Lime Green

Let me tell you about the smell of limes in the late-February late-afternoon, when the fire is lit and I have come down from upstairs where I have been working or playing in my study. And I bring a book for amusement, but my partner has been busy and he has the fire laid – so the first smell is the smoke that drifts – a tiny bit of it, enough to salt the room – into the living room as the fire starts to take. We close the curtains, because it is dark now or dusk, and we will not want to know what is happening out there – we are entirely in this world that we make for ourselves.

My partner brings out the book: Time-Life on how to make cocktails. He leafs through – what cocktail shall we have tonight? I am drifting through Twitter to see what the people I follow are having – Guy Gavriel Kay likes a Boulevardier – a version of Negroni made with bourbon instead of gin. We also like a Martini – dry, with gin, and a little dirty with an olive or three.

So I sit in the leather chair by the fire, reading my book, while in the kitchen my partner is mixing the drink of the evening – his favourite is the dark Negroni, so that’s what we’ll have tonight. Equal parts of gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. Somehow the herbs and alcohol of the gin, the bitterness of the Campari and the sweetness of the vermouth all weave together into a whole, the magic assisted by two lumps of ice, which break down the borders, making these neighbours huddle together and become one under the umbrella of darkness, a name full of suggestion, of blackness, secrets.

But the drink is not complete. I am still reading my book, lost in a fantasy world and sometimes in the fire as is struggles to conquer the wood and reduce everything to char.

A Negroni requires a touch of citrus. Some recipes say orange, Time-Life says lemon, but tonight we have neither, and so this will be a Negroni with lime. The recipe says do not twist, but a little twist releases the volatile oils in the fruit. If you could see it magnified, you would see a spray of lime essence, released into my glass, as the little bit of green is planted into the earthy brown of the drink.

For a Negroni is brown – rich red-brown like humus, or decaying leaves, and its smell is a complex of herbs and bitterness – the sweetness is never enough to let you forget that its essence is bitter. And when you use a bit of orange peel the colour and the smell tend to autumn – the colour of dying leaves, of ripening squashes and root vegetables. But tonight, we have lime. The smell is sharp, full of new growth and liveliness, acid like something restless and moving. And the colour is green. Not a mellow green – but a sharp bright insistent yellow-green – no one is going to sleep with this green in the room. This is not a fall colour. This is not a colour for winter, when we revel in the warmth of reds and browns. This is pure, unrelenting spring – WAKE UP!

How can there be this bit of green in my cocktail? Disrupting my fireside, the coziness of my rich brown alcoholic haze with LIME GREEN! There is still snow on the ground, but I am suddenly sure that when I stumble out in the morning, I will see the thrusting tips of snowdrops. The green of my lime peel is muted, softened by the swirl of earthy liquid, but as I sip, each savoured mouthful carrying just at the back of my teeth the hint of something sharp and green, the liquid level drops with every sip. Lower and lower, until, the last splendid sip gone, my glass has only this piece of lime, bright blinding green in the bottom of the glass.

Winter Bird Watching

Corvus brachyrhynchos, common crow

Black like green and metallic blue

Black and not black

like the colour your eye invents on the back of an eyelid

Lumbers into my yard

Racketing through my waking

Notorious thief of bright things

Harbinger

My Husband Laughing

I laugh when I think of how his facetious silly kind sweet person

takes me out of my dumps

how the dance of us is he towards me, me away

and then we turn

how he has an ease that I distrust

#

reading alone, he laughs out loud

and in distress, he laughs,

contagious, overwhelming, weird guffaws

spasm after spasm of his own cathartic storm,

how can it be real?

and yet….

#

Fifty years on and here he is

Still joking

Still tossing the world so lightly;

Surely he cannot understand the seriousness of it all.

He has tried to find darkness,

Brooding over Leonard Cohen

but it will not stick.

He rises from the swamp like some

Bubble of light spirit

Touched but quite unmarked

Subdued only until the next blissful chuckle

Which he will pull from his own

skewed and cheerful mind

Like a handkerchief of serenity

while I, the fine intellectual of angst

Still struggle in the mire

Refusing to take a hand.

#

He makes me laugh,

Dwells in an unintentional Zen state --

Meditation puts him to sleep --

Like a cat, lazy in the sun,

Resting his muscles for the quick hard hunt,

Unconcerned except for the next delight, his joy.

And I am – what miracle of Comus has done this –

I am that joy.

#

Spirit of laughter, let my gratitude rise up

in uncontrollable elation, let me hoot!

For what is love, what can be love,

That does not still surprise us with unbidden mirth?