Up: [[Place]] Related: [[Senses]] Created: 2025-05-25 Updated: 2026-01-24 **Note**: All of the following is quotation. I want to keep it because it’s such a beautiful sense-filled example of the *Anatomy of a Blackbird* quote in [[Hestia’s Cottage]]. This is the cottage that Hazel and her sister Flora arrive at in September 1939 after being evacuated from London to avoid German bombing during the Second World War. It’s from the novel *The Secret Book of Flora Lea* by Patti Callahan Henry, 2023. I love it! ______ #### Exterior The house was aglow. The sunset behind it turned its stones near silver. An inside light left on filled the windows with lemony hues. The front door was painted a bright blue. Under windows on either side of the door, window boxes were wild with green leafy plants and red and yellow flowers that rambunctiously overflowed their edges. The cottage appeared to have sprouted from the earth. Ivy ran along the side of the house and crept toward the left window. The roof was tiled in dark slate and its copper chimney pot looked set aflame by the setting sun, tossing bright arrows across the roofline. Around the cottage, the landscape poured over mounds and hills in greens and brown waves. There was not another house in sight. Moss held together an entryway path of flagstones that wound around two alder trees whose yellow leaves fell to the ground while others clung tenaciously to the branches. Hedges at the front of the house sprouted every which way. (p. 68) #### Living Room Hazel took in the view of the cozy home with a riverstone fireplace big enough to walk into, ample firewood stacked next to it. The mantel itself was fashioned of a log cut in half. Above were open beams and bumpy plaster walls glistening white. And everywhere there were books: on wooden side tables and shelves, on the floor and stacked in corners. The cozy living room also held a large, overstuffed couch and two plump chairs with a floral pattern of red and blue flowers. Instead of a proper coffee table there was a trunk and upon it, more books. The rug was a crisscross of ivy on an arbor. The riotousness of it should have felt chaotic but didn’t. The cottage whispered comfort. (p. 69) #### Kitchen …a square and solid room with windows at its far end looking out to a garden in dusk. Hazel saw arbors and pathways and a red barn, a vegetable garden with willow cages. A brick hearth fireplace with charred logs was along the right wall…. On another wall was a door to a tiny bathroom, then one going outside, and a closed door with a bright egg-shaped brass knob. The kitchen was soaked in green: its counters, the AGA stove putting off heat, the curtains over the sink made of pale checkered emerald and the countertops of mint. The wooden cupboard’s open shelves sagged, overcrowded with plates and mugs and glasses and linens. A round and dark wood table and centered upon it was a flowered teapot and a vase of purple thistles. (p.70)