Seeker

One of the joys of spring is there are now more days when I can hang the washing out to dry in the garden. I have done that today.  Almost every time I have done that since my mother died in the spring of 2013, I remember her. As I perform my mother's same actions, taking pegs from their bag, hanging washing on a rope line in the garden, the memories are vivid. Some of those memories are from childhood when I watched or helped her hang the washing, or learnt from her how to count the pegs, "1 peg, 2 pegs, 3 pegs..." Others are from my teen years when I could take responsibility for the task, although my methods of hanging were different from hers. (They still are!) More recent memories are of my mother in her nineties,  vulnerable to falling,  eager to hang the washing out in the sun or take it in when it was ready to iron or the rain started. Towards the end, when she had a live-in carer, she no longer needed to hang out the washing or take it in, or do the ironing....

My father would have been astonished at me posting a steam locomotive photo. (Not my photo - see below.) Had he lived long enough to blog he might have blogged about steam trains. When I told him I couldn't understand this enthusiasm, his joking response was,  "women have no soul".   I think he may have been quoting someone - Aristotle? Tell me if you know the origin. For some people seeing or operating steam engines is a REAL TREAT - I'm beginning to understand that, thanks to Fred Dibnah  and other enthusiasts like my husband. So, if you're a steam enthusiast, in the words of the well-known ad, 'treat yourself, because you're worth it'. Find a steam engine to play with! I won't.  But I do like a treat. One of my regular treats comes as a gift through a blog I follow. Dave Perry's Visualtheology blog (successor to davesdistrictblog) has superb original photos and interesting reflective writing from a Christian perspective. I like the...