My phone surprises me sometimes by playing around with my photos without any active help from me. This is what it did with the only photo I took the other day when out walking. It then pinged me and asked if I thought the fancy edit was worth keeping. I decided that it was!
Sharing with Ruby Tuesday
These roses on a grave in the cemetery made me stop and look twice. Surely there is no such thing as a blue rose? …
Quite right: On closer inspection, they turned out to be artificial – dewdrops and all.
The question kept nagging me: Why?
Of course I’ll never know for sure what the person was thinking who put them there…
But when I googled “blue rose”, this is what I found:
Due to the absence in nature of blue roses they have come to symbolise mystery and longing to attain the impossible, with some cultures going so far as to say that the holder of a blue rose will have his wishes granted. (Wikipedia)
And then this poem by Rudyard Kipling, which totally convinced me that the choice of grave decoration must have been very deliberate, rather than just “odd”:
Roses red and roses white
Plucked I for my love's delight.
She would none of all my posies--
Bade me gather her blue roses.
Half the world I wandered through,
Seeking where such flowers grew.
Half the world unto my quest
Answered me with laugh and jest.
Home I came at wintertide,
But my silly love had died
Seeking with her latest breath
Roses from the arms of Death.
It may be beyond the grave
She shall find what she would have.
Mine was but an idle quest--
Roses white and red are best!
Scanning through recent photos for the colour red (for Friday My Town), these are what I came up with – from a short walk last weekend.
Actually what caught my eye in the playground was not really the locomotive (I’ve seen it before!), but the hopscotch course drawn in the sand. I’m not sure I’ve seen one of those since back in my own childhood!
And a rose, of course, “is a rose is a rose is a rose”…1
even if it might smell as sweet by any other name.2
(It’s “ros” in Swedish too, though.)
A friend unexpectedly brought me these roses today – and treated me to lunch as well! A nice break in the monotony of the cold that is still holding us in its grip.
Not sure why, but while admiring the subtle colours of the roses (later, when on my own again), a thought floated through my head that yellow roses were very appropriate for a Wednesday…
Er… What?!
Which made me realize that I think of the days of the week in different colours, but I have little idea why.
Taking a quick look around the internet - it seems I’m far from the only one to associate the days of the week with colours; but there also does not seem to be any universal truth as to how it should be. (And I can’t even say for sure if they’ve always been the same for me.)
Here’s how they appear to me:
Monday – blue
Tuesday – a pale pink (I think!)
Wednesday – yellow
Thursday – brown
Friday – dark green
Saturday – light green
Sunday – red
Now I’m curious: What do you see??
For Straight Out Of the Camera Sunday
I intended to write something witty here about how tired I’ve been today, but then I realized it won’t work in English. “sleeping like Sleeping Beauty” – sounds just silly, and not related at all to the photos… While in Swedish, the sleeping princess is called Törnrosa, and in German Dornröschen = Thorn-Rose…
Anyway, my Sleepy Sunday comes from a combination of raindrops on roses (as well as on everything else) and having had a rather busy Midsummer Friday and Saturday (together with my brother), including cracking our own da Vinci code, and perhaps even (fingers crossed!) a first step towards the process of selling the House.
The code-cracking had to do with dad’s filing system. He did a lot of railway history research in his day, and in July someone from the national Railway Museum will be coming to have a look at what might be of interest for them to preserve for the future. Hopefully it will be of some help that we managed to figure out dad’s system for cross-references to his photos!
We haven’t yet officially put the house up for sale - but on private request we showed it to a young couple this weekend. Early days… but there were some ‘good vibes’ and we’ll probably talk again.
“Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.”
~ Beatrix Potter ~
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It’s Macro Monday at Lisa’s Chaos
