Plant roses and lavender, for luck.

“At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.”

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”

“After you’ve done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.”

“And then, one fairy night, May became June.”

“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with the spring rain.”

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.”

“The Mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base is the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In such spots one can understand that if the Greeks knew despair they always did so through beauty and its stifling quality.”