Three Beautiful Things

1. It's a day when I'm stepping from appointment to task to event to task to event. Two things get cancelled -- and breathe. 2. At the front door, I glance around to find the starling who is dropping electronic blips and bloops and clicks from a high place -- he's on next door's TV aerial, sifting the airwaves for the latest sounds. 3. I bring myself round to sleep -- last thing there's hard science fiction in Rendezvous with Rama  and then in the small hours, a collection of death scenes by Turgenev.

1. Waking in grey light to birdsong through the open window.  2. I look up and catch sight of Nick coming in from the street. 3. The beech leaves, new unfurled and underwater soft, still have fine fair hairs along their edges.

1. The fridge has been dredged for jars and roots, and now a venison stew is bubbling on the stove. 2. I put the last stitches into my little doll's pink felt shoes and hand her over to my daughter with the big scissors. 3. I'm wakeful, but there are two volumes of Turgenev on my e-reader, so I follow him into a lost world of mystic serfs and aspen groves and low mists and cart tracks.

1. We're having technical problems; we get a slightly out-of-breath call from the counsellor, who is also running late, and it occurs to me that she's as nervous as we are. 2. Early evening, I splash a little water about the garden and clear handfuls of fallen wisteria petals off my seedling marigolds. 3. The little doll now has stiff felt limbs stuffed with pipe-cleaners, and a dress -- but her fringe remains pinned flat and untrimmed because we don't quite dare.

1. We drink coffee and take courage from our stories. 2. A little blue butterfly lurches about the garden like a torn corner of sky caught in the wind. 3. In the late dark as I am falling asleep there's the sound of the quiet rain shower promised on the weather radar.

1. A great tit in pinstripes flies into the ivy, flies out again. 2. I catch a speck of red in the garden, assume it's plastic litter from a broken toy. But it's a ladybird, stretching its wings. 3. We've been shifting around each other, in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, and now there is a curry, and for afters, warm cookies with ice cream sandwiched between.