bursting out belatedly

Early this morning I thought I sniffed a little whiff of Autumn. Something about the way the leaves were quivering in the wind on the tree outside the bedroom window. It’s been divinely drizzle-y and grey for the last two days. Sweet, soft coolness, a blissful respite after the  flattening heat.

Now, in the middle of the day,  the sky is blazing summer blue again and the house is creaking in the sun. The cicadas have re-started. The purple tibochina trees on the dirt driveway to our house are on the brink of exploding into their extravaganza celebration of the colour purple. Their buds are almost bursting. 

Plants are blooming late this year because of all the many dark rainy  days we’ve had during this strange, tumultous summer. The garden here is usually dripping frangipani flowers by mid December. This year hardly a bloom until February. Flowering gums up the road are late too - but worth the wait.

I warm to the theme of late bloomers, being one myself. It’s taken me such a long time to...I’m not sure how to finish this sentence. Such a long time to bloom, to blossom, to become more myself? Or just to grow up? And to become  a parent, the mother of a late life child. ( F has recently started to realise that he has OLD parents. I remind him that we none of us ever know how life will unfold, or who will die when. But it’s a little poignant somehow)

Talking of being ‘old’  - and of blooming - D has been teasing me about my ‘retiree lifestyle’. It’s true that the parts of my day not taken up by work and parenting are often devoted to pleasurable leisure-activities, like going to choir or book club or playing marimbas or lunching with a friend. Next month I’ve booked in for a ukulele class. Last year there was Life Drawing...

I still can’t quite shake off a vague sense of guilt about my pleasant ‘lifestyle’, guilt which I blame on my dour God-fearing Scots ancestors, my father’s lot. Grandfather was a stern Church of Christ preacher, a fundamentalist type, dead against singing dancing or having fun. He died when I was about eight or nine. But lives on somewhere, it seems, in my psyche, though thankfully with an ever feebler voice. 

rainy Byron last night