In the Sunshine

Last Friday we drove to an unfamiliar Montreal neighborhood, in search of a particular Middle Eastern restaurant. At 11;30, on a beautiful sunny day, the cafés were all getting ready: every restaurant had its tables set out, its windows open, the wait-staff ready for lunchtime customers.

We liked the sign in the window of this health-food/natural-products store:

Flower shops and grocery stores had flats and pots of flowering plants on the sidewalk, attracting lots of attention. We found our restaurant and took a table on the terrace, right across from a florist. For the next hour we watched as cars pulled up, people got out, made their purchases, and went back to their cars, or on down the street on foot, carrying armloads of beautiful color.

Our meal was pretty too; here’s what it looked like to start with. That’s tea, a delicious light red lentil soup, warm pita, and a bowl of olives, hot peppers, and crunchy beet-stained turnip pickles. It continued with grilled kebab for J., and a fattoush salad for me, sprinkled with sumac. Oh, and that highly-prized ingredient: sunshine.

 

Late that afternoon, we came back down to Vermont, and yesterday and
today we’ve been working outside. There’s a lot that’s wonderful about Vermont, especially the clean air, the greenness, the rural quality which is unfortunately being eroded in this particular area. I’ve decided that my transition-culture-shock is worst when I have to go to the local mall, where franchises and big box stores are proliferating like mosquitoes in a swamp. I want to shop where "Hippies are Always Welcome" – and I’ve kind of made a decision that when we’re here, I’m going to go to the places that retain the true Vermont character: like the local food co-op, and the general store in the next town where the motto on the door is "if we don’t have it, you don’t need it." I went there yesterday and came home with a rake, suet cakes for the bird feeder, milk, knitting needles, and two pork chops.

This morning we went, in the early morning sunlight, to the best local nursery, where you
can lazily browse through a dozen greenhouses full of annuals,
perennials, vegetable plants, vines. In my favorite greenhouse, devoted to specialty foliage and flowering plants, we found this
oriental carpet of coleus, and a magic fuschia forest.

I came home with plants for a big pot on the back porch: two coleus in shades of apricot, dark purple and green, one with large leaves and the other with very finely divided, almost fernlike ones with pink edges; two sweet potato vines – one chartreuse and one almost black; and some lovely pansies, medium size, in a clear apricot/orange color.

And, because I need hardy things  that will survive during the days I’m gone, I didn’t buy the most astounding plant I saw today, something from the tomato family but looking totally alien – "it’s  a punk plant!" said the greenhouse owner when I asked him what it was – with stiff olive-green leaves from which protrude inch-long bright orange thorns. It was wild!

Back in my own garden, I planted scarlet runner beans, sunflowers, cosmos and nasturtiums while the cardinal and woodpeckers and purple finches chattered from the trees and the feeder.

Amazement and beauty seem like they’re following me everywhere.