Seasonal offerings

I knew you’d all be fed up with the festive season by now, so I thought I’d give you a break from tinsel decorations and snow scenes, and reminisce with you about autumn. What? You think I took photos of autumn leaves a month ago, didn’t get round to writing the blog post, but am still determined to use them? You cynics.

I love autumn. It’s my favourite season, always has been. And I never knew how much I was missing out. The British autumn, I’m sorry to say, is really a bit thin, compared to the richness of the season here. You know how at the beginning of October, you get a few days where it is warm again and the sky is a deep blue, and everyone says how much they are appreciating this Indian summer? Well, this year, we had that kind of weather for about eight weeks, mid September to mid November. No rain, no wind, just day after day of perfect skies and exquisite warmth. The leaves that fell stayed dry, and raking them up was like building piles of cornflakes, rather than that sludgy mess that comes with raking wet British leaves. Altogether a different experience.

Nature seemed to appreciate the perfection of the weather too, and put on some beautiful displays. Trees in Britain have to get their shows done so quickly, and in the damp. A few days, and they need to get from green foliage to bare twigs. They manage a little colour, but have to speed on through to dead brown leaves pretty fast. The trees here have the luxury of week after week of slowly fading temperatures, and still have the energy to choreograph their colour changes with finesse. What impresses me most, is the way one tree can exhibit different colours at the same time. We had two trees in our garden that were, for days on end, red at the top, yellow in the middle, and still green at the bottom. Traffic lights. I couldn’t get far enough away from them to photograph them, more’s the pity, but here are some other examples I found.

Look how this tree shades itself from orange to green, left to right.



This one decided to do it from top to bottom.



These ones do it from the inside out. See how they’re red at the ends of their branches, but still green at the core, as if holding on to summer in their hearts while bravely waving their hands at the oncoming autumn.



Impressed? Just wait till you see this. Group choreography. These five babies have got together for a chorus line performance.



Great show, gals. (That isn't a floating roof, by the way. It's just that someone painted their store the exact same shade of blue as the autumn sky.)

Some trees are just too bursting with their own creativity to bother with that shading effect, and they mix up the colours in a great effusion. This one gives us a beautiful two-tone green and yellow.



I left in that stunning little red bush for you to see. What an effort it made – the least I could do was not to crop it out of the picture.

This one couldn’t wait to decide which colours to go for, so threw them all in together and mingled them up. The photo doesn’t do it justice. Click on it to enlarge it - go on, you know you want to.



I’m glad trees are rooted to one spot. If those British trees came over in the autumn, I’d hate to witness their feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment. It would be like meeting your best friends in Milan or Paris, and walking down the most fashionable shopping streets with them in their old cords and Fair Isle sweaters. We could console the trees with talk of differences in climate, and how they do their best against the odds, but I’m sure their branches would hang low and their leaves would droop. I’d hate to see that. Of course they wouldn’t really need worry, because the trees here, being American, would be supremely impressed by the sheer size of their towering British cousins, and their history. All those years laid down in concentric circles, from the time of their sapling youth when masked highwaymen hid in their shadows, and men in tights hurtled between them in pursuit of wild boar (my historical knowledge is poetic rather than factual...). Trees here are neither large nor old. Too many ferocious winds to which they must bow low, and too many ice storms to contend with, when their branches are broken off by the weight of the days-long accumulated ice.

To finish, here is a glorious display of autumnal splendour.



Look at the rich red, the startling yellow, the mellow ochre, the luscious green. Even that little shrub in the front is shimmering in maroon and silver.


Which one? Well, it's a bit small, I admit. You probably can't appreciate it properly.



I'll enlarge it for you - I'm sure it's well worth a closer look.




Those lovely autumn tones...




Hang on...









It’s a fire hydrant. I’m getting carried away here. But don’t think I’ll be moving on to Santa and polar bears yet. Oh no. This post was trees. The next is going to be leaves. Sorry.

Carnival time again

Potty Mummy is hosting a carnival for British Mummy Bloggers. I am British, and a Mummy, and a Blogger, so they let me in.


If you want to make the acquaintance of lots of fab bloggers, head on over here.
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Bright ideas, please

Bloggy Friends, I need ideas. I'm writing a piece for a local magazine on entertaining your kids during a power outage (power cut). So if anyone has a bright idea, or a link to a parents' website which covers this, then let me know. Please think a little beyond books, colouring books, pen and paper games, card games and charades - I've got those already.

I have very happy memories of power cuts in the '70s. My memory is a bit hazy, but I seem to recall my mother used to let us sit at the kitchen table and play with the candles - dripping wax onto plates, letting it cool, scraping it off and putting it back on top of the candle. Hours of fun, but I don't think I can responsibly recommend it, given that I have just read that more than 140 people die each year from candle-related home fires, according to the National Fire Protection Agency (they recommend flashlights in preference to candles as an emergency source of light).

Your fun ideas in the comments box, please.

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The accent is on

I know I talk about accents a lot, but in my defence, I am frequently required to talk about accents in my real life, so it seems only fair that I should be allowed to in my cyber life too. I'm very used to talking about my own accent. Most people remark on it, if they don't know me. Most of them say they love it. That's an easy conversation to have. "Thank you" I say, "it came for free. I didn't have to study it, or pay for it, or anything." It's a nice conversation (if a little repetitive).

This week I've had two rather different conversations about my accent. The first was in a park. A five year old girl came up and introduced herself to 4-yo and asked her to play. They spent a happy time, while the mother asked me where I was from, how long I've lived here... the usual. Then as 4-yo and I were leaving, the little girl came over, looking rather puzzled and intrigued. She finally came out with "You speak excellent Spanish".

This made me laugh, not only for the way she had misunderstood, but also because it was such a very polite grown-up phrase coming from such a little girl. I explained to her that I wasn't speaking Spanish, otherwise she wouldn't understand what I was saying, that it was English, the same as she spoke, but it just sounded a bit different. Her mother came to my rescue: "like Charlie and Lola - she's from the same place as Charlie and Lola".

I felt the cache I normally enjoy from my accent was a little depleted (if you've never heard Charlie and Lola talk to each other, then find a clip on youtube or listen to a story here, and you'll see why it's not the most flattering of comparisons). Then getting 4-yo's hair cut today at Master Cuts, one of the other clients, a young chap with an adventurous hairstyle, said "I love your accent" (no surprises there). "My room-mate's parents sound a bit like you. They're from England, I think, but I find them really hard to understand if they talk fast". "Whereabouts are they from?" I asked, gearing up for the appropriate variation on the northern/southern/Liverpudlian follow-up conversation. "Um... I think they're from Dubai".


Oh, and speaking of hairdressers, I have another hairdresser-and-accents story. I have had to find myself a new cosmetologist (as you'll remember they are called), as my old one has moved away to Connecticut. Most inconsiderate of her. So off I went to a new one. The usual format: she asked me how I wanted my hair, I chatted away to her about my hair while she was washing it, I then moved back to the vertical chair, and as she started to cut, she looked at me in the mirror and struck up a bit of polite conversation. But her opener was far from predictable: "So have you lived here all your life?" Her face was completely straight, not a hint of irony. I didn't want to embarrass her, so once I'd recovered from the shock, I just replied "No, we've been here a couple of years", and then asked about her. I mean, judging by other people's reactions, I don't pass for a local just yet.

I'd like to think it was a bet, and that as I left the cosmetology salon, the entire staff and remaining clientele erupted in yelping laughter and shouts of "I can't BELIEVE you did that!" But I don't think so. I think she just hadn't noticed my accent. Did a nice job on my hair, though.

Carnival time

Just to let you know, there is a blogging carnival going on over at London Mums Blog, which I am taking part in.



I've never joined in a blogging carnival before. It's rather fun.

Sweet Land

Whenever I've felt that moving abroad is tough and lonely and all those other self-pitying things that we expat wives notch up on our imaginary totem of hard-done-byness, I've always managed to find some comfort in comparing my lot to those of women in bygone ages. I always hated history at school, and wrote it off as boring and pointless. I now increasingly see the huge value of learning about the past, about past lives. Boy, does it make you thankful to be a 21st century woman.

The pioneers, those women who sat in covered wagons with their children, bumping along day after day after day, full of uncertainty, fear, loneliness, illness. No email, no telephone, no blogging, no antibiotics, no heating, no air conditioning. How pathetic they would think we modern day women are! "I don't understand the school grading system. I can't get decent sausages. The bacon is really fatty. Air travel is so expensive." I hang my head in shame.

Last night, I watched a movie "Sweet Land" - look it up on Netflix. It's set in the 1920s, when Inge arrives in Minnesota to marry a farmer she has never met. Because of her German background, she is unable to get the necessary papers to allow her to immigrate or marry. The local minister preaches against her from the pulpit ("her coffee is too black"), and life is bleak. It is a beautiful movie, which I thoroughly recommend if you're not in a hurry (emotionally, I mean, at 110 minutes the film itself isn't unusually long). Slow-moving (oh how those days must have dragged for her), with lingering shots of the land, the houses, the faces of the characters, it's full of the detail of life at the time, domestic, social and agricultural.

I loved Inge. Beautiful, composed, dignified, standing up for herself as best she can, treasuring her few possessions, a gramophone player and a smart hat. She arrives in a strange and hostile land, speaking only a few words of English, but has been sensible enough to include in her handful of learned phrases "I could eat a horse". That speaks to me of a woman who, facing her life's biggest adventure and biggest hardship, shrewdly and wisely decided where her priorities lay.

Holding out for a hero

Help. I’m all behind with blogging. I’m needing to do that Hallowe’en post and Hallowe’en is already old news, and I want to show you some more fabulous autumn colors - I’ve been out with my camera – but the weather is turning, and if I don’t hurry up, winter will be upon us and autumn will be yesterday’s story.

Today, though, I definitely need to put those on hold and say something about the election, because this morning, who wants to read about anything else?

If I could have voted, I’d have voted for Obama. And this is why. To quote Spiderman, that most admirable of superheroes, “with great power comes great responsibility”. My vote would have gone to the person who grasps that truth.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that that is the whole story. You have to be ambitious to get to be a presidential candidate – no-one could get there purely for their commitment to public service. The articles on “why Obama won” that I’ve read this morning all talk about the huge amount of money he raised for his campaign. And then even leaders who start out with the common good at heart may turn out to be corrupted by power. All that aside, though, the man does seem to have that quality known as ‘statesmanship’, an awareness of the awesome (in its proper meaning) magnitude of the job, and a vision of a future he wants to help shape. McCain has an impressive track record of service to his country, but I couldn’t credit anyone who sings “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of Barbara Ann with a serious awareness of what it means to be a world leader. I hear a sigh of relief round the globe this morning, and I add my own breath to it (but quietly, since I'm in a state McCain won).

Spiderman’s costume is both red and blue, but my guess is that in his spidery heart, he is more democrat than republican. Just a hunch.