Making Limoncello

A  friend came to visit yesterday and brought me a bottle of Limoncello liquor and a card with it saying "When life hands you a lemon, drink Limoncello."
So I'm looking for the limoncello moments in my life right now, stuck here recuperating slowly from a fractured pelvis and I have to say there are many. Like all those lovely displays of flowers that arrived right after my accident, and then the constant procession of friends who stop by to cheer me up and offer to do things. One emailed and said "this is a list of my moveable feasts. Choose one and i'll bring it over." So she and husband are coming to dinner next week and bringing the dinner.

The other gift I am enjoying is the gift of time. I'm usually in full rush mode. Finish book to deadline, send out mailing, check Facebook page, plan for speaking engagement etc etc etc.
Now I actually have time to read, to watch a movie or just sit and think. My chair is in the front window where I can see the street and the hills above us. This week I watched a heron flying low past my house. I watch the new deer twins in my front yard.

And I watch flowers grow.

An amazing thing just happened. Two years ago someone left a flowerpot with a few leaves of some kind of bulb in it on my front porch of my condo in Arizona. Since it was up a flight of stairs I wondered who would take the trouble to bring a discarded pot up and dump it on my doorstep. But I kept the pot, stuck it outside on my balcony in California and have watered it from time to time. This year... two years later...it suddenly shot out a shoot. A big fat shoot with a bud on the end. And then one day it blossomed into an amazing Amaryllis, getting better with every day.

One of the small miracles of life that I'm enjoying.

Then a friend brought me a really weird orchid. She said she looked for something mysterious for me and to start with I thought it was creepy. Now I find it fascinating. For one thing it seems to turn to look at me. The flowers are never facing the same direction twice in a row. I'm thinking of using it in a future mystery novel. I can almost hear it whispering, "How about if the victim is strangled with the tendril of a tropical vine? Or poisoned with the juice of a rare poisonous plant?

I keep meaning to ask John to bring up my watercolors so I can paint, but frankly I'm too busy!