The petals of yesterday

Dear Lady Ursula!

Barely a day has passed since your departure and I feel the days have crumbed into as if petals. Yes, petals strewn over the lawn that I must collect and conjure into the tulips of A Tale of Our Teas. Did I say Teas? Oh, no. I meant Tinis! Tinis, my dear Lady Ursula, tinis!

I hover over this idea of capturing the essence of your visit as scissors do over torn pages of the OED to be sheared and shuffled into a storyboard. As memory floats does over petals. Those fallen ones, curling into a pallor, fading fast unless we scoop them up and coax them into a floral prosthesis. Those petals so wan like words scattered, unclaimed...need I say...unspoken? Like language. Language with words. A hush of words.  Or maybe spoken but silently, like the whisper of a blogger into the ear of a gentle listener? O process, process! do not fail me now!

For such is story-telling is it not? It is not unlike the tremulous reclustering of petals into the blooms from which they have collapsed away.  Each petal an afterghost of a merriment, a telling, now a retelling I with to capture. For the reader. O reader, I call to you over the hills of time? Can you hear me? More importantly, can you listen without hearing? How shall I reconvene mere petals into a calyx  of days so delightful with a dear confidante? I shudder. I draw my long tasselled shawl around me. I quiver like a word about to meet its mark. And then I sigh and sigh and sigh. And sigh. Where is Ethan? And then I remember. He has been replaced. By a fireman. Who is now on duty. Elsewhere.

So then I pour the tea myself and sip it and drink it and stare long and hard into the accumulation of tea leaves at the bottom of the empty cup. Will they tell the story? Will they tell the memory of your telling visit which left an indelibility in my guest book? Will they?

Or shall I have to tell it?

I trust your return to the Isles of the Diamond Jubilee has met with your favour. I, for my part, am still in pursuit of the Lady Percy, who will not yet show her face. But I will find you Percy, I will hunt you down and corner you in some distant parlor and serve you your porridge! You have been put on notice!

I wave to you Lady Ursula, from afar, with fragranced gloves!

Lady Crumpet