Today a storm passed through, reversed/returned or swirled back on itself and crashed and over the city again ... a storm so powerful that, for now, the air is clean and sweet-smelling. It's reminds me of New Zealand ... where I know almost all of the scents that you will find in the South Island air.
The thyme-filled Central Otago air, the rainforest lake air of Te Anau, the merging of beech forest and ocean spray down at Tautuku - photographed at the end of this link to another rain post. Then there's the glacial rock and ice scent, mixing with the huge forests on the wild west coast, and jasmine-scented harbour air on the verandah of my Broad Bay house back in Dunedin ...
And that's me, the woman sitting next to my open window here in Antwerp while Spring rain continues to splatter nosily down. The rain is so juicy and sweet-smelling that I am compelled to stop and open the other side of the window occasionally, undoing all of the good that the insect screen does, just to lean out and inhale the delicious scent of wet vegetation ... created by a garden so lush that the smell of it reaches my first floor window here.
Maybe I'm 'involved' in too many things ... is the thought that occurs to me as I try to organise my desk as a viable working space after Italy, on this much-cooler Sunday morning in Belgium.
I'm trying to organise all ... there are the things I want to blog about from Genova, the photography workshop material I'm printing and organising, the Inspiration workbook material I'm preparing for the 5-day workshop in Italy, and the book on Genova I'm putting together ... and then there's everything else that interests me too. Reminders, notes, the appointments book, and and and.
To my left my bookshelves are overflowing with books read and unread but I love that state of being. No pressure, just pure anticipation. There was the secondhand beauty I found just before flying - Pablo Neruda, Memoirs. And I'm still meandering through Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days.
Both books were too heavy to take with my camera gear and laptop as hand luggage, as I acknowledged that sad lack of escalators in Italian railway stations. A lack that has twice made me consider abandoning my luggage there at the bottom of the stairs as I looked up.
Yesterday, pre-massive night-time thunderstorm, I lay on the bed for a while and zipped through the delightful story of a wandering cat and its owners efforts to track it - titled Lost Cat. Pure lazy luxury.
And I'm still dipping in and out of Paul Kelly's 100 chapter biography (although not the version I've linked to. No cds included in my copy and, sadly, too heavy to contemplate carrying to Genova), and the Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West because they're the kind of books that invite dipping. I discovered 'Portuguese Irregular Verbs' at my .75 cent secondhand book supplier (so many good books found at this price) and it's waiting there in the queue. And finally I am reading 'TinkerBell, in the Realm of the Never Fairies with Miss 9. It's an excuse for us to hang-out up here, in the cool of the evening, reading and chatting. We're looking for the next big series read but will put that decision off a little longer.
I'll leave you with a story-scene from medieval Genova.
The bite of a mosquito or some other insect turned feral on Friday. I woke with a small disaster on my ankle and by Friday afternoon, I was at my local pharmacy, asking if she had anything for it.
She told me she had seen a few like it recently, the mozzies are mean this late late Spring and suggested anti-histamine which I didn't quite feel was right. She sold me some cortisone cream and suggested I draw around the edge of the redness. If it continued to spread, I would need a doctor. I knew that but had never thought of drawing around the edges of it.
So I drew around it, applied the cream but by bedtime, it was a bit hotter and I wasn't enjoying the feeling of air on the skin there. Saturday, preferring to ignore these things, I applied the cortisone cream and pottered about but in the back of my mind my experience with cellulitis.
Years ago I barely escaped an antibiotic IV and hospital which, in retrospect, may have been simpler that complete bedrest and 6 courses of antibiotics, 2 at a time.
Retrospect ... everything is so much clearer then.
I decided not to be a baby (because this New Zealander is tougher than tough, in a chickenhearted kind of way sometimes) and went shopping with Gert in the afternoon, we had errands to run but my throbbing ankle made me take a look mid-shopping expedition. The area was a bit too red. Gert sent me out to the car and finished up, then we wandered over to the emergency doctor ... with me still humming and haawing about it all. You really had to prove you were injured or sick when I was growing up. That kind of thing sticks. 'Was I just being neurotic?'
The doctor took a look and reassured me that it wasn't cellulitis but that it did need some attention. That I could ice it if I wanted to, should cover it, and must take antibiotics.
Antibiotics and I have a history. They often affect me worse than the thing they are fixing. So I woke up this morning, the heat had gone out of the area round the wound and it has turned a big corner but, by crikey, I feel miserable. 18 doses of antibiotic to go ...
So I'm bed-resting and reading today and have some excellent books next to the bed. Paul Kelly's How To Make Gravy is superb. And I'm playing his A-Z soundtrack as I devour it... it's the music he writes his 100 chapters of book about. I couldn't travel with this book, it's a monster but tightly written. Nothing boring yet. He's an old hero of mine. His Midnight Rain is the song I have loved best for years.
I found a TED talk Paul gave about the book ... with a song too. It might give you a sense of what I love about him and his music so I added it at the end of this post.
