Saturday Morning in the Hills

I’m cooking green French lentils with bay leaves to go into a salad with fresh mint, red onion, and goat cheese.

The world is coming into bloom. Fruit trees as well as acacia and mustard weed now; in another week or two my lime tree. Everyone is out—with dogs, with horses, bicycling, walking in straw gardening hats, digging up clumps of long grasses from the rain-soaked, black soil, observing the Sabbath at the synagogue next door.

image: Vincent Van Gogh, Blossoming Almond Tree, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; photo by xanne from the Netherlands