Smells like camping
There is this big window in the living room that faces, from left to right, the original veranda from the fifties with its teal venetian blinds, the backyard with its ancient rose bush, its infesting mint bush, the endless jasmine and generic hedges, the thriving persimmon tree, some bay bushes, many other aromatic bushes, a little tree whose blossoms look like peach tree blossoms, except that it is not a peach tree. Over the lush garden, there’s a brick-red house and many other trees and plants and also a cinematic palm tree that becomes golden red when the sun sets. This is my favourite window in the new apartment. I didn’t have to move back to my folks after all. After six months of searching in the cruel deserted estate market, we found a place for ourselves.
It smells like camping. There is the same quiet and the same pine tree smell, mostly during these deep blue summer nights, that you can expect when you go camping near the sea. It took three excruciatingly tiring weeks to get to this state of deep appreciation and calmness. Between a hiccup and a sob that lasted the lifetime of a fruitfly, I handed back the old apartment’s keys and my old car’s keys and by night I had a new room where to rest and a new car to learn how to park. It was two weeks ago.
Book: In Watermelon Sugar (Richard Brautigan, 1968)
In June we read Brautigan: it has to be read as you would eat a slice of watermelon, quickly before the juice runs down to your elbows. Just a few pages in, I’ve come across one of the most beautiful passages I’ve read in a while and it says: “If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer. That is my name. Perhaps it was raining very hard. That is my name. […] Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around. That is my name. Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened. That is my name. […] Perhaps you were lying in bed, almost ready to go to sleep, and you laughed at something, a joke unto yourself, a good way to end the day. That is my name.”
EP: SHHHHHHH! (King Krule, 2024)
The title alone is quite the amount of silence I chased for most of this year just to enjoy music once again.Tune: Cowgirl (Ora Cogan, 2023)
Our Legacy hand-crocheted necklaces with past collection leftovers (by Astrid Gustafsson)
Liz Rowland’s (ig @lizrowland) illustration on bathroom tiles
Summer mantra (source)
