It's May! Can you stand it?

 

May is almost too wonderful to bear. 

 When I opened the curtains this morning, the front porch was a bower of purple clematis, overnight!

 The Kousa dogwood that RH planted as a veritable twig a few years ago now fills the window. He planted it much too close to the house but it was a matter of sidewalk and water line limiting spaces to dig. This year is the first for it to be loaded with white flower bracts making it a replacement for the huge Kousa at Valley View that was like a bridal bouquet in front of my bedroom window every May.

And this is what one daughter-in-law brought me on Mother's Day, a sample from the Valley View dogwood. The bracts are huge!

This a bouquet RH brought inside one morning last week, a twig from one of our two black locusts trees here. I could have sworn I dusted that lampshade. The lamp's an oldie that we bought in 1973, made in Denmark, or was it Sweden? 

And the clock radio was a gift from my firstborn after I did a post here hinting to him (if he saw the blog post) that I sure would adore a 1953 Zenith clock radio because it was SO Me!

Unbeknownst [I've always wanted to use that word] to me, he researched it and searched high and low to find this beautiful piece. He told me it was a big seller in its time, nicknamed The Owl Series. If you look at it closely you'll guess why.

 

We have a small locust tree in the middle of some trees in our turnaround and a very large one outside the bathroom window. The week the trees were in bloom we had the windows open and they perfumed the house magnificently. [It helped mask the odor of pee on area rugs. I'm sorry, BreeBree, but you know you do choose not to use the pee pad sometime.]

 Here's the turnaround where the small locust is and another May gift of nature.

 Believe me, we're the most popular driveway in the neighborhood with the UPS and FED-X drivers with this turnaround near the kitchen door.  And look how large the wild rose has grown this year!

A climbing rose planted by Mother Nature!

And to end my tribute to early May's gifts, here is a lovely bouquet brought to me last weekend from our youngest son's garden.

 

The fragrance of these peonies was amazing and they were gorgeous.

Ah, May, you're almost too wonderful to bear! 

But I'm up for the challenge.

A Decision and Richardson Wright

 This past week has been a happy week full of sweet family visits and good conversation, both in person and over phone and texts. 

I loved every minute of it and was left with temporary sadness when it ended. There's never enough pictures taken and what I do have I'll share soon on Dewena's Window where my granddaughters and their mom brought the party to me! 

This post here today is just a way of tackling feeling overwhelmed about where to start after an absence.

So I'll just post by saying that in celebrating what is my last year of the seventh decade I came to a decision. 

Decision: this is the year I will try to do more of what  makes me happy and less of a no-end-in-sight To Do List. Because, if not now, when?

Now, it's a given that some things on the daily to-do list have to be done or I won't be happy and neither will RH. Some things have to be done, period. But there can be a limit and I intend to recognize it. 

Yesterday I did only what I had to do and at 1:15 I hung up my homemaker apron and sat down to spend the entire afternoon with one of my favorite literary crushes, Richardson Wright. 

I have almost all of his few books on a special bookshelf but it had been ages since I treated myself to time in them. I luxuriated in Richardson Wright's life in the country with his wife and his Georgian New England home and his gardens where he lost 30 pounds  away from his desk as editor-in-chief of my favorite vintage magazine, House & Garden, for thirty-five incredible years, from 1914 to 1946.

I think I've had Richardson Wright in my labels here and at Dewena's Window more than any other author except for Gladys Taber. Today I'm not going to put a single sentence from the charming man as yesterday I read him just for myself, not as a blogger.

But here is his picture, once again. 

Richardson Wright, my literary crush....