dreams of spring

Reading home decorating and gardening magazines on cold, dark winter evenings can be equal parts inspiring and frustrating (reading it's-summer-over-here English ones even more so). I look up and about, and want to create, say, a pearly feature wall in my bedroom, or paint all the skirting boards white.

But it seems pointless - the painting, especially - when it's too cold to open any windows; I'd be inhaling that fresh paint smell in my sleep for weeks.

As I flip thru the glossy, colourful pages, I am seized by a compulsion to makeover, upgrade my domestic life. I dig out two favourite pages of English garden sheds, looking prim and pristine and pretty; a dirty blunnie would never have darkened their doorsteps. Then I think about another pic I used to have taped up somewhere, and I mentally install big pots of colour right near the back door, that I can see from where I stand at the kitchen bench; hot pink and red pelargoniums, perhaps.

Instead, I channel my wistful dreams into sorting thru the linen press and sweeping the browned, curled-up leaves from the driveway. I transplant self-seeded larkspurs from the vegie garden into the cold, unpromising soil of the flower beds up the front.

Instead of repainting walls white, I take down art prints, hoping to let as much of the weak, watery sunlight bounce around as possible.

I can barely yet gather a handful of jonquils from the garden to bring their perfumed promise of spring breathing into the house. So, instead, I rely on a cheeky stash of imposters to at least bring colour to each room, if not life.

Gloomy days plod by, monotonously; dreary routine fills winter, not the bright spontaneity and doing of summer. After work, after chores, reading magazines and looking ahead.