Holidays, Hollyhocks and Dreams

Coming back from holiday is always slightly unsettling. It makes you look at your normal context and routines slightly differently. Things I hadn't noticed before I went away - like the two pairs of shoes completely caked in mud and waiting by the back door to be cleaned for a shameful seven months,  - seven months - how could I be so appallingly slatternly?! - are now glaringly obvious. Slightly unwelcome tasks that I like to put off, such as completing my tax return, which I felt before going away could be deferred almost indefinitely, suddenly seem no longer deferrable. Work of course hasn't stood still and even though I was only away for a week, all manner of things have been pressing for urgent attention, which adds to a sense of not being quite on top of life.

I am pleased to sleep again on my old familiar rosy pillows but there's no doubt that the period in the immediate aftermath of a holiday is a time when one questions some of the things that have drifted along without question before it.

Some of them settle back to drifting again and others remain wakeful and insistent and that's the interesting part. It's not always clear to begin with, what will settle and what won't.

Only time will tell. I found a slip of paper in a book the other day on which I'd copied out the following little poem. No idea where I found it or who wrote it but it's resonated this week.

"If you find a dream inside your heart

don't ever let it go

for dreams are the tiny seeds

from which beautiful tomorrows grow."

In the meantime the hollyhocks I pass every morning down the road are as glorious as they've been for the last six weeks or so and their consistent flowering reminds me that not all is in flux.

Every year they grow happily out of the crack at the base of the old, white, lime-washed wall beside the path. No one has planted them there - they grow all by themselves, self-seeded and self-supporting. They reach a good five, even six feet in height seemingly without need of soil or water. Their tall, sturdy stems produce an abundance of pale green, downy leaves and their satiny, papery flowers are just beautiful. The spreading petals have the colours and texture of old watered silk - pale rose-pink, magenta, and a slightly deeper, claret red. The powdery yellow stamens are loaded with pollen and surrounded by fine, pale, feathery filaments as soft as a caught breath. English cottage garden flowers at their best.

I have tried planting hollyhocks in the past without success but these seem to grow almost in defiance of deliberate cultivation.

There may be a lesson here about not trying too hard.

May be the dreams will do the same thing if I let them.