the scarf. after.

I don't have a "before" shot of this scarf.

I bought it in a "charity shop" (as they call thrift shops in Ireland) in a rather disreputable part of Dublin. I think a paid a Euro for it. It reeked of cigarette smoke and took countless washings in the good-smellingest soap I had before the water ran clear and the musk was off it.

When it gets wet, there's still a bit of an off-smell to it, which I attribute to its once having been dry-cleaned. Not that I know this for a fact, but I do know that once you dry-clean something, you never quite lose a bit of a chemical smell, especially if you try to wash it, thereafter. That's the smell it gets, wet.

I wore it to the Greenwood the day before the clearing began. I took it off when I got too warm hauling dead branches and small trees into the L.o.D. ("limits of disturbance") so that excavator-man (pictured right) would haul them off with the trees he was taking down. Somehow the scarf got left behind. I found it again on Saturday, on the walk after our picnic. It was a sodden, muddy mess.

This time, having laid out in the sun and rain, the red flowers ran and stained what had been a mostly white background. It is mostly white no more.

I was kind of upset at first, but the more I look at it, the more I like it. It's much richer looking now. It's not just the red phantom migrations, but it's also green and brown ones either from the scarf itself, or from the mud, leaves and rain of the Greenwood. You can't really see it in the picture. Sorry about that! You'll have to take my word for it.

I've noticed that the older I get, the less I like things to "match". I don't want things all the same colour. The minute variations are pleasing to me. What a difference it would make if all snowflakes were the same, for example! And how rich - instead - the infinite variation.

We start out, though, wanting conformity, order, and what passes with us for "perfection" - which means little more than a cookie-cutter sameness, be it in shape, size, or colour.

Life isn't like that, though, is it? I guess it's convenient that I've come to appreciate the marks that living seems to leave on us. Good and bad.