In the morning I woke to the banging of windows. The wind howled, knocked, tore at the window screens and scattered light things across the terrace. Dogs were quarrelling, roosters were screaming hysterically.
The wind was a surprise, promised by no weather station except the inner, bodily one.
For our traditional evening promenade yesterday, the goal chosen was a trip for potatoes to the nearest shop, Akvilon. We walked past the flower shop, which by our walking hour is always already closed. It was closed yesterday too, but a flower truck had arrived, and bags of soil were being unloaded. I so wanted to peek inside, just with one eye, and said so to the owner in words and gestures, making a spyglass with my hands. The owner did not speak Russian and did not understand much either, but he seemed delighted by my gesture:
“The driver was astonished, the tram came to a halt.”
And with a smile he let me into the shop — to look with one eye)).
That eye immediately snatched from among the abundance of flowerpots and blooming plants a delicate scattering of tiny violet flowers, whose name I asked yesterday, even managed to learn, and by morning had forgotten again.
Something reminiscent of tender wafer tubes with vanilla cream, served at Cappuccino on Shtemenko Street.
Or, for some reason, Venice, with narrow boats sliding over dark water...
I have not been to Venice, however, but I know about boats no worse than I know about vanilla sticks with an equally Italian name.
It is good that I did not leave the violet flower miracle on the balcony overnight: the wind would certainly have tried to carry it off.
As for the potatoes, by the way, we almost forgot them yesterday, seduced by a big watermelon — which is not a watermelon at all in Bulgaria, but a melon — by fresh honey, peppers and brynza to bake together for lunch, and by beer mugs that I suddenly needed urgently for work. But that is still a secret; please do not tell anyone.
True, ashamed of ourselves, we went back from the cash desk for a symbolic little bag of potatoes.
And nothing, it seemed, foretold this hooligan wind, yet it howls outside the window, lashes the bushes and grasses, flutters the curtains like merry Rogers flying over the sea, and laughs cheerfully at the plans of neighbors who like to fry themselves in the sun.
But the wind does not frighten us!
The violet flower is beautiful, no worse than the scarlet one — as people say: to each their taste and color... There is a sea of paper and paints, and outside, below, beyond the road descending between houses and trees in a humane serpentine, there is also the sea, all covered with whitecaps. Only my unfinished — or rather endless — work with the half-painted eustomas looks angrily at me from the easel, like a Red Guard from a Moor poster:
Have you finished painting the eustoma?
And I get out of bed, taking my eyes away from the white sea-lambs — “Draw me a sheep,” I remember — and go to make tea, so that after breakfast I can quickly finish the unfinished. For the new American watercolor board is already waiting for me, and the rhododendron, and the violet babies, and the beer mugs that are still our secret. The Bulgarian peppers not yet baked are waiting, the whitecaps on the bright-blue sea are waiting too — for how can one not paint them when for ages the request has been sounding:
Draw me a sheep...
The day has begun, ladies and gentlemen, the day has begun))
Spend it well, my windy ones; the morning is good!
P.S. Only do not walk in a strong wind! Unless you have not been to Kansas for a long time))
