Ring at my door and I may not be home. Ring at my heart and I always am.

At l'Eglise de Compesières even the door leading to the powder room is enchanting...

You pull open the heavy wooden portal only to enter a stone floor room, pitch black, with two doors leading off to the right. If you're lucky, you pick the powder room door; if you're not so lucky, you greet the Mayor in his office.

But the minute you wrap your freezing fingers around this ancient handle, imagination begins to spin and dance - and the music you hear groping its haunting fingers toward you lures you back to the holy sanctuary...

I've been gone ... I know.

But the doors through which I entered were so magical and astonishing, so lovely and dreamlike that I have wondered how I could bring just a bit of the fairy dust that showered me your way.



Last week I was invited to a concert in Geneva, with Mozart that would melt your heart. It did mine.



Would you like to see pictures of the ancient church in the country that gave agonizing birth to luscious strains of music on a cold and snowy night?

Looking out or looking in? Perhaps the out of doors is actually the inside where we belong, and huddling in our houses puts us on the outside of where we were meant to be.

It is still grey out, and I am still inside. Coffee anyone?

Weeks and weeks and weeks of drizzly grey; snow holds off but so does the sun, and it grows increasingly challenging to maintain the optimistic mood.

So I bought myself a hyacinth, guaranteed spring the minute you walk in the door, and set it on the sideboard without thinking. And then I saw friendship nestled under its generous arch ... and then I saw what friendship does to that which is grey and dreary and in need of spring.

Hyacinths are spring - they are laughter and complicity and the promise of all that is copious. I've been watching the frozen ground for my own garden to grow...

xo

bit of beauty - drop of peace

Sunday afternoons along the quay. I'm reading by the bank - won't you come sit beside me? Water trickles and splashes against rusted moorings, icy wind chills and chaps a winter face.

But there are rosy smiles to be had and furtive glances from a mysterious parallel-world accomplice. Where has your mind taken you today? Do tell!