nostalgie du ciel

Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me: — HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad. — AZ > HF: I have a few small guides, in German, to Alpine flowers, used by my father over a hundred years ago, when he visited his Swiss cousins as a young man and, yes, being an athlete, did some small-scale mountain climbing, but, being a floriculturist too, also collected (in a beautiful wooden flower press) exquisite alpine flowers, which he saved for the children he was going to have some day; they turned out to be me, just me, and I did add American wildflowers to the…