The Blue Rose

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She woke to a murder of crows.

The noisy fluttering and cawing came from an entire family of them, as they took off from the top of a towering cedar in the meadow behind the wall.

Kate Sheppard yawned, stretched and sat up on the rickety old white bench. How long had she been napping, she wondered. Rubbing her eyes, she gazed up at the birds, now black specks disappearing in the hazy distance.

A murder of crows. Who thought that one up?

A parliament of owls; a mustering of storks…an exaltation of larks.

An exaltation of larks. That, she decided, was her favourite.

Why on earth did she retain such useless trivia? She was getting as bad as Alex, her husband – he was a veritable repository of frivolous facts, figures and minutiae, always bringing them up at dinner parties.

Kate yawned again. It was unusually warm for the time of year. She felt like taking another forty winks. Glancing down between the slats of the seat, she noted flakes of white paint on the ground. Another item for the ‘to do’ list. She reached into the canvas bag beside her and pulled out a small notebook with a pen clipped to it. Repair and paint white bench by Japanese maple, she wrote under the last line of the neatly printed list of items on the second-to-last page of the book. Since they had bought the old house the list had become something of a joke. Every day it got longer but few lines were ever crossed out. Alex was convinced they would be octogenarians before her zillion projects were completed.

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