Spring is in the air..........somewhere

Last fall I ordered some plants which, I was assured, would be sent at the correct time for spring planting in my area. They arrived the day before yesterday. The day before the latest snow arrived. I don’t think the ground has thawed yet and I have dahlias to plant.

Hmmm, I see a problem.

Somewhere someone at White Flower Farm looked at a calendar and decided it was spring. To quote Anthroslug at his "the not-quite adventures of a professional archaeologist" blog, "there is often a wide chasm between what is and what is perceived."

Jane Eyre was a gold digger

I love it when (clever) writers take a classic and rework it a bit. Give it a different slant or change the era or tell the tale from a different character’s point of view. Thus, we have Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, reworked into the cult sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet, with Robbie the robot as Ariel. There have been countless retellings and versions of Dickens’, A Christmas Carol, including a rather good book by Gregory Maquire called, Lost, in which the main character’s family claims an ancestor on whom Ebenezer Scrooge was based.

My own family boasts of a court jester as an ancestor about whom no one has yet written. Maybe that will have to be me. But I digress.

Currently on Broadway and on tour throughout the country is a musical based on the Good Witch Glenda and the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz called, Wicked. This take is also based on a book by Gregory Maquire. Now to the classic, Jane Eyre, the only one of the books any Bronte wrote that I could actually get through. There has been a very well received book telling the story from Mr. Rochester’s first and not-quite-yet-mad first wife’s point of view called Wide Sargasso Sea. The producer, Val Lewton, one of my favorite’s, gave us the horror movie, I Walked with a Zombie, based on Jane Eyre, since Lewton needed a story and, with a minimal budget, had to adapt something already in the public domain. The author, Jasper Fforde’s, book, The Eyre Affair, is a hilarious tale of a world where people can enter their favorite books as long as they don’t break the law by changing anything in the story. Someone begins their nefarious doings by messing about with a character in Dickens who is so minor only scholars notice the change and escalating to kidnaping Jane Eyre right out of her book.

So I’m waiting for the book that asks of Jane Eyre, what did she know and when did she know it? I’m waiting for the book that paints dear Jane as a scheming little gold digger who set her cap for Mr. Rochester. I’m waiting for the author who wonders if Jane just happened to leave something flammable in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Maybe that will have to be me.

In which our heroine finds herself mired waist-deep

in a mind-numbingly boring afternoon. Still brown outside, only now there is a cold misty rain that is leaving me listless and without gumption. My mind feels slow and thick and unfocused. More so than usual.

I fear I need a tonic. Does wine count as a tonic?

Brown out

Things are looking disturbingly brown outside. Without the cover of snow and before the warm rains and sun of spring, the world is.....brown. Not a good coffee brown, either, more of a beige brown. I spied some tulips beginning to push up, but no flowers anywhere yet.

No robins yet, either, but there are birds. Most especially, there are cardinals. The only real color in the landscape right now are the cherry red male cardinals. All the birds are involved in some serious flying and chasing and picking up bits of dried (brown) grass.

Today is supposed to be an outside clean up day where we pick up fallen sticks, rake some of the leaves off the flower beds, cut back the ornamental grasses that have swayed all winter and burn all the yard debris. It’s supposed to be, but there is a cold wind blowing and the temperature is not going to be as warm as we thought a few days ago. There is also a new Panera bread store down the street with fabulous pastries and a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee on our counter begging to be used for the purpose for which it was made. So I have a choice between a beige brown landscape and good coffee brown with cherry pastries.

What to do, what to do.

Winter

A few years ago, my husband took this picture out our front door. This is one of my favorite views of winter.

A wish to build a dream on

To be grammatically correct, it should read a wish on which to build a dream, but that doesn’t have the same old zing, so I’ll leave it as it stands.

Everyone, I hope, has a wish to build a dream on. Some thing they want, some thing for which they would make sacrifices. Some thing, though thing is not always the wish. It could be a situation or a way of living that is different from the way things are now. As humans, I believe we all need a wish to build a dream on.

Here’s the problem. For far too many of us, myself included until I suddenly realize time is a-passing and if I don’t get off my duff and strive harder, my wish is only ever going to be a wish and not a reality, don’t do anything more than wish. “Oh, someday,” we whisper wistfully, taking comfort in the dream as though the dream were the reality. To have a wish or a dream is good, but I’m saying the wish or dream alone is not good enough and absolutely and positively should not be good enough. My wishes and my dreams are of great and enormous comfort as I travel down the path toward them, but they will not be a comfort if I get to the end of my life and only have wishes and dreams to show for a lifetime.

This is what Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, you will meet with a success unimagined in your waking hours! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

Off I go.