a relief to see magnolia flowers, and new leaves of nettle and cranesbill. 2. The train after the one we missed arrives early and leaves promptly. 3. '...and,' she snaps, tired and grumpy after parents evening, 'I bet he pulls the chair out for all the mums.' I'd noticed that too, and simultaneously appreciated it and found it awkward. 'It's because he has good old fashioned manners; and he said you were nicely raised, so you probably are.'

1. Nick has put some washing on the line -- looking forward to clothes that smell like the outdoors. 2. The forsythia hedge is dusted with yellow stars, just clearing its throat before its big moment. 3. The full moon has been silvering our left cheeks all the way home, but now I have time to really look, it is nowhere to be found. I have to lean out of the bedroom window to catch it round the roofline, and my varifocals don't work sideways so it is a jellybean-shaped blur.

1. The alarm goes off, and it's light outside. 2. After a run of murky wet days, clear hot sun light rushes into our kitchen and suddenly anything seems possible. 3. I return an edit, and feel like I deserve a glass of wine and some telly with the children.