Sunday Mornings used to be Coffee and Newspapers.
Do you remember those days? I loved the Sunday newspaper. How it was really fat, fat enough that everyone had a favourite section and took it off into a corner like a dog with a bone.
I also loved how – if you got Saturday right – then Sunday was a proper day of rest. Maybe a little gardening to clear a spot to rest. But lots of resting and people and catching up. Maybe wine later in the day or a little earlier if the people arrived.
What happened to my ability to just relax on a Sunday. (Rhetorical question don’t answer that).
In the days when I had kids in New Zealand, we would all do housework in a Saturday after school sports, then on Sunday I would make a monster salad, pop the bread in the oven then wander down to the shop to buy a bottle of wine and a newspaper and that was about all.
And in fact I was busier then, raising all those kids by myself and working two jobs.
And I distinctly remember sitting on old chairs in the garden with random friends dropping in. Lazy Sundays were like that.
Plus the farm used to have piles of visitors. I am going to get the farm people ready again.
But there I am making lists of things to do AGAIN. Why is it so hard to take time off now?
Maybe we can blame it on the pandemic and those twelve hour days and 6 day weeks. Yes. I think I will blame it on the pandemic. All that socialising stopped and never recovered.
Getting this house back in order has been brought back to the front burner. One corner at a time for the housework.
And re-building my lost Real Life friendships.
And re-building The Kitchens Garden on a Sunday with a glass of wine on a fencepost.
Cleaning out the barn is on the list too.
Look what I just found in the back shed. I must ask the farm hand about this?
A manure spreader?
That would be great but we only have two cows. And they spread their own manure.
Did he buy this while I was in California? Or New Zealand?
No more random auctions and sneaking stuff into the back sheds!
Look at that (above) 58F today! And the sun is out now!
I will definitely get one garden cleared and Nelson re-located.
(oops I was going to do a corner of housework right . Hmm. Ah well, housework can wait until tomorrow).
Have a great Sunday.
Hope you have got a restful period planned.
Love Celi
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thekitchensgarden 
Long before the pandemic, Sundays ceased to be a day of rest. I know growing up on the farm it was, there would always be someone stopping in around dinner time and mom would throw another potato in the stew and insist they stay. I do try to make myself sit outside and read for an hour on Sunday but I always find things to do. (and I’m retired!)
It’s crazy, isn’t it, that not having a 40+ hour a week job sometimes seems to be even busier that having one! I almost feel guilty sitting down to read for a bit, or lying in the hammock, as something always needs to be done on our little farmy.
I am thrilled to be back on farm time. Trying to farm PLUS hold down a full time job was doing my head in. I think that once I stop feeling anxious about Monday morning – things will be a lot better.
Have you hung up your summer hammocks yet?
Oh yes! The hammocks actually stay up all year around as we often have crazy swings in temperatures here. I see relaxing in mine as a reward at the end of the day. 😍
Sounds like a great reward!!
They tell me that once you retire you wonder how you used to fit it in!
I wonder where this inability to just relax went?! Not watching Netflix or scrolling the phone – just sitting.
When someone remembers how to do that, I hope they tell me. xo
21* here! I would love your temps. And snow coming in tonight. I! AM! SICK! OF! WINTER!!! We should be farming right now but we are too cold and wet —the onion farmers are very concerned.
Onions. Miserable when the sets do not get into the ground in time.
Surely soon it will warm up. We still have some cold nights in the forecast. So looking forward to it being above freezing at night.
Me too. Snow due in here again. Such a long winter.
I used to love the Sunday papers too, but all news seems to have become gossip orientated these days, including the BBC.
The weather was great here yesterday, sunny and about 14ºC. I went to a big funeral on Friday – a bit sad, but I saw lots of people that I hadn’t seen in years and everyone wanted to talk!
The reason for funerals after all. So everyone can catch up and talk – tell stories, have a yarn. I still resent that I was unable to go to my dads funeral.
That must be very frustrating.
It was
I remember your letter to Jacinda!
Yes!
Sundays were great years ago. Leisurely breakfast, read the papers and usually later in the day visit family and have a great supper with them. Years go by, kids grow up, spouses work shift work and weekends……I do miss them.
We are 40° with wind and sun today. Spring is slowly coming!
40 is not too bad at all.
Today is a bit odd really ( after snow yesterday) but I will take the warm!!
If it’s nice out, I try and do some spring cleaning and save housework for rainy days.
Sounds very sensible!
Sunday mornings, years and years ago… my husband used to throw something on, run up to the corner, grab a donut/coffee, the SF Chronicle, Monterey County Herald (or Austin American Statesman, etc., depending on where we were living at that time), bring it all home, spread it all out on our King Size water bed (do they even make water beds any more?), and there we’d spend all of Sunday morning enjoying our favorite sections of the paper(s)…
I haven’t read a Sunday newspaper in years…
But nowadays, those “To-Do” lists… I’ve got them, whether on a piece of paper, or in my head… I was thinking just the other day that I need to check out the Sunday SF Chronicle… see if it still exists in paper form…
Oh we had a water bed too/ so long ago. I went through two pregnancies in that bed- getting OUT of that thing became quite the mission in the later stages!!
Thank you for the memory Henrietta!
They were comfy though
Oh, yes, comfy and warm… (I can’t even imagine trying to climb out of one during pregnancy)!
When I opened your post today that first beautiful shot of the farm made me sigh right out loud. It looks beautiful! And GREEN! I know our turn is coming again soon … but yesterday and this morning we had a good snowfall. It’s spring snow – heavy, wet and not over my boots. And the Blackbirds and Robins are still singing… But … oh … your green looks SOOOOO inviting!
Fields of wheat. It is amazing how resilient wheat is.
Good morning Mouse!
Housework can always wait as far as I’m concerned–one of my tragic flaws. My memory of raising my kids is that every day was more relaxed. We’d drop by each other houses, hang out with the kids, do fun stuff that was free. Now everything is scheduled because everyone is so busy. But–an elderly neighbor two doors down has moved out, leaving behind her subscription to the New York Times. My husband’s first Sunday morning job is to creep up the street and nab the paper before one of the other neighbors does. (We’ve contacted the woman’s kids and they are too overwhelmed at the moment to stop the subscription.) Long story short–I’m enjoying the paper on Sunday mornings and truthfully all week long, as it takes me days to go through it. A gift.
That is the sweetest story. I can just see the ninja husbands creeping past each other in the early morning trying to get to the newspaper first!
I try to do housework in tiny bursts. But I really really need to give the kitchen a full spring clean. ( not something I am looking forward to!).
Oh how I loved Sunday mornings when my children were small. Saturdays were busy taking them to and from sports but Sunday was our day. I remember when the Dominion was delivered and particularly the Sunday edition. There was so many parts of it that we could each, my husband and I, to choose our special part. Now the children are grown up as have their own children and Sunday is just another day. The Dominion has become the Dominion Post a merger of the two d daily papers and as somebody has said here it really is a gossip page full of nothingI want to read. What a miserable old lady I sound. Autumn is slowly taking over here but because we’ve had such strange weather recently I have a bowl of crocuses blooming. Surely that’s unheard-of in Wellington in autumn!
The crocus bowl is unusual. When was it planted?
And newspapers – In fact journalism is so different now – I think that in depth journalism has flipped to pod casts now. Do you think?
Hi Cee. I don’t remember planting the crocus so it must’ve been from last year or maybe even self seeded by the birds flying around here. Journalism has deteriorated here and we have only two journalists that I can think of who do really in-depth reporting. I really miss the daily paper with my 1st cup of tea in the morning. Once again I’m sounding like the little old lady that I’m becoming – “ things weren’t like that in my day”. I hope it’s getting warm for you as it’s getting cooler for us.
Your post about the Sunday paper reminded me of what I would do as a kid- I always woke earlier than anyone else, so I would get the paper off the front porch, carefully reading starting with the funnies and then after looking and reading all I wanted to I would meticulously put the paper back so my dad wouldn’t have a fit that someone else had gotten to the paper before him! I think he knew what I was doing but appreciated that I was careful with “his Sunday paper”! Have a lovely day!
Yes, on Sunday my family would get the NYT and each would take a part and read it only to swap throughout the day.
Oh yes! The swapsies / I forgot about that!
I think you are right, we still feel fairly isolated even though we can get out and about again. We don’t have as many people popping in, and we don’t do much popping in on others, either. I don’t know! I read the NYT online, which loses much of the fun of reading it in print (but I just can’t face even more recycling than we already have).
I still find myself taking a step backwards if a person gets too close to me. It is almost ingrained now to open windows and wash hands.
I want to wash other peoples hands!!
Sunday bacon & egg brekkie. Sunday papers. Sunday family lunch. Sunday drive. Sunday arvo football at the local oval or on TV. How did we fit it all in…
Very slowly!
Sunday mornings in my childhood: the smell of roast lamb, setting the big round table with the ‘good stuff’, being hustled into smart clothes to go to church, my father playing Beethoven’s Pastorale at full bore on the stereo, coffee brewing, looking through the Sunday Telegraph colour magazine while the parents consumed the paper and all its supplements. Fighting over the washing up with the siblings, who’d wash and who’d dry. My brother always won. These days, Sunday is a day like every other, which is what happens when the Husband is a shift worker, doing 4 days, 4 nights and 4 off. Today ‘feels’ like Sunday, (day 2 of the off shift) and is coincidentally my 10th wedding anniversary. Tonight, I don’t have to cook 😀