Category: beauty

  • The colour brown: boring or eloquent?

    Brown is a September colour; it always makes me think of ‘back-to-school’, of walnuts and chestnuts on the ground, the bindings of books, tree leaves changing to tan and rust and fluttering off branches to dance on the wind. I don’t think brown gets enough respect. While it’s not flashy,…

  • Beware the Headless Horseman! — Sleepy Hollow Country in NY State

    My childhood was shaped by an eerie scene of cattails alongside a road that were beating, in the rising wind, a tattoo like ghostly hoofbeats upon a dark and lonely road. I’ve loved Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), an animated adaptation narrated by Bing Crosby, from…

  • Primeval, beautiful, dangerous water lilies

    The Great Devourer, as she’s known by all, prowls towards me, leaving no tracks and casting no shadow. She stops in front of me and says, I am here for you, Nenuphar. Apep has given me until the end of the Seventh Hour to cross the sands.   I can’t…

  • Spring blooms on earth and online

    On a beautiful spring day, gardens are usually the best places to be, and plenty of people were proving that this past weekend at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ontario. We were notified that, because of the unseasonable warm stretch we enjoyed for the better part of a week,…

  • Colours, glorious colours

    Are you a fan of magenta, aka fuchsia? It’s a striking purplish/reddish pink, a strong colour that I suspect invokes strong feelings in many of us. But this year, Pantone® Color Systems has named it their Color of the Year. If you’re not a graphic designer, fashion designer or other…

  • Longing for longer days and slower paths

    “There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right temp. Even a bicycle goes too fast.” – Paul Scott Mowrer Life moves quickly. Before we know it, the week has flown…

  • As Cold as Ice

    Tip of the iceberg. Skating on thin ice. As cold as ice. Ice in your veins. For the most part, the form of water or precipitation known as “ice” doesn’t connote good things. Some people, and some animals, feel differently. Bartenders, for example. Ice-cream manufacturers. And as famous marine biologist…

  • Blue Tuesday/Wednesday

    I started writing this post on Tuesday, which stretched into today due to the complexity of the subject, so the title was adapted for my own reality 😊 The colour blue is wildly popular around the world, but I have to confess that it’s not one of my favourites. I…

  • An enchanted journey becomes a holiday classic

    When my brother and I were children, my parents always kept a metal nutcracker in the house. Not the doll-like figure that graces households at Christmas in multitudes, but a twin-handled implement specially textured to be able to snugly hold a nut in its shell and then squeeze the handles…

  • A great book leads to a great movie and then an amazing travel experience

    “Sometimes we gazed through a succession of arches, its course very like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral. The great artistic sculptors and builders of the Middle Ages might have here completed their studies with advantage.” Chapter 16, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne ***…