03 March 2008

Springtime lasts another 24 hours

The neighbors' daffodils

Today I'm going to post just a few pictures I took yesterday morning. We had friends over for dinner last night, we ate late and stayed up late, and I'm dragging this morning. But I need to go out to the supermarket too.

Our ornamental cherry tree

For dinner we made a lamb curry, a spicy spinach and potato dish, a raïta salad (cucumbers in yogurt), and the Indian bread called nân (it's spelled with that accent in our Cuisine Indienne cookbook, in French). We spent most of the day cooking, and everything turned out the way we wanted it.

A lot of trees around the neighborhood are coved in these
white flowers, but I don't know what the tree is called.


It also rained all day yesterday. I went out in the rain with Callie in the morning. Then she didn't get her evening walk because it was just raining too hard, and all we needed was a wet dog climbing all over our friends when they arrived for the evening.

Yellow and red flowers in the neighbors' yard

And climb all over them she did. I don't know if it's because the dog knows these friends — remembers them, in other words — or if she would have climbed all over other guests the same way, trying to kiss their ears, noses, and mouths. Luckily, Janet and David have a young dog themselves, so they know how it goes.

The neighbors' house, with ours in the background

Around Saint-Aignan, it's still very wet and the trees have buds but now leaves yet. The grass is really growing. But Walt said predictions are for more freezing weather this week. It's March — un mois traître — a month you can't trust. You never know what might happen, weather-wise.

6 comments:

  1. Your mystery white flowers might turn out to be blackthorn - we call the eventual fruit sloes, and they're used for home-flavouring alcohol, as "sloe gin".

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  2. Funny, we were talking about sloes just last night. Our English friends used to pick them when they lived near Bath. I looked up sloe on the Internet this morning to learn more about them and saw the name blackthorn.

    Is blackthorn a shrub or a tree? These flowers are on trees.

    Sloe in French is prunelle.

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  3. When I saw your beautiful cherry tree, I had to start singing,
    "Quand nous chanterons le temps des cerises, et gai rossignol et merle moqueur seront tous en fête."

    Your tree put music into my heart.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, blackthorns can start out shrubs and end up as big as trees:

    http://tinyurl.com/2rr7nh

    http://tinyurl.com/3y7pjg

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  5. Please do keep posting - you and a small handful of others are a much appreciated "window".

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hmm...just looked at your photo of the white blossom and no sign of thorns, so I wonder...Perhaps a thornless French relative of Blackthorn - I will have to consult the texts and let you know if I come to a conclusion.

    Susan

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