Ninety

I did not go to the gym today.  I did go for a walk through the meadows with my ghost-dog Molly, to see all the consequences of so much water falling from the sky - water burbling down the dirt road, digging dongas, raising pond-lines, making mud and softening up the paths into spongy leaf-clung trails.

Babbling brook coursing down road.

Pond melting.

Actual buds about to burst into blossom!

Leaf-buds with a long way to go still.

Six pairs of geese honking their way home.

On our way from dropping off my car for its service this morning, little balls of ice were mixed in with the rain on the windscreen, and everywhere in the fields there were sad-looking cows and miserable horses standing in the cold and wet.  Tim said, "Oh, I love this, just think, it's the breakfast of all the plants, all this rain, it's the spring's breakfast, and soon everything will be growing and green!"  He is a rather enthusiastic man.

And in the bank, the teller said, "Oh well, another cold and horrible day!", so he told her his "breakfast" story and her eyes lit up and she smiled a great big grin, and when we left she said, "I love that breakfast story!  I'm going to tell everyone who comes in today that they shouldn't worry about the rain anymore. It's the spring's breakfast!" 

And later on Tim found some Tennis biscuits which must have been there since we got back from South Africa at the end of August, and which were hiding on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.  We were both very happy at this find, and we made Rooibos tea and ate our tennis biscuits and both floated off into South African nostalgia.  Tennis biscuits are the taste of childhood, the treat in your lunchbox at school, the delicious flavour of getting warm on the beach when you are a little shivering skeleton after staying in the sea too long, and your aunt wraps a big towel around you, gives you a good rub, hands you a tennis biscuit in one shaky hand, and a plastic mug with hot milky tea in the other, heavenly liquid that goes straight to your arteries and floods your body until you glow with it.  And later, when you are a parent, you do something you had never before felt possible, when your toddler generously hands you the soggy remains of his tennis biscuit, expecting you to gratefully eat it, you do. 

They are that good.