Yesterday was such a delightful evening.. :) I like the new library machine, the one that enables me to completely avoid staff behind the counter - almost all truly dislikable people. I've known them for a long time and can't say I have more than 3 remotely happy memories of them combined. The scanner may fuck up my account at some point, as all machines tend to bite back, but so far waltzing in and it's just the scanner and me and the books, then waltzing out again, I don't even have to put off my headphones.
With Piček still too tired to do pretty much anything, antibiotics reeking through his pores, I drove uphill to see my parents. It hasn't rained for the first time in days and the air was cool and moist. Clouds were pretty, colors were clean, trees were deep emerald and bagrem, the acacia, are going into bloom. Their potent fragrance is one of my favorite in the road I walk between where I park to where the parents' house is. Soon fireflies will follow and crickets and blackbirds are already warming up.
Mum was in the garden, tending to her flower beds and oh so neatly planted veggies - something she does truly to perfection. Every time some underground rodent eats one of the saps in the neat row, she replaces them with indescribable tenderness. The result is some of the richest, crispiest salad and sweetest peas I've ever eaten. When I was little she had a potato field as well and sometimes I'd grab a basket and go collect ten different things needed for a perfect veggie soup. I make her add some stuff, like edible and decorative pumpkins, but not always things grow. We have, for example, a freak fig tree that is completely alien to the region, and yet it bares fruit like there's no tomorrow. American blueberries - those big ones - don't grow, though. The only time they did, dogs ate them.
As that wasn't cute and serene enough, it really perked me to see that Emi, the golden retriever, is with her, sitting on the walkway, just.. keeping her company. The two dogs are never willingly apart except in this rotation. Tara, the rottweiler, was naturally with dad closer to the forest, where he was wedging war against the tall grasses of the plum orchard. That is so cool, how the dogs tag each one :D
I hung around mum for a while, chatting on nothing in particular, following her as she planted and watered the tiny salads. Emi and Tara now followed me, begging for food and fighting one another over my attention. At sundown I went to get dad and help him carry up the mower and mum waited in the big orchard. 'One-eye' the cat climbed the lowest possible branch of a apple tree and Tara kept trying to knock her down but kept coming an inch short, utterly frustrated. She knocked Emi over instead and dragged her around by the tail until Emi was bored by this treatment and bit Tara's jaw.
I hung around mum for a while, chatting on nothing in particular, following her as she planted and watered the tiny salads. Emi and Tara now followed me, begging for food and fighting one another over my attention. At sundown I went to get dad and help him carry up the mower and mum waited in the big orchard. 'One-eye' the cat climbed the lowest possible branch of a apple tree and Tara kept trying to knock her down but kept coming an inch short, utterly frustrated. She knocked Emi over instead and dragged her around by the tail until Emi was bored by this treatment and bit Tara's jaw.
Telling them I'm in no hurry at all, dad was encouraged to start a fire in the outdoor fire-place and mum set to comb Emi's sheep-like coat. Tara sat next to me to be petted, but pivoted herself to fall directly onto Emi and get groomed herself. Of course Tara has no coat to speak of, so mum returned to Emi in 2 minutes. Dad said "watch, Tara will now go get a log to chew to draw attention" and surely enough in a minute Tara vanished into the shed are returned with a large log and began chewing it into saw dust in the middle of the yard. Not that Emi cared - she was now on her back, eyes closed, being tended to like she's Marie Antoinette. Ultimately it got dark and I started to leave. The road took me through the brush in darkness and crickets and the evening smell of wet dirt and bagrem. It was truly an eve of rare perfection.
