Monday Morning Rainbows!

On our walk this morning, my eldest son and I came across this spectacular display.

Photo: M McAdam

I know it looks like two rainbows but there were in fact three.

Photo: M McAdam

See if you can spot the third one just beneath the bottom rainbow.

Cleveland Dam Photo by M McAdam

Here’s wishing you all a magical week 🙂

What inspires your writing?

 

I am inspired by the changing Seasons and the inevitability of change.

This is our first Spring in our new house and the garden is bursting with treasures!  I wish I could tell you I am a Mrs Green Fingers but that distinction falls squarely on my husband’s broad shoulders.   He has been pottering around in our tiny greenhouse since mid-Winter coaxing green beings out of their protective casings.

Often while I watch him, I am reminded of my maternal grandmother who used to sing to her plants in the sunroom.  It was obvious the plants enjoyed her fussing and attention just as much as they enjoyed her singing.   I used to squeeze my child body between those pots and hide under those broad and lush leaves when I wanted to get away from doing things household chores.

I wasn’t very good at doing things when I was a child.  I was quiet happy to just be.

So while hubby does the work of calling forth miracles I take pictures of our garden beings.  Aren’t they lovely?

If you know the name (Latin or otherwise) of the bottom right plant please let me know as it is a wonder isn’t it? of feathery pink leaves and tiny white bells.  I imagine when the wind blows those bells ring and fairies come out to dance.

 

I am inspired by the city I live in.  Vancouver.

I grew up in a dusty African city so to (finally) live in a city surrounded by sea and mountains is a dream come true for a water baby like myself.

 

See the seals sunning themselves on the logs?  My spirit kin! 🙂

Since moving here I find my short stories and my work-in-progress are populated with references to water and sand and concrete.

Cityscapes offer a variety of settings for writers, don’t you agree?  A myriad of plot opportunities.  Fortunes, good or bad, signed and sealed in boardrooms, pummelled in alleyways, lauded in bars and captured in apartment buildings.

But for me none more appealing than that house in the suburbs.  You know the one.  The one wearing the subtle signs of discord in the peeling paint, the hanging gutter, the empty seat at the dinner table …

 

What inspires your writing?  

 

What makes a place “home”?

A dear friend of mine who is considering a permanent move to Paris asked me the other day what I think makes a place ‘home’.    It got me thinking.  I have been fortunate enough to live in different countries and in various settings before coming to Beautiful Vancouver.  In my early twenties I lived for six months in a rural village in Portugal.  I loved getting up with the roosters and sitting down to a breakfast of fresh bread and milky coffee served in soup bowls!  I loved feeding the chickens and working in the vineyard.  There was so much to love about the place and the country but I certainly wasn’t “home” and I knew it.   I have lived in crowded and dirty cities and  I have lived in history-rich and architecturally-dazzling cities that weren’t ‘home’.   I have lived with family and friends and I have lived in my city of birth; a stone’s throw from the hospital I was born in.  And yet,  I wasn’t ‘home’.

Then I came to Vancouver.  I saw it from the air as the plane circled the city before landing and I just knew.  I was home.  To me ‘home’ is the place where your soul is at peace.

What makes a place ‘home’ to you?