In the morning I woke to the banging of windows. The wind howled, knocked, beat out the window screens and scattered light things across the terrace. Dogs were swearing, roosters were screaming hysterically.
The wind was a surprise, not promised by any weather station except the internal bodily one.
For our traditional evening promenade yesterday, the chosen goal was a trip for potatoes to the nearest shop to us, Aquilon. We passed the flower shop, which is always already closed by our walking hour. It was closed yesterday too, but a flower truck arrived and they began unloading soil mixes. I wanted so much to peek into the shop with at least one eye, and said so to the owner in words and gestures, shaping my hands into a spyglass. The owner did not speak Russian and did not understand it very well either, but he seemed delighted by my gesture:
“The driver was surprised, the tram stopped.”
And with a smile he let me into the shop, to look with one eye)).
That eye immediately caught, among the abundance of flowerpots and flowering plants, a delicate fine violet scattering whose name I asked yesterday and even managed to learn, but by morning had forgotten again.
Something resembling tender little sticks-tubes with vanilla cream, served at Cappuccino on Shtemenko Street.
Or, for some reason, Venice with narrow boats gliding over dark water...
I have not been to Venice, however, but I know about the boats no worse than about the vanilla sticks with the Italian name.
It is good I did not leave the violet floral miracle on the balcony overnight: the wind would certainly have tried to carry it off.
And about the potatoes, by the way, yesterday we almost forgot them, tempted by a large watermelon — which in Bulgaria is not a watermelon at all but a melon — fresh honey, peppers and white cheese to bake together for lunch, and beer mugs that I suddenly urgently needed for work. But that is still a secret; please do not tell anyone.
True, ashamed of ourselves, we went back from the cashier for a symbolic little bag of potatoes.
And nothing, it seemed, foretold the hooligan wind; but it howls outside the window, flutters the bushes and grasses, makes the curtains tremble like Jolly Rogers flying over the sea, and merrily laughs at the plans of the neighbors who like to roast in the sun.
But we are not afraid of the wind!
The violet flower is beautiful, no worse than the scarlet one — as they say, to each taste and color... there is a sea of paper and paints, and outside the window, below, beyond the road that descends humanely between houses and trees in a serpentine, there is also the sea, all covered with white lambs. And only my unfinished — or rather endless — work with the unpainted eustomas looks angrily at me from the easel, like a Red Guard from Moor’s 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” (c), I remember — and go to make tea, so that after breakfast I can finish what has not been finished; for the new American watercolor board is already waiting for me, and the rhododendron, and the violet little ones, and the beer mugs that are still our secret. The not-yet-baked Bulgarian peppers are waiting, the white lambs on today’s bright blue sea are waiting — for how can one not draw them when for what century now 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, after all, is good!
P.S. Just do not walk in a strong wind! Unless you have not been to Kansas for a long time))
