sad blog avatar or "the spatial awareness of organic production"

I was sitting on the train going to Budapest, a day earlier than planned, as my mum's condition turned to the worse, when my sister phoned me to say that she'd died.

As to avoid dealing with that, I wrote the blog I'd failed to write last weekend;
a replacement blog...

So last Wednesday, Harry, the Taiwanese wwoofer materialised. Well, sort of, as he turned out to be a very frail and thin specimen of 20 going on to 12.
We took him on as we had a special request from a Hungarian wwoof-host who, for some undisclosed reason cancelled his stay there. Apparently his trip to Hungary was sponsored by his university and all travel arrangement had been already made.
So he badly needed a place... as we understood the story. He said his major was history and he did also sociology, so the educational aims of this sponsorship seem to be a tad difficult to fathom.
Anyway, after two days of lacklustre help with collecting hay, processing beetroot and clearing paths, Harry declared, that this was not what he expected. And when I asked what he expected, the curious answer was the phrase in the blog-title.
All through his not quite 3 days stay he had hardly eaten anything and he didn't seem fit enough to work, I suspect sadly,a health problem with this youngster . To our mutual relief he departed on early Saturday morning requesting a lift from Timi. He told us he'll look for a flight going back home. So another enigma to colour our organic production... other Chinese wwoofers and guests so far seemed to have liked my food, and enjoyed or at least were intrigued with the work...

Meanwhile we had a nice cluster of hostel guests, on Monday morning we breakfasted a lovely family of five from France, a Japanese dancer lad who lives in new York, and who stayed longer than his booking, a Polish couple on their way to Bosnia and Croatia, and Simon, the English would-be-wwoofer.

Well, I am typing in all this in the evening, in my mum's eerily quiet place, with treasure Julika (who looked after our mum so well) tearfully resting in her room, and with my sister sent home to do the same. Tomorrow more arrangements to be made, the usual upheaval when there is a death in the family even when sadly anticipated – my mum would have turned ninety in November, if she'd just made it... still, she had a full life, which was mostly happy, after the survival of being imprisoned as an illegal anti-fascist, taken to Bergen-Belsen... working for the soviet led international youth movement where she picked up a good working knowledge of French and English; being kicked out of job and party as someone not to be trusted when her parents emigrated to Israel; picking herself up while working as a private maker of ladies specialist undergarments (her original trade) being rehabilitated and working until retirement for the office that dealt with Hungarian artists'' contracts and travel and work -documentation when they were working abroad, and the same for foreign artists when working here, meeting and getting to know and love a lot of very famous people... And then, of course, she helped looking after the grandchildren... She enjoyed reading, TV, and of course all that frustrating politics, keeping her humour, when hardly anything else left...

pictures show flowers, me with mum and dad about 4 years ago at the stop of the 59 tram in Budapest, an up-to-date view from my favourite spot in the front yard in Kiskassa; the feeble wwoofer, and Gus on the mat – he has the privilege when being frightened of a storm.