'....... A rare and gentle thing'

I started writing this on Saturday, so it relates to the last days of October.

It's been a strange week, the clocks went back last weekend and it has taken me most of the week to adjust my body clock. The weather  has been surprisingly warm and pleasant for the start of November so the darker evenings seem strangely out of place. The autumn has always been my least favourite time of the year, and the dark evenings with their reminder of the long winter months ahead have left me feeling a bit out of sorts. Robbie is working away at the moment so I only see him at the weekends, it's an arrangement that works well for both of us, but I miss him - there's a limit to the conversation skills of a cat, even an extremely eloquent one like Dave. Our family has a huge black cloud hanging over us at the moment, something which I don't feel able to discuss in detail on the blog but it makes thinking ahead very difficult. I have plenty of work and other responsibilities to keep me busy and usually I am quite good at living in the present, but the dark evenings and the challenges of this week have got the better of me. 

It may not mean much to anyone else but something happened on Wednesday morning which felt like a sign of hope. When I woke up I became aware of a slight fluttering which was odd as I hadn't left the bedroom window open. I realised that there was a butterfly in the bedroom and it had settled on Robbie's bedside table. It stayed there for a while and then it settled on the net curtain so I opened the window for it to go out when it was ready. I got on with my morning routine and didn't go back into the bedroom for an hour or so, I expected that the butterfly would have gone on its way but I was surprised to see that were now two butterflies on the window. I don't remember having a butterfly in my bedroom before and I'm certain that there have never been two. In fact I don't recall seeing a butterfly so late in the year. I managed to get a photo of the first one, I think it's a Small Tortoiseshell, the photo quality is not very good but it was nice to be able to see it close up, it was beautiful, so fragile with the delicate colouring of a watercolour painting.

      

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you” - Nathaniel Hawthorne