Well, this is a first. After all the build up. By mid-day we had to make the difficult decision to postpone the party. After all these years. I haven't seen rain like it in quite sometime. One look at the rain radar online showed the whole country covered in rainclouds far into the night. The main focus of the party each year is the bonfire and sitting out under the stars at this magic time of year, so sitting in our little house was not going to do it really.
Boo!
A few people turned up and we spent the day and evening eating and chatting and it was lovely.
And next weekend we will do it for sure, and I don't care what the weather does. It can't possibly be as bad as today!
I took a photo of the ten minute peep of sun we had as dusk came. Then that was that, back to the rain.
And it rains...
Not to worry the party will be just as wonderful next week! I wish I could come.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as if you had a wonderful evening despite the weather.
Solstice
ReplyDeleteby Ellen Dudley
On the first full day of summer the sun is up
the sky as far as it will get and now it will
head south to warm the Antipodes, where today
it rains and gales blow up from the Antarctic.
Here it is summer already, the lawn mowed, garden
weeded and nostalgia for summers past makes her
way into this place. The years of WWII bunkers
on South Beach and the tar coating our feet from
the boats out there and green-eyed Billy, now gone to
fat and trouble, trying to pull me through his bedroom
window. Now, Lily Briscoe paints the lighthouse again,
and my cousins across the yard. And the others, all
of them. Grown middle-aged... or dead or sick and
their children, for Christ’s sake, all grown up.
We were something. The great bonfire on the beach
and sex in the dunes with someone I would
never see or taste again, and hanging on each
other before the fire. The other years: crossing
the Tyrrhenian Sea in a summer storm, fearing
the boat will sink because they have, they do.
Below decks everyone pukes and prays to Dio,
Deo, Allah, so I go above and lash my sleeping
bag to the deck rail and wedged between
the bulkhead and two steel rods, I sleep. Nothing
between me and the wild ocean but a clothesline
rope. And awake as we chug into Brindisi, all
of us repeating grazie, grazie as we disembark to live
another summer. Now, all these years on, we
see another summer coming, relentless in
its blooms and breeze and thunder rolling up
the valley and apple blossoms strewn like snow
flakes on the ground.
What a brilliant poem! It captures so much of a particular time of life I think most people can relate to and someday feel nostalgic about!
ReplyDeleteThanks Dad!
I'm sorry your party was washed away in rain.
ReplyDeleteI came via Gracia. I love your year at the backdoor. Such a beautiful idea, and amazing photos. I wish I could hear the birds:)