Flowers birds and a letter to an old friend in The View from the Terrace

I am really enjoing the light evenings. It is 8.30pm, the sun has just gone down behind the hill and left a pink glow behind the trees across the top and there is that wonderful stillness that you get just before dark.

I spent a lot of time in the garden today. This morning I sat on the patio and wrote a letter to my oldest friend who will celebrate her 70th birthday on Wednesday. It is hard to imagine that we are this age. We met as children when she was 9 and I was 8 and have been friends ever since. We both left our home town in our early teens so have not seen a great deal of each other over the years but, by a wonderful chance, she moved to Leicestershire and I married a man from there, so we visited when we went to see Hubby’s family. The last time I saw her we met quite by accident on the shores of Windermere. We were there for a spring holiday and they for a few days celebrating their 40th anniversary.

After lunch I pruned the fuchsia. It takes a long time as it is enormous. It was in the garden of the mobile home that we spent the first 2 years of our married life in. Then Mum took over that home when we bought a house. After Mum died 8 years later brought the fuchsia here and it has thrived.

I saw a magpie this afternoon perched in our damson blossom. I wished I’d had the camera, We get a lot of birds, usually sparrows, blue tits, house martins and robins. We don’t often get a magpie.

The daffodils are almost but not quite over and the tulips are blooming. The bluebells are just coming up. The ones in the garden are the Spanish ones, not our native variety. They were here when we bought the house and we have more now than we had then. Soon it will be time to go to the woods and see the English bluebells, that is one of my favourite things each year.

It is almost dark now. I love the shapes of the branches of our fir tree and the forsythia against the dusk sky. I wasn’t originally from the country but I wouldn’t want to live in a town again

Last updated April 17, 2016