Beyond the Garden Gate

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world. Oscar Wilde I try to infuse my life with beauty and simple pleasures as much as I can.  Like my previous post where I talked about flowers by my kitchen sink add a touch of beauty and bring pleasure to a mundane and sometimes dreaded task. I think the world is just to full of yuck, hate, separation, stress, worries, pain, etc. And our home should be a refuge. A place where we can rest, breathe, find solace. When we are at home our souls should be at rest, or as much as possible, I don't think we'll ever be at rest until we're united with God like St Augustine writes in his confessions  “ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You". But you get my point. One of the ways I like to infuse my home with beauty and make it comfortable to be in is by trying to always have baked goods for snacks.  Baking is something I find infused with pleasure from the moment I put...

It's one of my all time favorite times of the year... Peony time!  Seriously when I moved to the US and saw for the first time this beautiful, fragrant, feathery, giant, fluffy, soft, ball of pink puff my life has never been the same. I look forward to this time every year specially when I had my flower shop open... I miss it so I might re-open soon But we found out not all Peonies are the same and they all NOT smell the same... yes... normally I like to keep the feathery ones for our house because they are just so fun but the thing is when they are closed it is kind of a guessing game. What will it be? What color? Mixed colors? Hmmmm... By the way, did you know that peonies when closed they are covered in sugar? Yep, they open when the sugar dries or the ants eat it allowing the petals to start to expand. Sometimes for events if they were too closed I'd run them under warm water to wash the sugar off (I have heard of people licking the sugar off and they are edible but don...