5909 Athlone - Kerrisdale circa 1989

On the back of that first Polaroid - my handwriting - and I was a newbie H. 'Halcyon' never had white flowers

Every day is a day in which I think of why am I alive and what is my duty for the day. Not knowing how much time I have left (statistically not long) I perform my daily menialities of feeding my cats, vacuuming and deciding what I will eat.

Legacy combined with being surrounded by stuff, compels me to organize and decide what goes and what stays. It is easy to delay it for the next day. But I keep at it.

The Polaroid back attaches to my Mamiy RB-67 Medium format camera

Consider the envelope I found in a large plastic container with as-yet-to-be-filed family photographs and negatives.

In it are these Polaroid prints that have a charm of being all in themselves unique. I have scanned each one individually and corrected the colour shift of time as they may have been taken around 1989.

I was nuts over my many hostas and I did not tire then in shooting closeups of the leaves. I was yet to persuaded by my Rosemary to the beauty of her perennials and our soon interest in old roses. And the idea of scanning our and my plants was still in far future.

The garden and the house burned to the ground on Halloween night 2019 and broke Rosemary’s heart. I could not go back and I have not gone back.

Perhaps my favourite hosta is the elegantly blue Hosta ‘Halcyon’. Somehow as I look at these photographs of our superb garden that I shared with my Rosemary and now with her and the garden gone I believe that while the Polaroids may be discarded by my daughters when I am gone, that their presence in this blog is an instant legacy of halcyon days gone by that I can enjoy now. They were, indeed, halcyon days.

Later it is of no concern to me.