A Page From June

JadeTotti Mayıs 28, 2022

What happened on the first day of June before I kept a log online? I couldn't tell you. Did I stop to celebrate? To appreciate its beauty?

But I have a vivid memory of my tenth year and the happiness of June as I sat on the curb in front of our house. It was early morning on the final day of school. I was thrilled to be wearing new summer clothes, feeling the cool morning, and doing nothing more than sitting alone and watching the shadow of a tree mark time across the pavement until time to leave. The sense of freedom was exhilarating. Enough to cross the expanse of decades of hours since that hour and touch another day in June. . . .

This summer month seems made for youth and beauty. And besides a page from my personal past there are these wonderful pages from June recorded by Edith Holden in her Nature Notes of 1905. This volume is lesser known than The Country Diary of An Edwardian Lady which, though published earlier, was originally crafted one year later than this journal.

Edith never meant these drawings for publication. They were a teaching tool for the students she trained at the turn of the last century when drawing and watercolor was part of every genteel young woman's education. I would have been thrilled to have learned from her!

My copy is an American first edition, and one of my prized possessions. The perfect thing to share under a bower at the turning of time into June. It calls for the cool summer cottons reminiscent of an Edwardian lady from the English countryside. For fresh roses and laces. And for the memory of a season of youthful freedom under a shade tree. . . .