Just as I was getting used to the house being empty ... it filled up again.
Miss 8 was offered the chance to come back from Germany, with Mimi, and we all agreed it would be a grand idea. Then Gert's children arrived too, 2 days into that visit, and we had dinner guests last night.
I had been mad-busy processing a beautiful series of yoga photographs for a friend. Meanwhile Anna and I contine to fine-tune the itinerary plans for the 2 and 5-day photography and video workshops for women in Genova, Italy.
Suddenly life flipped again, and became all about cooking and cleaning, entertaining, expeditions, and long periods of reading Harry Potter aloud in the evenings. Sahara and I have been retiring upstairs to read after dinner ... we're up to Book 4 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I had never read the books or viewed the movies and so, we're both having fun.
Our book-reading sessions are often interspersed with long conversations about all kinds of things. Little Miss 8 is a wise woman indeed.
There has been a juggling act going on with the laundry and getting it dry around a multitude of thunderstorms and torrential downpours ... summer in Belgium has been 'interesting' so far, although Gert's garden is thriving.
This weekend continues with busy. Gert's kids leave but I'm photographing the 50th wedding anniversary of a friend's parents, and then there's this fabulous documentary photography experiment coming up. The one where I move in with the family for 24 hours and create a slice of life family portrait ... capturing formal through into informal moments. The children at play, bedtime stories and breakfast. Dinner, with everyone staying there at the moment, and the quiet times too.
It's exactly the kind of photography I adore and I'm so looking forward into exploring the feasibility of offering people this very intimate kind of documentation of their family life.
And then we have been gifted the use of a rather special house later in summer and it is there that I hope to finish up work on THE BOOK. Writing is often why I disappear to Genova simply because I fall off the world and into my writing, when I write. It's so often not an option here ...
And that's how it is here at the moment.