s l e e p

After reading The Outlaws of Sherwood at a young age, I became enamoured with the notion of sleeping outdoors and secret homes underneath the trees.  Robin and Marin in the woods in the dark, sharing pure, stolen moments amidst pervasive melancholy and dread: that's romance.

Forests are for lovers.

h a i l

Another summer has risen up and quietly faded; when I think of my experience, my personal ability to say that I've seen twenty-four summers pass, I feel strange. The number seems so small, too small to be able to say that I know how a summer is and what to expect from one. Saying, I've eaten at a restaurant twenty-four times, or that I've read a book just as many times is different; those are numbers that I can willfully expand, infinitely build upon. But summer...whose passing I wait for with bated breath, and who only recently I've grown to tolerate, even appreciate...

You can only collect so many summers before they're gone.

l a k e . s i d e

This past weekend, I was fortunate to spend some time in St. Catherines; Josh and I snuck away and went for a quick walk along the shore, and while it wasn't technically a sea, it was lovely being by the water. It was a gorgeous day, all blazing sunshine and soft breeze and in a perfect, quiet moment,  I felt a million times removed from ordinary life.

i n . b l o o m

My mum loves gardening. While I was still living at home, she would often try to persuade me to come outside and help her tend to her plants; she would (and still does) joke about paying me fifty cents to weed.

Even though I love flowers as a visual concept (as explained here), I was never very keen on the concept of gardening; one (among many) of my most dreaded summer phenomena was the experience of being dragged along to an open air garden centre; the heat and inevitable swarms (or so it seemed to me!) of bees and other bugs were unbearable to me. I was also always nonchalantly adamant that when and if I ever had a garden of my own, I would simply throw hand-fulls of seeds onto the earth and let nature take its course.

It's a mystery to me, but so far this summer I feel like I'm obsessed with plants; I keep pausing when I pass by beautiful gardens in bloom and can't resist capturing them on camera.

*

When I was little and we lived out in the county, there was a giant peony bush on the corner of our property; I remember staring in morbid fascination at the lush blossoms swarming with gigantic black ants.