A Winter's Morning Silence...the virtues of a foggy day

Winter's silence enveloping the marsh side waters of our cottage...

Walking out to the dock, my footsteps were the "sound" this morning...

A foggy, quiet day can be calming, contemplative and oh so pretty...

There are many things James and I enjoy and truly appreciate with being here in the South Carolina Lowcountry with both living out on a tiny barrier island sparsely populated and also having an in-town cottage facing out towards a marsh waterway...access to nature is one thing, privacy and yet also having great neighbors nearby is another and silence, ah silence, is very much to me another cherish attribute to the life we're living right now.

Many days and nights are wondrously silent barring the chirps, rustling and rambling of "nature's goings on" from time to time and the usual exuberant spring chorus of our tree frog population which makes itself loudly, but comically, known for a few weeks when the weather turns warmer.

However, the days and nights when a blanket of misty fog rolls itself down onto our waters as well as the marsh side and woods surrounding us.....ah, that's when I enjoy silence the most!

This morning has been one of those cherished calmed, stilled, silenced times I've basked within.

After a very early morning's work with inventory going on at the store, I returned to the cottage here and walked out to the dock in order to bask in the foggy-silence awhile.

Many writers and poets have written some prose, poetry and pithy statements regarding silence that I'd like to share with you along with these pictures taken of my quiet morning earlier today:

From Paula Huston's fascinating book, The Holy Way- Practices for a simple life, "...I had to learn how to seek out and refresh myself in the pools of silence that lay hidden along the pathway of my noisy daily round."

And Madeleine L'Engle writes that, "...when I went on my first retreat I slipped into silence as though into the cool waters of the sea. We need both for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound; and the equally great joy of its absence."

Here's some food for quiet thought: "When we make room for silence we make room for ourselves...Silence invites the unknown, the untamed, the wild, the shy, the unfathomable - that which rarely has the chance to surface within us." - Gunilla Norris

And for the more practical, prudent minded..."Right speech comes out of silence." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And of course, poetry alludes to silence in its own quieted, white-noise, negative space kind of way:

This evening stillness...

Just the ruined cowbell

Found by the pasture gate. - Jewell

How quiet-

At the bottom of the lake

peaks of clouds. -Issa

The winter storm

Hides in the bamboo

And becomes silent. - Basho

on a post

near the edge of a brook

a crow

utterly still

in the stillness of high noon - Mori Ogai

There is a beautiful mystery within fog, snowfall, rain and other times and events which "still" us to some degree in the midst of our busy and oh so noisy lives. I like this quote from Albert Einstein which points out that, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."

Those are my non-silent-now thoughts about silence and a morning spent enjoying the fog set out within the marsh waters by the cottage. Maybe you haven't been sitting out within the damp fog surrounding your dock, maybe you're enjoying time by a fireplace or a window as the snow falls, rain drops or maybe you're "stuck" somehow in some way having to still-yourself...however your silence comes, I hope that to some degree, you can happily dwell within it for awhile....

Preppy Foodie...one "show" the Food Network may want to pass on

Ahh, a little bit of Haagen-Daz....always such a perfectly Preppy treat!

A Prepster's in-town cottage's fridge: pretty basic, boring but healthy-ish

Preppy work-snack: going healthy since martini-lunches are now archaic.

Today I trotted off to the grocers... eventually one must re-supply the pantry, fridge and such...

Grocery shopping is for me almost akin to a trip to the dentist- I am not a person who loves to wander through the produce section, gaze upon the glass-protected shelves stocked full of deli options or even steer my cart towards the smells and bread-basketed decor' of the store's in-house pseudo bakery. I am much like my father in that...have a list, grab a cart and work quickly through the aisles.

Perhaps one of the Preppiest things about me is that, frankly, I am "not interested much" in food. Now, yes, I do (you bet) get hungry and eat food on a regular basis and obviously am not the startlingly-skinny of certain movie industry starlets, runway models and various members of royalty who are young, in love and constantly monitored as to their fashion, hair-do's and dress size. No, I eat a' plenty and when I do, it's more towards healthy-options though I am hardly one of those Yoga-Moms who get quite militant in their vegetarianism, organic-obsessions and raw food, pure food, slow food and localized food stringent life quantifiers.

Yes, I do like to buy fresh, local and the-least-chemicaled-possible but I do not make it a big issue, a universal absolute or something toward the application of personal postmodern sainthood. I leave that to others.

I grew up in a family who paid scant attention to food. When we lived in Georgia, our house, my grandparents' houses, other family members' houses and our friends households as well all had fulltime cooks. No, not fulltime family foodies who loved to be in the kitchen whipping up something and no, not professional chefs either but actual regular ole' hired cooks who doled out our 3 Square Meals a Day in the manner of 1970's and earlier-styled Southern Cooking...that we all didn't die early deaths of butter or bacon fat grease overdosing is a miracle! That all of us kids were skinny things looking like we actually needed some more butter on our toast was a funny outcome indeed from the food we consumed set down before us day after day.

IF my mother, grandmothers, aunts n' such actually HAD to make a meal for some odd reason, it was literally an opening-of-cans debacle' with toast or some cheese toast burning included in...

When we moved up-north, we left that lifestyle behind and from then on dinner was always a choice in my family of one of two options: more Campbell's cans of soup and cheese toast slightly burned on the edges OR "your father's coming home in a minute and we're going out to dinner"...so saith my mother who'd be getting dressed for it after her long tiring afternoon of playing away some Mozart, Bach and so forth on either her piano or on her organ in our living room still attired in her dressing gown and robe. My northern friends thought it a riot to see her like that if we popped into my house on school-day afternoons in the farmhouse my parents were busily restoring whenever the renovation-mood hit my mother but in my Deep South vernacular, well, this was just er, normal. Didn't every one's mothers lounge around like that? My late mother did "do real estate and estate sales consulting" for a few years while I was in high school and thus was up fairly early and dressed for work but that wasn't a chapter in her adult life which lasted for very long. It was like playing-at-normal before once again going Deep-South-Faulkneresque as the true roots of her upbringing pulled her back into the Spanish Moss shaded depths of what it means for born-Southerners to live-under-the-Live-Oaks.... but anyway.... I'm digressing a bit, and so....back to the food tales storytelling.

It was about 3 years after James and I had married that on one of our trips up to Wisconsin to see my parents before Dad retired and they moved back South, my mother attempted to cook a meal for us. Now, my James is from a family where everyone loooooves to create in the kitchen and is appropriately talented as such with the most lovely of culinary cuisine outcomes. He's from a long line of Preppies who are Culinary: rare but true. They do exist but much like Preppies who will Buy and Wear Chanel couture, they're exceptions to the general rules within the basic parameters of Preppyhood. And so, James soldiered-on through this big-deal-meal in my parent's dining room that evening and started to sincerely understand why, for his wife Lachlan, while I truly enjoy fine food and delicious meals, I'm just not really drawn to food, meals, wine, wandering around in the grocers and such as he is..........

If such a thing as a perfectly-pitched plated meal IS placed right in front of me, I sooo enjoy it of course but if not, I'm perfectly fine with weeks and weeks of simple salads, cheese toast and soups, cheese slice sandwiches or what I like to "make" most: a turkey or chicken wrap with lotsa' fresh veggies and lettuce in it n' a tad of mayo or Ranch dressing- yum.

In the midst of alla' this, I do have an occasional sweet tooth that pops up every now and then and if I let myself, I'd err a bit in the potent sweet forms of petite fours, cup cakes, beignettes and thick-slab slices of chocolate cake! And that wouldn't be healthy or wise or keep me fitting into the fashions I love so... I've learned how to deal with this: keep a pint of Haagen-Dazs super chocolate ice cream like the one pictured above in my freezer. I am not a huge ice cream eater and so this pint will last me a good month and take-care-of the occasional chocolate craving that has me eating just one spoonful of this late at night and being satisfied.

Preppies like Haagen-Dazs, oh yes! It came onto the better-ice cream-scene long before Ben and Jerry's and doesn't have that we're so righteous saving the world superiority which can get harder to swallow than the Chunkey Monkey's fudge chunks and bits of walnuts. I'm all for giving back, making right, doing what we can and alla' that but heck, sometimes just sometimes I want to indulge in pure sweet tooth decadence without being reminded of my civic n' global duty.

That being said....sometime later this evening you'll know where I'll be....over here at the cottage with that Chocolate Chocolate Chip pint in-hand and a spoon perched to dig out a delicious bit of it! And that would be the most exciting moment of this Preppy's "foodie moment" this weekend and why....I don't think there will ever be something like Pink and Green in the Kitchen showing up in new programming for the Food Network any time soon ;)

Bright Spots in the midst of this cold, cold winter... Johnny Jump-Ups n' Such

Winter's flowers hanging-tough in the midst of freezing rainy days....

Outdoor flowers peering into the window at cozy houseplants inside....

Simple but winter-hearty are the planters over at the cottage....

This afternoon I went over to the cottage for the first time in two weeks... I had been missing my little serenity-spot and finally am "mobile" once again with being able to drive a car now that my back's on the mend. I didn't know what to expect after our freezing temperatures, freezing rain conditions as of late but I was so pleasantly surprised to see the Pansies and Johnny Jump-ups actually doing just fine within the few casual planters I have set out over here on the front porch.

I got a kick outta' the oranged-hued ones seeming to peer into the glass french doors of the porch at the cozy, warm houseplants, potted bulbs and an orchid I have clustered in one of the corners of the kitchen. It seemed a bit of outdoor envy at the obvious indoor advantages.

The ivy vines were a little worse for wear and the porch and its steps covered with dead leaves, spanish moss clumps and even a small tree branch stuck between a house wall and one of the garden chairs..... so I picked up as I could, swept a little bit and loved the puttering around outside the cottage despite the cold temperatures today and the rapidly waning sunshine.

Like so many of our sunsets, tonight's was a delicate pink- it was absolutely delightful watching it from the porch expand over the marsh and water beyond. SO nice to have a little break from the rain for the moment.

Rain's once again in the forecast as are cold temperatures but some flowers are hanging-tough ;)

Sometimes it IS the "Little Things"....

So little, so pretty....but what's inside is always so impactful....

...2 of my favorite pictures I carry with me literally wherever I go....

The doldrums of a very cold, icy and snow-dumped-on January can get to folks and this is nothing to be ashamed of especially when so many of us are house-bound with colds, other illnesses, ancy children on snow-days and even blown-out back discs...

Unless you're living in a ski town and able to get outside to take advantage of all of this winter's snowfall (yes, you my dear friends and former neighbors out there so luckily in Park City, UT), a colder than usual winter month like this one is turning out to be can be quite, well, challenging.

Tomorrow I am going to brave the cold temps here and actually drive a car for the first time in weeks. I am anxious to get back over to our in-town cottage and then hopefully the next day, drive the five minutes commute to my fun part-time job and work a couple of hours over there.

Relegating one's world to a bedroom, to the corner of one's bedside where a small table is stacked with books, magazines, hand lotion, water in plastic tumblers capped off with a top and bendable straw for ease of drinking and such gets....small, very small and yet sometimes it indeed IS the "little things" that make a huge difference in where we are and how we are dealing with being where we are....

For me here, one of the nicest small-but-big things has been the beautiful bouquet of roses James brought me yesterday. They're blooming-out now so full n' lush and the scent has been soothingly reminiscent of gardening days past and yet to come. It's always so amazing to me how much flowers or a potted flowering plant can add into both an atmosphere and one's own psyche'. He grabbed this at the grocer's and it has made such a wonderful impact indeed.

Another small thing that I keep nearby year-round is the flat, paper picture frame which was once my Grandmother Wylly's and now I enjoy using. I keep in it two of my very favorite photos and will probably be peering at these in some nursing home on down the line: both are of James and my 2 truly magical years of being ski-bums out in Utah. One picture is us posing in front of the mountain pass beyond which perches our beloved miner's cottage on the sloped streets in Park City's historic district. The other photo is of James and I after we climbed up Double-Arch in Utah's Arches National Park out there in the desert lands of Moab. Still to this day, we count those two all-too-brief years as our happiest married-life adulthood years together. Of course we're having a nice time now and enjoying the present with one another and are glad to be here in our home-grounds of the Deep South but there'll always be something-magical about our Utah time.... just opening this up and looking at the pictures makes me smile.

Our world can be all too easily a landscape of "bigger is better", "grander gestures are greater" and "lots is preferred over just a little" but I disagree to a degree....me a lover of cottages, small poetry books, petite four cakes, strands of simple pearls, a single bloom in a silver bud vase, a kiss on the forehead, a door opened and held, sporty roadster cars, a bottle of wine shared, a postcard in the mail, a hug, a steaming mug of tea and so many, many gestures done to someone or done to oneself that speak the language of "Little Things...big of impact and large of meaning."

Here's to you treating yourself and the ones you care about and care literally for with something little and yet oh, so wonderfully lit with largess this month- best to everyone, Lachlan

India Hicks...Island Living inspiration of a more Tropical sort

Needing a tropical-inspired sunny-sky virtual reality break lately.....?

Ah, then, here's an island "tropical-clime getaway" drawn from the pages of India Hicks' book...

India Hicks' interiors are as always, gracious, elegant and "real-life-scaped".

Even her line with Crabtree and Evelyn is oh, so elegantly understated...

Thank you India for being a cheerful inspiration to us all this winter month...

All over the globe there are a myriad of ways in which "island living" is interpreted, imagined and inspired...

...here off the coast of South Carolina, it is a Deep South Coastal-driven "Lowcountry" style that hopefully a few of my blog posts have illustrated somewhat thoroughly for readers in not only decor' and dress descriptives but also history, social setting, gardening, cultural aspects, cuisine and so forth. Out in Hawaii, it is another kind of styling for islanders of course, over off the coast of Scotland, still another rendition and in the Caribbean, still another and so it goes around our world.

I find wonderful inspiration within just about any ole' island I either visit myself or visit virtually via others' experiences, films, books and so forth and one of my favorite ways is to "visit" via a well-written and photographed interior design book.

India Hicks' "Island Life" is one of my all-time favorites and this legendary designer, (descended from another legendary designer as well as English royalty) is as well one of my favorite individuals to see out within the public sphere mainly due to the very casual, laid-back yet still so proper and elegant bearing she exudes. Yes, she's stunningly beautiful, incredibly talented, well-pedigreed and no doubt has advantages to her life galore' and yet... there's a beautiful naturalness and calm to her that fits right on into what us-islanders like to term, "island living" or, "living on island time." Days and nights graced with the tides, starlight and the gentle rustle of palms....at its best of course. Like anything in life as we know it, there's always flip-sides to any shiny copper coin but with her book and the actual life she leads as a residential islander in tropical climes, India Hicks can bring us all some much-needed warmer weather joy as we peruse a few pages from her book, her island house and her life...

India Hicks' well-edited eye reminds us that yes, actually less-is-more when it is rendered from within parameters consisting of: classical styling, scattering around well-loved items many of which are obvious sentimental pieces and family photographs, an indoor-outdoor approach to daily living, graciousness enacted through simple luxuries being available to owners and guests alike, utilizing natural elements within one's decor' and bringing a sunny demeanor into one's atmosphere.

In the previous post, I talked about bringing in more "sunny yellow" into my room, my current situation of convalescing and I must remember that this is also very much a part of what "island living" is all about as well even when it's winter, a wet and gray and cold winter, here off the coast of South Carolina............

A Touch of Yellow... accd' to Eleanor McMillen Brown and...me

Rosey-wishes DO come true when wishing for a touch of cheerful yellow today :)

Forget the subtle nature of butter creme...this is a Bright Yellow crave! (as in Van Gogh's delightful "Still Life Majolica with Wildflowers" from the Wikimedia Commons site)

On such a gray, rainy and bland winter's day as is today...I've been thinking about yellow!

Not my usual preferential hue of yellow which can best be described perhaps as a soft butter creme: more lightly-sitting as would be a glaze rather than a thicker paint pigment- that's the kind of yellow I adore and always enjoy having about me. No, the yellow I think I'm viscerally craving right now in this weather and within the kind of health challenge I've been dealing lately with is....bright, bold, in-your-face yellow!

Tennis ball yellow, Lily Pulitzer print yellow, lemonade yellow, L.L.Bean rain slicker yellow, Hunter wellie boots yellow, deviled egg yellow, lemon square bars yellow, large citrine cocktail ring yellow, Kate Spade leather handbag yellow, potted daffodils and tulips yellow....yes, those kinds of bright, cheerful, pretty yellows indeed.

One of my all-time favorite lifestyle quotes is from American interior design maven, the late Eleanor McMillen Brown's quip (and universal truism to be sure) that, "Every room needs a touch of yellow."

Every room, every life does indeed need a touch of cheerful yellow, I so agree !

Growing up, my mother dictated what my "room of my own" looked like and it was beautiful in each house we lived in from Georgia up to Wisconsin and even to the guest bedroom out here on this SC lowcountry island she set up for me since I came down here once a month to visit when James and I were still living in North Carolina pre our UT ski-bum years and....it was always in the tones of a rosy pink, subtle greens and cream with but of course the dark English antiques in mahogany, walnut woods and ever a four-poster bed that seems to be as part of my life as my own set of teeth are- a permanent fixture! (My childhood bed, only a full-size and not a queen, is now designated as one of our guest bedroom beds so it's still very much happily-still-around as they'd say. I'll will it to a niece...it can follow her around then...)

And so I loved, and still with the guest bedroom here, very much enjoy this pretty blend of Preppy meets English Country House meets Southern Belle' in the Garden kind of decor styling. Pretty, timeless and so restive...how many a bedroom should be.

However, as to the first "grown-up bedroom" I ever had, well the master bedroom of James and my little cottage-house in North Carolina was immediately...painted yellow! All the walls and even the attached master bath were swathed in a richer hue of yellow than I usually gravitated towards and our first married-life comforter set to fit the married-life four-poster Tobacco Leaf bed we bought and fitted out with a queen size mattress was Ralph Lauren's "Evelyn" pattern. Remember that one? Yes, soooo yellow with the bunches of roses n' blue ribbon patterning scattered all over it :) Oh, yellow!

This bedroom had a large bay window at one end of it where I tucked my writing desk and chair nearby and put a large but low chest of drawers in front of it to "filter" so much of that bright sunlight streaming past the curtains on into our very-yellow room. It looked out onto one of my garden areas where I had placed a tall wooden birdhouse which was painted white and had a mellowing copper-roof: a busy place for a family of birds I loved seeing flit in and out and out n' about. A water birch tree provided the dappled sunlight n' shade to one side which further diluted the sun's glare however....we did indeed have quite a sunny master bedroom all those years ago and to this day, I still get cheered-up thinking about it.

And so then......maybe that's why today I am craving a bit of bright yellow while lying here in this rose pink, soft greens and cream room with it's proverbial four-poster bed and dark wood antique bureaus, side tables and such....a window's sashes opened up to watch the rain pour down from the grayed skies above my beloved marsh and woods being blurred beyond the rain's movements and the one lone palmetto tree I can espy from my bed-perch looking so lonely standing there drenched through......

James went to the grocer's today and maybe, just maybe, he'll return bearing something bright yellow to brighten up this day for me. I'd love a bouquet of hothouse tulips perhaps or a small potted arrangement of daffodils but heck, even a couple of lemons that I could plunk into one of our pink china bowls would be stellar! I'd sit it to the side of my bedside table and just drink-in the color's cheerfulness.

A spot of bright yellow in the winter time is just as refreshing as a cool sip of lemonade is within the heat of the summer so here's three cheers to....yes....yellow!

UPDATE: Beautiful roses are what James brought me back! So pretty yellow with the tips edged in pink- what a sweet, sweet treat and they're now on the bureau across from the bed facing me so that I can thoroughly-delight in this "spot of yellow"- YEA JAMES! (see first picture above)

Winter Hours delight with Potted Spring Flowers...

A dose of Spring's poetry within the wintery days of January.... (painting by Augusta Innes Withers, c1793 courteousy of Wikimedia Commons)

Usually at this time of year in early January, I have taken down and stored all the Christmas decorations as well as a bit of New Year's sparkle decor' and am happy to let the quiet, elegantly-spareness of winter's bareness settle in to both the landscape and my psyche' with...one exception.

Clusters of blooming potted bulbs now set about the house are always welcomed reminders, such cheery harbingers of another springtime to come....

As a bevy of garden and seed catalogues begin to sprout up in our mailbox post in the new year, I usually find myself puttering away here in the island house's down stair's lattice room where my potting shed area has become dusty and stilled with an air of benign neglect. Movement and a bit of magic however return to its atmosphere as I pull out various old and new pots, bags of small sized garden stone, bags of potting moss and of course begin to scoop down into one of the large potting soil bags I keep in an antique white enamel child's bath on its tall risers my late mother found in a local antique shop and never put to use. It had been tucked away to the side of her art studio holding old boxes of stuff until I recommissioned it to be an active part of my gardening facilitation's. The potting soil bag it houses now "bathes" spring bulbs being placed into pots every wintertime.

I keep potted bulbs simple and direct for each winter's interior enjoyment: easy, casual clusters of classics such as daffodils, hibiscus, crocus, tulips and such with usually a slower-evolving holiday leftover hanging around like one of this year's er, more stubborn amaryllis over at the in-town cottage. What a laggard has turned out to be. This one's determined to be a Valentine's surprise it seems! Well, so be it...we'll enjoy it then...

If I was of the style bent towards the grand, the showy, the outward extravagance that seems to still permeate much of today's upgrading of one's lifestyle showmanship (now termed Passing-By The Joneses instead of merely keeping up with them) spotted in books, glossy magazines, television shows and various neighborhoods around then perhaps I'd enact something like what I espied in Paris last spring along the Place' Vendome right by our hotel: huge Edwardian urns almost as tall as me with a round-ball clipped boxwood bush in each surrounded by potted daffodils spilling lushly over the brims of the urns. Breath taking, oh yes, and sooo pitch perfect elegant in the early spring grayed-tones of Paris but out here.... well, such things of beauty would seem comic at best, totally inappropriate at worst.

I've always been in wonderment to see homes and their lawns/grounds/gardens not "appropriate" to one another... especially long after someone's moved in and lived in them for awhile. But that's my own quirky observation and I well- realize that standard developer-contractor landscaping has become an American urban, suburban and small town institution.

Back to here where I live, said house, cottage and their surrounds are kept simple because frankly, the buildings themselves are simple. More simple actually than I'd like since I'm more of an English Cottage typa' girl who loves sloping eaves, small-pained but tall n' wide windows, stonework, slatted boards, bricking and ivy vine trailing along windowsills and door frames. However, we are no where near the point of either the timing or the desire for our "dream home" or heck, even a close-enough-house we'd hafta' spend a lot of time, effort and money on.

Maybe one day, but for now I'd rather be keeping it simple n' easy for awhile....taking into consideration my bad back, ongoing elder caregiving, our non-office-hour careers and the mass amount of actual nature existing right out our front n' back doors awaiting our presence fishing, kayaking, rambling around woods, walking along the marsh, beach and such....

This week James helped me out tremendously by not only taking down the holiday decor' but also repotting some houseplants and so maybe tomorrow or the next day or sometime soon we can get at least a couple more pots potted-up with spring bulbs and perched onto windowsills :)

Anyone who has a bulb, has spring. - Anonymous

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. - Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm ready to keep putting little doses of poetry around my house spaces this month, how about you? Happy wintertime everyone and happy spring-to-come glimpsing about as well!