A quiet week

So what do you write when everything is normal?

Don't get me wrong. Normality is good; it's restful. But same old just doesn't have the zip that new, exciting adventures do.

The first thing I do is go out and take pictures in the garden. You are looking at a photo of a daddy long legs strolling on the leaves of a purple cone flower. I always thought that they were black. This one is light brown.

The weather here is been fine. After one of the wettest Octobers on record, November has been dry, sunny and mild. That has helped a lot. Trees have been dropping their leaves like it was autumn (it is.) The dry spell has let me catch up with clearing some of the gardens of leaves. That has its objectionable parts too. See my post before this one.

The weather has some plants confused. I found a daisy, a spring bloomer in a protected spot around the Master Gardener project I work (Curran Hall.) Spider wort is reblooming and the Indian blanket flowers and zinnias in my last post are still brightening the landscape. A couple of daffodils have stuck their noses out of the dirt. That is not all good. Even though daffies have some antifreeze in their sap, a hard freeze will kill them and diminish their normal, spring glory.

Our local news is full of the trial of the man accused (now convicted) of raping and murdering a very nice young reporter, Anne Presley. I thought it was just here colleagues on the station where she worked, but every station is full of it tonight. There are a lot of things happening here in Arkansas. I think that too much time is spent, not just on the trial, but on retrospectives of her life. She was, as I said, a nice girl. Her death is a useless tragedy. It seems to me that all of this attention is slightly morbid and does not serve the community as news.

My office is piled knee-high with stuff to be sorted. Some should be tossed, some sent to storage and some shelved where I can get to it. Maybe next week.

I bought a copy of "The Oxford English Dictionary Thesaurus" last week. After studying it for several days, I still can't find the words I want. The thing consists of two large books and a poster sized guide to the thesaurus. Words are listed in groupings like society, animal and the like. But the poster seems to have different group numbers than the guide book, which has different numbers than the actual thesaurus. It's a disappointment. I do so love dictionaries.

I once bought an English Swahili dictionary. It was a theory of mine that Edgar Rice Burroughs used Swahili for the language of the great apes. Looks like I was wrong. Oh well. We learn as much from failed experiments as we do from those whose results agree with our predictions.

apologies to Kurt Weil

Oh it is garden time

From May to December.

But the leaves fall down

When it is September.

And the golden leaves

Are blown all around.

It is time to rake

and a leaf pile make.

If you couldn't guess from the last two photos and the pastiche of September Song, I raked leaves most of today. Part of them are mulched and placed around winter sensitive plants and the rest are still piled, like the song says.

I left them on the lawn so the neighbor kids could jump in them and not get hurt. The ones I mulched were on the driveway and that concrete skins knees when roughly contacted.

Leaf raking is a restful way to spend a pretty day. The weather was wonderful and the autumn flowers were happily blooming in our garden. The first four pictures are variations of the Indian blanket flower. That is usually a summer bloomer. Our fall weather has been so mild that they have continued apace.

The three photos before the leaves are a whirling butterfly guara, pineapple sage and a cosmo.

The birds were singing too. Even the crows seemed to be trying to caw musically. Lovely day, somewhat dusty, but really terrific.

A lonely grave?

On my way home from St. Louis, I passed, then did not pass a spot that had been intriguing me for years. This time, I turned around and returned for a close look.

You can see why this lonely site interested me. There, with a pine tree and some flags for company was some kind of marker stone. I had been passing it each time I drove to and from St. Louis, about four times each year and had gone my way, wondering.

The new highway was being built opposite the site. It and the wall holding that majestic pine and earth had been left. The highway builders may have felt the same kind of mystery and awe that held me there for more than a few minutes.

Was this a grave? Had some soldier fallen, been buried and stayed on that spot? Perhaps it is a memorial to those thousands of men, on both sides, who had been mutilated past recognition in the battles of that war. Perhaps the body of a soldier, uniform torn beyond identification had been found there and the stone memorialized the place.

A Boy Scout troop in a nearby town maintains the marker. I guess they refresh the flags and flowers I found there. I salute them for caring beyond most of us. I wish that I could tell that unknown what I waited 20 years to hear: "Welcome home."

Short and sweet: Today, I found a toad lily in our garden (several really). It was growing in the partial shade loved by the Japanese anemone and astilbe.

The toad lily is a native plant in Arkansas and found in other places where the great prairie formerly ruled.

Ridiculous

This image is a poster painted by Sigfried Reinhardt. It is copyrighted so don't reproduce it.

If it seems a little ridiculous, good. That's the title of this blog after all.
I love the new styles. The oversized trousers and baggy shirts remind me of the photos I have seen of "zoot suits" that were fashionable with young people before WWII. They went out of style when cloth rationing came as part of the war effort. But, some of these things have their disadvantages. For example, there is this quote from the Houston Chronicle from July 23 of this year:

"Police say an 18 year-old carjacker approached August Peters, 74, as he exited his vehicle. "Give me your car or I'll kill you," the carjacker said, putting a knife to Peter's throat. Luckily for Peters, he had an item that made him the physical equal of his youthful adversary -- a firearm. Peters grabbed his pistol from inside the car and fired, striking the carjacker at least once. The suspect fled through a nearby home, struggling to run in his baggy pants, which fell off in the kitchen as he ran for the back door. Police caught up with the pantless suspect nearby."

The title of this particular blog applies to that and to those silly fashions which insist that a man's underwear show over his trousers. The super baggy pants and shorts remind me of a baby whose diaper is full. They hang in that suggestive way and I smile. Youth will out, they say. The quote says that isn't all that will out.

The fact is, we're a pretty silly race, us humans. I suspect that is one of the reasons the Gods haven't just given up and started over. Look at all the fuss we get into as a result of sex. A man and a woman or two of either sex take a look at what is available to them, make a choice then decide whether to marry or live together. Before long one or the other or both start looking around again. They often decide that a little variety in partners is what the doctor ordered. It's decisions that let divorce lawyers get rich and fill the dockets of the civil (not really) courts. So we don't know our own minds. And most of the time, we don't take the time to explore inside ourselves to find out if we're really in love forever or just looking for a little security and love.

Even those couples who don't cheat and stay together (after all, infidelity is only one of the reasons for divorce) have trouble communicating with each other. Those troubles have given comics almost infinite material to make us laugh or at least grin sympathetically. If it isn't communication problems, it's the insecurity of one partner or both that makes for fights and someone ending up sleeping on the couch instead of next to their partner of choice.

We get terribly excited about things that haven't happened yet. We grab a small slice of something and make it into a huge to do. Look at the health care arguments that are currently in the media. I have to ask myself if any of the people shouting in meetings have read the proposed legislation. I tried, but the darned thing is over a thousand pages long. I'm not a lawyer. Neither am I endlessly patient with legalese. So I, like most of us have to make do with what people tell me is in the bill. When I get two or three or a dozen different takes on what's there, I get confused.

It's the same about our president. Folk are accusing others, who disagree with one or more of his statements, of being prejudiced against blacks. (Oh, is that politically okay? I know that negro is absolutely out and that African American is better. By the way, everyone with dark skin isn't African or American. So label me insensitive. If it isn't a really insulting epithet, it should be inoffensive.) Unhappily, there are people around who are prejudiced against anyone whose skin is darker (or lighter) than their own. Another example of ridiculous.

But my favorite example of "what you say?" is computers and cell phones. How many times have you asked yourself, "why do I have to press the off button to turn this thing on?"

late summer in the garden

While my daughters were here, I lamented about the sad state of blooms in late August and early September. They laughed and said the garden looked pretty good to them. So I walked out this afternoon to document some blooms. Alas, I was too late for the magnificent thistle we found, but there were quite a few others.


azaleas

Along with the goldfish above, we found a cute, little garden snake who was sharing the pond with the fish. He/she/it(?) had also staked out a couple of rocks upstream where (pronoun of your choice) could stick its head up and survey all goings on. I haven't been lucky enough to get a picture yet.


knockout roses

Indian blanket flowers

Dahlia

zinnia

love lies bleeding

wild onion

And I have no idea what this one is.

I had been so busy looking for holes in the foliage that I missed the flowers that were there. I guess there's a lesson in that. Treasure what you have.

By the way, if you recognize the above 'wonder what' please leave a note here.

A book review

I have just finished a remarkable novel. While I did not start this blog to review what I read, I like this one enough to want it shared.
LIFELODE by Jo Walton
NEFSA Press, Framingham, MA
hard cover
published February, 2009
ISBN - 1: 1-886778-82-5 other versions are available

The first thing I noticed about LIFELODE was the language. It is as simple as a peasant farmer's narrative would be. But imbedded in that language are words and concepts that were irresistible to me. First was the thought of a world in which the use of a force (yeya) is easier in one direction than another. Where it is easy, people join with gods. Where difficult, without the use of this force, people would become as automatons. Time is also different in the two directions, moving slowly in one and quickly in the other. The story is based in a village located between the two extremes.

While the story is essentially a fantasy, there are strong elements of science fiction in it. The world in which it takes place is Not Here. Things work differently. There are strong hints that people (or beings) from outside it made the world and then migrated to it. It is also theorized that when the originators came, they were gods and people slowly moved away from them, in the process having less yeya to use, but more independence of thought... to a point.

I mentioned language. I confess that I was hooked by the first paragraph. But I was wowed by part of an exchange explaining just what Lifelode was:
"...It's how you survive, how you put food on the table, and beyond that it's what moves your soul. It's not just the lode of your life, the seam you will mine, and not just the direction your life points in, it's also the load you'll carry through it. It isn't something you can just work out in a minute..."

The story is told in a present, but flexible tense. Things logically move into past perceptions and events. People see shadows of both past and future. That is a part of what makes the characterization so strong. By the end of the first chapter, I was involved in the lives of two of the major characters. By the end of the fourth, I was concerned with the entire extended family.

The plot takes the family and pushes three characters into it. First is the former lady of the manor, great-grandmother to the present lord. She left the family to go east where time goes slowly and learn yeya. She returns with a secret that is pursuing her. The second is a scholar who loves women easily and falls in love with two of the family wives. The third is a priest of a god pursuing the first and ruthlessly using anyone she can to accomplish her mission. She uses the scholar to sow discord into the family. When she is defeated, the goddess sends an heir of a former lord with armed men to reclaim what he believes to be his birthright.

It is more complicated than that, and more enchanting. But each word, each sentence solidifies the characters and adds to the story. This is the first book of Jo Walton's I have read. I'm going to buy and read everything of hers I can find.