winter garden revisited

Well, the winter garden has about petered out. 

The lettuce is bolting, 

the spinach has been discovered by bugs, 

what's left of the broccoli is blooming, 

and the peas seem confused. 

The carrots, though, are wonderful. I started pulling them out a week or so ago.

I have a new food to add to my list of 'never eaten before'...turnips from Frank of the bountiful garden...at least knowingly, on purpose, cooked in my own kitchen. And they were surprisingly good, boiled with butter and salt and pepper. They had been pulled out of the ground only a few hours before being eaten.

I'm liking this growing food thing.

We're about ready to do some major work on our garden, expanding the one and adding a few more small raised beds over by the other. All it has to do is stop raining.

Ha! I never thought I would say that again!

roses are red...

I always think of my dad when I see roses. When I was growing up, alongside one section of our long curving driveway was a rose bed. My father planted and cared for those roses. He would bring home the old blood from the blood bank at the hospital and pour it on the ground around them and said that's what gave them their big sharp thorns. I don't know how true that was but they did thrive under his care. Later after he retired and my parents moved to the beach house he had a rose garden there too.

After he passed away and my mother went to live with my brother, my sister and her husband moved into the beach house and she took over the care of the roses. Eventually, we sold the beach house and they moved to Wharton, which is why I am here, but before she left, she dug up as many of Dad's roses as she could and transplanted them to her new garden.

My sister does well with roses too and I don't think she lost a single one. With her most recent move last summer though, from out in the country into the town proper after her husband died, she only dug up a few of the roses, leaving most of them for the new owners.

I've never been able to grow roses myself though I've tried a time or two. I think perhaps I didn't have enough sun at the city house or planted them too deep or just bought the wrong ones for our climate. All I know is they all died. So one of the big selling points about the country house when we were looking was all the roses planted about the property. Granted, they are all heritage roses, either pink or red, but they are established and hardy and bloom.

According to my father, roses should be cut back on Valentine's Day though my sister usually cuts hers back on February 1st because our winters have been so mild. If you wait till Valentine's Day, they are likely to already be putting up new growth and buds. And mine are.

I don't think I am going to cut them back this year, at least not yet. I probably should. I know they were stressed from last year's drought and the weather prognosticators are predicting another hot dry summer. Perhaps I'll do some pruning after this first flush of blooms.

the sky is crying...

More rain today. It rained yesterday as well, and last Friday too. I'm starting to weary of the constant overcast but still I am glad to see the rain. Last year was just too awful, millions of trees died from lack of water and wildfire.

Sorting through some photos of the sky from this year.

44 years later

Some people are still talking about high school.

artwork by Kelly Echols, class of 1976

Some while back, a guy I dated during the first half of my senior year in high school found me on Facebook and sent me a friend request which I accepted. Preceding that, I had connected with another guy from high school who I had a serious crush on in 10^th grade. Alas, though we were friendly, he never asked me for a date even though I had screwed up my courage and asked him to the Sadie Hawkins Dance. The Sadie Hawkins Dance was the one function of the year where the girls were supposed to ask the boys for dates and I was thrilled when he accepted. I have a picture of that floating around here somewhere or did for a long time.

Anyway, through the Crush, the woman who seems to be in charge of all things alumni from my high school also connected with me on FB in order to make sure I got the info about reunions and other happenings. Sure, I told her, put me on the mailing list if you want but I won't come to any of the functions.

When I graduated, I left high school behind. It was not the best time of my life. I was shy, skinny, and flat chested and needless to say I was not part of the popular crowd, I didn't care for jocks, and I didn't join any of the organizations that help make you feel like you belong. Throw into the mix that I started smoking pot the summer before my senior year and I preferred to keep a low profile. Of the few people I ran into after high school, our paths crossing on occasion, was the Crush with whom we have art in common. (I know, that's bad english but I don't care.)

So back to the whole FB thing. The boy I dated took it upon himself to add me to the member roster for the alumni page. It has a varying number of people who post on it. I have no interest in any of it really, but it's sort of like a train wreck that you can't not look at, these people you never really knew and certainly weren't friends with going on about, well, high school. It's a bit voyeuristic, looking at their names and their pictures trying to remember them, if any of them were in my classes or homeroom. Surely I would remember the ones who had been in my homeroom, right? Not so much. A name sounds familiar here and there but I definitely did not travel in their orbits.

Apparently the page for our specific year on FB got archived and a new one was being put up and everyone started posting very old pictures again. There was this senior girls party, that senior girls formal, this other senior girls party, the sweetheart ball, the senior holiday party. Party party party. I was not invited to a single one of those parties. So.

It's really a little weird, listening in as it were, to their conversations about it. Perhaps they did forge lifetime friendships and if so I'm happy for them. I found my niche eventually, learned to maintain a social group but I'm just as happy alone or with minimal contact.

Which is certainly what I get out here in a small town.

spring roses

Just outside the garage, growing beside the concrete apron is an old white crepe myrtle with a very thick trunk, unusual for crepe myrtles that like to spring up new branches from the root all the time. They'd be giant shrubs if you let them, but somehow this one has grown into a tree and it is quite tall. Nearby it grow two oak trees.

Someone, in the past, planted two climbing roses at the base of this crepe myrtle and they, too, look as though they have been there a long time. These two climbing roses have climbed up into the crepe myrtle and leaped across to the oaks, where their branches mingle, with arching bridges and dangling lines, they have grown far up in the trees where they bloom twice a year.

They had been blooming for a week, close to full bloom when we were packing the truck for our week in Austin and I was afraid that I was going to miss them, that they would be bloomed out by the time we got back. But I needn't have worried. They have been beautiful, starting to wane a bit now but it will take another two weeks I think before they will be completely done. Then I must wait til fall when they do it again.

U is for...

Image via http://www.buzzfeed.com/provincialelitist/keep-your-boehner-out-of-my-uterus

U is for uterus.

I give you fair warning, this post is about a very controversial subject.

There was a march on our state's capitol recently by the anti-choice crowd, you know the type, the ones who want to make your decisions for you and then leave you to handle the consequences by yourself, the ones who champion the unborn but can't be bothered with the born.

Somehow, their religious convictions tell them that it's OK for them to be that way, that it's OK to insert themselves in the private lives and circumstances of other women, to interfere and thwart and then leave them with the mess while they go interfere in someone else's life. They can't be bothered with the results of their interference. Unwanted children are still unwanted, often resented, abused or abandoned, causing meager resources to be further stretched affecting all.

It would be so much easier to take those anti-choice people seriously if they were out there adopting all the unwanted children that are already here or at least making sure that they have access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare. I posted as much on my FB page to which I received this comment: It's about believing life is sacred, period.

I don't really have an argument with that but life doesn't begin until birth with that first breath of air. A baby who grows in the womb, who is born and does not breathe is not alive. A fetus in the womb is the potential for life but it is not alive and it is kept growing and developing by grace of it's mother's blood and oxygen. Yes, a fetus responds to stimulus. So does a nerve bundle growing in a petrie dish.

I find them not pro-life so much as anti-choice. Because once it is indeed a life and not just the potential for life but an actual living breathing human who needs care, it seems their interest wanes. For all their anti-choice stand you would think that they would be for sex education and making pregnancy prevention devices readily available so that abortion would not be a necessary option but many of these same people are against this as well.

From this site (a brief fact sheet about who, when and why women get abortions):

88% happen in the first trimester with 61.8% by the first 9 weeks. Only 1.5% of abortions happen after 20 weeks and I would venture to say (but have no documentation to back it up) that the majority of these have to do with saving the mother's life, something else these far right christian people are against. If you get pregnant and something goes wrong, then the living breathing human's life is forfeit. Where's their belief in the sanctity of life then?

The idea that women are going blithely about and having abortions because they can't be bothered to prevent pregnancy or raise the ensuing child assuming it makes it to full term is not just ridiculous, it's ludicrous. It is a terribly personal decision, some more easily made than others perhaps but I would not ever begin to impose my judgement about this on someone else. It is none of my business. Period.

And so I say to all the anti-choice people out there...

Don't want an abortion? Don't get one. And I promise I will never force you to get one as long as you never prevent me from getting one if I so wish.

Do not presume to tell me that you are right and I am wrong especially when your 'truth' comes from a book of myths written to promote a particular version or vision of 'god' that I do not share instead of scientific data.

Do not presume to claim the moral high ground just because I do not believe in your version of god and creation because I am no more interested in christian sharia law than I am muslim sharia law.

U is for uterus. Step away from mine.

no doubt

Well, one thing happened while we were in Austin last week.

Spring happened.

Everything is busting out. Well, not everything, but a lot of things.

We had had some rain while we were gone and it rained again today. Thursday morning, when I went out and looked around at the yard, Spring was apparent every where I looked. And on a trip into the city today japanese magnolias and carolina jasmine were in full bloom and the baby blue eyes and african lilies and red bud tree were starting up.

bletilla or ground orchid

confederate rose

gerber daisy

rocket larkspur

peach tree

rose