You know when you’ve been stuck inside for a few weeks with sick kids, and your world has become very small and stuffy (yes, we’ve been keeping the window open, but still…), and you almost forget that anything exists behind your front door? And then you have the chance to emerge, even briefly, into the sunshine to take out the trash, and everything is so fresh and crisp and incredibly beautiful that you start spouting poetry? Well, that’s been happening to me lately.

The neighbours must shake their heads as I gaze around like a love-struck mole emerging from her tunnels and start blabbering ecstatically:

It’s so beautiful! There’s a whole world out here! The sun is so shiny and the birds are so chirpy! My soul rejoiceth whilst removing the rubbish…

Aha, there she goes again. The garbage poet. It’s pathetic. Always writing about trash.

Well, as long as my poems don’t actually belong in the garbage…

Perhaps Oscar the Grouch and I could write a book together. One of those great debate books…two opposing figures hash it out about life, love and excursions to the garbage can.
We’ll be fancy and call it “Poèms en route de la poubelle.”

I had been feeling a bit like this:

So I took a brief back yard escape:

And saw green and growing things like rosemary:

And winter kale:

A pretty statue:

A little escapee who flew over the fence of her coop:

The others watched her so longingly as she grubbed for worms that I released them, too.

They made such a mess mucking about in the fresh manure in the garden that they had to return to their confinement, and me to my duties…Meanwhile my three year old had snuck upstairs to my friendly neighbours, wailing in search of her missing mummy, whose aforementioned excursion outside was of unacceptable duration…

Ah, but it was beautiful while it lasted…