The Monsters under Some Beds

Say hello to Laramie, the Chihuahua mix we got from the Kentucky Humane Society on the next-to-the-last-day of my high dose radiation for breast cancer.

We adopted her because when I woke up the day after my surgery my first thought was, "I need to get a Chihuahua."  And so it came to pass.

This morning that cheerful little dog coughed up a hairball the size of my fist on the leather couch, jumped down, ran into a corner, upchucked, and then took a nap to recover from the excitement.I cleaned up after her and then loaded the dishwasher. When I was done, I turned on the disposal. Fairly soon I noticed that the garbage was bubbling up on the other side of the double sink. Then I noticed that the bottom of the dishwasher held several inches of water and garbage.


Meanwhile, the big-ass Mitsubishi television in the living room blew a gasket today and now produces only static and crackling. I'm torn between wrestling the thing to the sidewalk for the trash men (it's huge and DOMINATES the living room) and waiting for my beau to get home from work to test the thingamajiggies (I nearly said tubes, but that's so last century).

Dog, sink, and television all  in one morning. Our "things fall apart" experience continues unabated.  It began on August 30 when, ten minutes before we were to go out of town, my Jeep, which we were to take with us, broke down. Since then, empty jars, the Crock Pot, the Jeep again (it actually has had three breakages, two of which were fixed, the third of which awaits a spare thousand dollars to fall from the sky), a small end table, a piece of my mother's china and more have all broken.

All of this is to say that I had an annoying morning, which may be the reason I had a minor fit when I listened to the noon news and heard yet another half dozen reports related to the upcoming Susan G. Komen walk/run.I hope to God it's this weekend because I've had all I can stand of the sacralization of breast cancer that accompanies the annual event.

The White House was lit up in pink, for God's sake.

I've been on edge about the topic since last week, when two different magazines came to hand in which the editors whinged on idiotically about breast cancer

In the first case, the editor said every woman is scared before a mammogram.  Oh, please. I've never been afraid of mammograms, not my first one in the late 1980s through my most recent one two days ago.  In truth, I feel a great deal of affection for mammograms, what with them saving my life and the lives of zillons of other women.  I even love the room where my mammograms are done. Drunk on painkillers and Valium, I was taken to that room the day of my surgery and found the sight of five people hunkered around a tiny screen discussing my own personal left breast hilarious. Whiffs of left-over good humor greet me each time I return.(Obviously, my not being dead contributes to my good feelings, but isn't that true of all of us?)

The second editor had the audacity to say that the thought of breast cancer frightens every woman.

Where was I when she became my spokesperson? Beyond that, why do people act as though breast cancer is the worst thing that could happen to a person?  It's nothing but a disease. Yes, some people die of it; and everybody hates when that happens; but how does that justify grown women acting as though a monster is hiding under their beds?

If you want to talk monster, I'll give you a monster.  It's name is multiple myeloma. In 1998, life expectancy after diagnosis was 28 months.  Geraldine Ferraro got lucky; she lived for years following diagnosis. My late husband, on the other hand, only lived for 22 months.  Multiple myeloma is an orphan disease, far less common than breast cancer, but one hundred percent of the cases are incurable and fatal. If you want to be scared, that's a far more logical disease to fear.

And some things are far worse than that.Not long after he was diagnosed, Fred told me that he kept asking himself "Why me?"  I'd pastored a church for the three years prior to his diagnosis and conducted more funerals than I'm going to count up. I'd spent quality time, in great quantities, considering the idea of death; and I'd reached one absolute conclusion.

"I don't mean this ugly," I told dear Fred, "but I'd rather you have cancer than five people I can think of right off hand."

Fred blinked, and then he uttered two healing words: "Me, too."

The five people?  Our grandchildren. If you need something to be afraid of, don't bother with breast cancer.  Rather, be afraid that a child - any child: yours, mine, a friend's, a neighbor's, a stranger's - will be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow.

A mammogram is a diagnostic test, no more worthy of drama than that moment  when the dentist pulls your tongue forward during a cleaning to examine your mouth for cancer.  If you want to over-dramatize it, leave me out of the conversation. I've got a Chihuahua to clean up after and a no-monsters-allowed-beyond-this-point life to enjoy.

Housekeeping Update

I've been fabulously busy doing incredibly interesting things, like mopping the kitchen floor and loading the dishwasher every day.  Brushing our yellow Lab once a day is keeping the dust bunny/hippopotamus situation under control; and figuring out supper every night -- my, that's just oceans of fun.

Housekeeping, it turns out, is exactly as repetitive as I expected it to be.  (I'd like to say "as I remember it being" but apparently I stopped caring so long ago that memories have faded away.)  Nothing stays done, which is to say that if you mop, vacuum, cook, and clean today, by five o'clock tomorrow no evidence will remain of that effort. Which is why you might as well not bother.

I, however, am choosing to bother, for 365 days, some of which I've already used up, thankyoujesus.  Yesterday's  event was cleaning off the huge desk in the living room. I worked five hours, mostly making file folders and then putting pieces of paper into them. The desk needs another five hours of attention.  Not happening--

Quench not

I love the photos I took this spring, but I love them even more when I've captioned them.

Rise. Shine. Breathe.

I'm in love with this technique.  Wait, maybe the word is obsessed.

I made this just for you.

My photo.
My text.
I used picmonkey for the first time.
I'm liking it.

50 Ways to Use Marshmallows

In a burst of caffeine this morning, I decided to devote the next year to being a -- oh, Lord, can I manage to spit the word out of my mouth? -- home maker.

That's one step short of housewife, for which I'm not qualified, what with not being a wife and all.  I do have a house, though, and a compadre who thinks eating three meals a day is reasonable and two dogs that shed unmercifully.

I've juggled the work/home bombs for decades, setting off numerous explosions along the way when I dropped one or the other.

Today, finally, I had enough. "Screw it," I thought.  "I give up.  Somebody hand me a freaking apron, quick."

I'm changing my ways, dedicating myself to the house first and the things that make life worth living -- art, fresh air, stepping stones, photography -- a gloomy second.  I'm going to recreate that magical mythical time -- roughly the 1950s -- during which white women with affluent husbands wore pearls and heels to vacuum, smiling vacuously all the while.

I'm not really prepared for vacuous, what with having a master's degree from Duke and another master's degree from Goucher, and also a brain; but I'm giving it a shot. Maybe I've been wrong my whole life.  Maybe this domestic crap is worth doing.  No time like the present to find out.

We live in a comfortable three-bedroom house in a slightly suspect neighborhood that's had a rash of car and garage break-ins recently.  It's an ideal location for turning the clock back to the 1950s, for taking the opportunity, now that my adult children have children who are nearly adults, to figure out the homemaking swamp,  complete with cleaning, cooking, finances, organizing, Saran wrap,and fake smiles.

I'm going to upend my world and aim for what society has wanted from its women all along:  tidy house, tidy pets, tidy life, tidy relationships, and a lovely meal at the dining room table every evening, often by candlelight, not to mention throwing money at every new fashion that comes down the pike in order to keep the economy strong.

I've been preparing for this task for years without even knowing it.  For instance, I have my very own copy of a pamphlet called "50 Ways to Use Marshmallows."  With that pamphlet in my hand, how can I go wrong?  I've already had one breakthrough, which I hint at with the photo at the top of this post.  Stay tuned to find out about my first extraordinary find.

Stylin' and Profilin' with Old McDonald

 

Here are some of the fabrics for  the new picnic blanket (a. k. a. pieced quilt) I started this week for a friend.

I was zooming along with the construction when my compadre asked if I'd seen the friend's latest post on facebook. Turns out she'd told her daughter's adoring public about all of the animal sounds the toddler can make now.

My compadre contained himself until the next morning, and then he couldn't stand it any longer. He said, "You ought to put the animals on the quilt."

The what?  Yes, I'd heard correctly. He thought I should put all of the animals the little girl knows onto her mom's quilt.

"They'll look really good," he said.  He didn't need to add that my friend would be doubly delighted.

As an act of friendship, he was bang-on right.  From a design perspective, though, I had to rearrange my idea of what I was making.  See those pretty fabrics above?  The one with the black background shows up in a number of places on the quilt, as does another fabric with a black background.  The motifs for that one are fabulously outlandish boots and purses. It's a styling and profiling quilt balanced by a range of pinks and a few very small rectangles that reflect the presence of a little girl.

Adding animals?  How would that work?  More smoothly than you might think, considering the fabrics I added:

Believe it or not, I had all of these fabrics except the lion (green background, top center) and the snake (Slither slither on the right side, with the white background).

The majority of the piecing was complete, but I was able to substitute good-sized chunks of animal fabric here and there.  The rest of them I fused down slap in the middle of my carefully chosen and organized pinks and peace signs, alleviating the potential boredom that never existed because it was wonderful to begin with.

And now?  What is it now?  I'll post a photo when I get the thing completely finished so you can judge for yourself, but I've got to say that sometimes dumping your original concept when a new one comes along can be a brilliant move.  Already I love thinking about how much fun my friend will have with her daughter, the two of them discovering animals here and there and giggling as they baaa and moooo and ssssss and oo oo ah ah (that's a monkey sound) and ribbit and roar with their blankie wrapped around them.

The Third of July

If there are any currant bushes on Middle Bass Island, the berries ripened today.  At least, they always ripened on July 3 when I was growing up.  I can remember the date, because it's my late sister's birthday; and it was also the day of the township's firework display, which took place on Put-in-Bay (another  island, just south of us).

July 3 was like Christmas Eve in that it took forever for night to arrive. We didn't just have to wait until dark; we had to work until really dark, and then we had to wait for the lights on Perry's Monument to be turned off. Then we'd pile into whatever jalopy was operational that year and Daddy would drive to the Main Dock, and we'd Ooh and Ahhh, the way everybody does, everywhere.


Since then, I've seen fireworks on New Year's Eve in Times Square (2001); on the Fourth of July from the roof of an eight-story building looking over the Hudson River in New York City (2003); and over the Ohio River following Thunder over Louisville, the annual precursor to the Kentucky Derby (2004).

Each of those fireworks displays was the largest ever in the history of the country, according to the news reports, but none of them compared to the fireworks on the island.  I've alwaysattributed it to the island's isolation, but today I've been reading interviews conducted in the 1980s with writers who are women, and a substantial piece of the conversations had to do with the role of place, in the sense of who grew up where, and Place, in the sense of an ongoing and tiresome conversation about how anybody who wanted to be successful as a writer had to live in New York City.  (Surprise!  The people doing the interviews lived in . . . wait for it . . . New York City.)

But I digress.  My point is that I was reading about the role place carries in our lives, and then I put the book down and started working on a new quilt.  The rhythms -- ripping, pressing, testing, sewing fabric - made room for meandering thoughts.  So I was thinking about the fireworks going off beside Perry's Monument (it's official name is Perry's International Peace and Victory Monument and it was built to commemorate the Battle of Lake Erie and to honor and attest to the peaceful border that has existed between the United States and Canada ever since the Treaty of Ghent was signed).  (Way to go, United States and Canada.)  I was also thinking about currants, cake and ice cream, birthday presents for Amy, and how the fireworks exploded doubly, in the sky and in reflection on the lake, and what a big deal they were.

Then it struck me that just as significant as the fireworks was the fact that we were down at the dock after dark.

We only ever were at the dock after dark on July 3.  Hell, we were hardly ever there in the light, unless we were catching the boat with Mother to go shopping in Port Clinton or to visit her relatives and friends in Detroit.  What was that, all together?  Four or five times a year?

Otherwise, we weren't allowed near the dock.  In the summer, Lonz Winery was generally crowded with raucous folks (many of them from Cleveland*) drunk on sparkling wine (the kind that would be called Champagne if the grapes and the product were both from the Champagne area of France).  Not only were they drunk on fake Champagne, but they were drunk on WARM fake Champagne, which meant they were either hollering or singing or throwing up.  Not a place for children.

Not a place for children in the off-season, either.  What were we going to do there other than pick cherries from the Bing cherry tree that stood near the cliff in front of the Lonz mansion (which we did, with Mother's company) or fall in the lake (which we didn't, because we were never near the water, which is to say the dock)? My folks were all about being somewhere where you could do something productive.  We never went anywhere to look; we went places to learn.  Which isn't a bad form of parenting, whether on a Lake Erie island or in New York City.

*P. S.  It has been said that my children and I are loud. I claim it's a habit developed from a childhood living with a parent who was deaf as a result of flying noisy airplanes in the war without ear protection.  You had to SPEAK UP and you had to e-nun-ci-ate; and it seems I passed that lesson on to my children.  A few months back, I was telling my compadre some island stories and mentioned how loud people from Cleveland seemed when I was growing up.  "Are we that loud?" I asked.  "Oh, no," was the answer.  "Nobody's as loud as people from Cleveland."

I mean no disrespect, you understand.  If people from Cleveland are, indeed, louder than the rest of the world, it's no doubt attributable to all of the reasons I've just named for our family's speech pattern, with the added element of living in a city, where you have to talk over cars and trains and buses and utter bitter cold and, oh, yeah, all of those people.

Happy Third of July.

The Joy of Catastrophe

As I keep repeating in hopes the shock will wear off, my compadre was seriously injured on June 3.

In accordance with my continuing desire to make sure life is as complicated as possible, the first thing I did upon our return from his emergency treatment was to lose the plug-in cord for my cellular phone.

It wasn't the end of the world.  I do have a cord in the Jeep, so when I seriously need a charge I could head out back and sit still for ten or fifteen minutes -- always my favorite thing to do in times of crisis.

Losing stuff wouldn't be half as unnerving if, when catastrophes hit, I didn't devote serious time and thought to tidying.  When life is out of control, I need clear spaces and the confidence that when I reach for something, it will be there.

And so it was, except for that blasted plug-in cord.

Day before yesterday I decided to take photos of the St. Snidely picnic blanket, and you'll never guess what I discovered when I opened the camera case.  Yes, indeed; I'd tucked my phone cord into the camera case, thinking it was the camera-to-laptop cord.

Oh, joy.

The kind of joy that only comes in catastrophes, because under ordinary circumstances the want of a phone cord is a mild annoyance. When the going gets tough, though, the want of a phone cord can be the final straw - and the end of that want thus becomes a truly joyful moment.

The Saint Snidely Quilt

 I finished this quilt for my nephew a few days ago.  It's title is "The Saint Snidely Sidewinder and the Unrepentant Uke Boys."

Saint Snidely is the patron saint of ukuleles, vegetarians, mustaches, and the A-Team.

My nephew plays in a ukulele band, and their logo is the mustache on the lower left in the mustache portion of this photo.

Here's the long shot.  I favor just enough quilting to keep the batting where it belongs.  In the case of the cotton batting I used, that means stitching can be 10 inches apart, which is still a little closer than I like.  Even so - this is a picnic blankie and is sure to turn up in the parks and environs of Spartanburg, SC, when Snidely and the gang hit the stage.

Painting!

It's a bird!

It's a plane!

Nope!  It's a sunflower that I painted last month, and on Monday it will head out to Hawaii to add a helpful heaping of joy to someone's life.  What a wonderful world.

The Art of the Tidza Parade

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5apP6-7LAs&feature=colike

My cousin just provided the link so I could see the 2010 parade in Tideswell, the small town in Derbyshire, England, where my father was born.  He left to join the navy when he was 17 and returned only for the rare visit.  My mother kept up the communication with his family, and so I knew about Wakes Week and the annual dressing of the well, a holiday celebrated on June 24 each year, which is St. John the Baptist Day and my friend Mary Flowers' birthday.

I just learned here that the custom of well-dressing is peculiar to Derbyshire.  Here's a bit of information:  
"This ancient custom is only found in Derbyshire and is the art of decorating springs and wells with pictures made from natural materials. Four wells are dressed in the centre of Tideswell.  Wells have been dressed at Tideswell since 1946. Refreshments are available around the village.
"Well locations: Fountain Square – main Well; Church Yard – Three wells dressed by Scouts, Guides and Tideswell School."

One participant posits that the custom of well dressing is a "Christianised vestige of early ritual celebrating the healing miracle of clean water" -- and it's not hard to imagine the custom having developed while the area was still pagan.  Bless the water, which, as we in America are becoming more and more aware, is life.

I met Betty Friedan at Forum '85, a session held in  Nairobi, Kenya, concurrent with the United Nations End of the Decade for Women Conference in 1985.  I happened upon a tree with a note attached informing anyone who cared that Betty Friedan would be there every day at a given time for an hour or so, and everybody was welcome to join the conversation.  One of the days I attended, some Kenyan officials (male, in suits) came to ask Betty what women wanted.  She deferred to their countrywoman, whose name was Sarah.  Sarah stood and replied that what women want is schools, firewood, and water.

Clean water.  Potable water.  Water close by.  Water not contaminated by coal ash or pesticides.

Women still want clean water, which takes us back to the well dressings in Derbyshire. Here are a few photos:

The 2011 Tideswell well dressing

England faces the same crisis with small post offices that we are in the U. S.

The point of all of this is to say that I've always wanted to go to a Tideswell well dressing.  When I told my cousin Danny, he posted the youtube link for my viewing pleasure.  I am filled with questions after seeing it, mostly things like what the money being collected was to be used for and how exactly did one find one's way into such a parade.  Then I dwindled off into thinking that by rights we ought to take part in that parade ourownselves, if we could settle on a theme.  (Actually, a pseudo-theme looks to be sufficient.)  Which leaves only one more thing to be resolved:  whom do we know in Derbyshire who owns a tractor and what would it take for them to let us use it on parade day?

The Craft of Going the Whole Nine Yards

Why, I have always wondered, would you encourage anybody to go the whole nine yards?  What kind of achievement is that when the goal is, at least in football, if cheerleaders can be trusted, as I believe they can, "First in ten; do it again."

What, I've perenially wondered without ever remembering to look it up or ask, is the point of stopping one yard short of the goal?  What, precisely, is gained by that?  If you're going to fight for nine yards, why not give that extra little push and actually accomplish something?

Today, my decades-long confusion was cleared up.  I'm excited to report that I got the answer while watching a rather silly spy movie with my compadre.  It turns out that my error in understanding is that all along I thought we were talking about football.

I was wrong.

The nine yards doesn't refer to football but to a far more serious endeavor.  At least since World War II, ammo belts -- the kind soldiers carry for military operations because that's how much fits in an average ammo box-- have been nine yards long.

To go the whole nine yards, then, means to give it all you;'ve got; to pour until the jug is empty; to take extraordinary measures to preserve the lives and physical wholeness of your colleagues; to keep using what you've got 'til you use it up. Life and death, in other words.

Now I have a new question about "the whole nine yards"? I want to know why we toss it into conversations about meaningless activities?  Go the whole nine yards to meet a company goal?  Go the whole nine yards to finish an art project?  Go the whole nine yards in getting a proposal written?  Go the whole nine yards in training your dogs, detailing your car, fixing a gourmet meal for friends?

Yeah, no.

I'm not saying those activities are to unimportant in the ordinary scheme of things.  Rather, I'm saying that they have nothing to do with life and death; and that a phrase born out of war, out of the deaths and maiming of military personnel and civilians shouldn't be trivialized in common conversations. With an all-volunteer army, it's easy for Americans to pretend that, while war may still be hell, it's a newer, gentler hell -- the kind of hell you get when the feet on the ground in Afghanistan and other hot spots belong to poor people and to minorities (not mutually exclusive groups) rather than to the profile of soldiers during the days of the military draft, when anybody and everybody's brother or cousin or high school friend or colleague's child could be on the next boat or plane heading into a war zone.

We need to go the whole nine yards to support military families.

We need to go the whole nine yards to provide effective protective clothing and vehicles and equipment for the military on the battle fields.

We need to go the whole nine yards to provide the support -- physical, mental, emotional -- that our veterans and their families need when a military person returns from battle.  And, yes, by that I mean not only hospitals with no rats in the hallways but also qualified therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, medical personnel, chaplains, folk life experts, poets, projects, and seminars to allow as much healing as a given person needs and wants.

Those tasks are more important than a first down in a football game.  They mean the difference between life and death, between a life of paucity and a life of abundance.

Wounded Warrior Project 
Support Our Troops By Supporting Their Children
Joining Forces

If you know of other organizations making a difference in the lives of military personnel and families, please leave a note in the comments section.

The Art of Dailiness

 Paper Coterie has a sale going on for their new journals, which they're calling a Daily Documenting book.  Each book has two or three lines for each day, so that you can quickly jot down what was happening each day.  Great for people who don't want to journal but do want to keep track of what they've done in recent months.  The best part is that you can upload photos for the cover and to be sprinkled throughout.

I spent two hours making one for myself and then saved it.  I'll look at it again tomorrow and decide whether the photos I uploaded are the selection I actually want.  (Usually I start these things an hour before the final deadline; in this case, the sale continues for several more days.)

Nothing like a 40% off sale to make it worth my while to experiment with a new mode of uploading photos -- especially when I can fill my Daily Documenting Doohickey with iris after iris from photos I took this spring.

No products, services, payment, or financial gain of any other sort was provided for me to tell you about this deal.  It's simply a good excuse for posting an iris photo, or two, or three.

The Art of Thoughtful Giving

A friend came to visit us at the hospital and gave us the three best gifts ever.

First she handed me a roll of quarters.

A roll of quarters, for vending-machine or parking-meter moments.

Then she stuffed two five-dollar bills in my pocket, stepped waaaaay back, and waved off my objections.



Two five-dollar bills, because who can find an ATM in the midst of trauma?

The third gift:  showing up.

The three best gifts ever. Spread the word. 

The Art of the Epistle

Dearest, darling Universe,

You know that I love adventures. Going, doing, learning, experiencing the beauty of the world and its inhabitants -- yes, that's what I've wanted for my life, throughout my life, and you have provided it in abundance.

Now, however, times have changed. It's not that I'm opposed to adventure, but given recent events -- which included a bad dog, doctor visits, vet visits, interviews with Animal Control, a conversation with the city lab technician who has access to records regarding the sending and receipt of animal heads to and from Frankfort for rabies testing, not to mention my compadre's hospitalization, plastic surgery, and ongoing physical rehabilitation . . . .   As I was saying, given recent events I am asking, with all due respect, that we change our existing policy on adventures.

I'm not requesting a freeze.

Rather, might the adventures be a bit fewer?

Alternately, might they be farther apart?

Thank you for your consideration.

With warmest personal regards, Mary Jo

The Art of the Peony

I went to a peony festival and photographed 24 varieties of peony.  This one is Falcon.

Not one Falcon looked like any another Falcon.

Abalone Pink, the beginning

Abalone Pink, the middle

The Art of Healing

Healers are gathering in Louisville, Kentucky, today, at four o'clock.  We're gathering together in a healing session for the west end of the city, which has undergone terrible violence in recent weeks, including three deaths.

We're each being asked to play an active role: to read or sing or speak or play an instrument; to offer up whatever gift we may possess to these battered, grieving families and to this battered city.

I'm gathering myself prior to heading out for the gathering. I'm planting my feet firmly so that I can feel my the soles become roots traveling down toward the center of the earth, the way they talk about in yoga class.

I learned after my husband died in 2000 that the true bedrock in life is beauty, because beauty has power even in the midst of futility.  And so this afternoon, then, unless somebody requests otherwise, I'm going to read two of my poems:  "Not Paprika" and "You Walk in Beauty" (which I could and probably should have titled "Ode to Feet").

I'm also going to take along the seven iris paintings I did last week.  I'll put them where ever they may fit to lend some green and some air to the healing and to remind myself that at any moment the wind can blow and everything can be different.

Can beauty prevent violence?

Can healers heal a city?

Here's what I think. I have a friend named Sue.  Eleven years ago, her husband, Tim, was dying of the same cancer that killed my husband in 2000.  Tim underwent an autologous stem cell transplant conducted by doctors inexperienced in treating multiple myeloma.  He had a second transplant, an allogeneic one in which he received stem cells from his sister, overseen by a world-class oncologist.  Tim had chemotherapies before, during, and after both transplants, with some useless radiation thrown in as well.

Tim and Sue had two small children, the younger of whom was a toddler when his father was diagnosed.  Tim was ill, and he was ill, and he was ill; and everything that stood a chance of helping him was attempted. Eventually, he ran out of things that might work.

And then what did he do? He kept on. He kept on taking the thalidomide. He kept on taking the steroids. He kept on allowing chemotherapies that had never been shown to combat his disease. He kept on forcing himself to drink a little, to eat a little, to speak a little  in spite of the intense pain he endured for three years.

How does a person find that kind of determination?

I learned the answer one day while on the phone with Sue.  She was telling me about the latest thing that hadn't worked, and about the equally useless thing the doctors wanted to try next.  And then she said, "What Tim told me yesterday is 'I can't do nothing.'"

I can't do nothing.

At first, I thought Tim had used a double negative. Then I thought he was lamenting the loss of physical ability. Then I understood.

When Tim said "I can't do nothing," he meant "I can't stand here, or sit here, or lie here and allow this to happen while I do nothing."

And that's why the healers are gathering today. Because we, like Tim, can't do nothing. We can't stand  by while the bullets fly and people die in the street, on the sidewalk, in their homes, and do nothing.  We are doing what we can do, trusting that from within the gathering of our bodies, voices, spirits, gifts, and offerings, some green might flourish, some air be stirred, and a fresh wind blow, making everything new and possible.

The Art of the Flower Garden

What do Pink Giggles, Bowl of Cream, Petite Elegance, and Sunburst have in common?  They're all varieties of peony.

I went a little overboard with the photos I took at the Peony Festival at Whitehall House & Gardens, which is part of the Historic Homes Foundation.  I took over 500 photos, which I've reduced now to a modest collection of 347, not counting the ones that I cropped. They aren't all peonies; I also have more iris and some hosta and a cat which seemed to live there and even the front of Whitehall and an outbuilding or two to show off.  This first group of photos is all peonies, though.

(Note:  The second set will have more flowers that are actually in bloom, the way we all like seeing them, but I was taken with the range of names and so wanted to share them.)

Petite Elegance

Pink Giggles

Coral and Gold

Coral and Gold close-up

Pink Kisses

Old Faithful

Sunburst

White Grace

Bowl of Cream

Stay tuned for updates in the coming days, or perhaps weeks, given the 347 photos, plus cropped photos . . .   You are going to love seeing these beauties as much as I did.

Notes to Myself

Kentucky prohibits the import of firewood from outside of Kentucky in order to prevent the arrival of the Emerald Ash Borer.
This information is outdated.  The Emerald Ash Borer arrived in Kentucky in 2009, first appearing in the counties that form a triangle between the borders of Indiana and Ohio.  Gradually, the insect is expanding its invasion in the state.

 Ash leaf showing damage from Emerald Ash Borer.

 Not every bright green insect is an Emerald Ash Borer.  On the upper left is the genuine article.


If you see an Emerald Ash Borer or evidence of its passing, contact the state entomologist at (859) 257-5838.
******
People who are ill are often angry people.  One reason?  There is energy in anger.  A doctor told me decades ago that people with long-term illness, dire or not, are invariably depressed.  Energy can overpower depression.  Anger is energy.
****
In 2009, Wikipedia said only 3 percent of CFL bulbs were being recycled.  One hopes that percentage has increased now that Home Depot and other locations are accepting the bulbs for recycling.  As we all know, they keep energy usage down but contribute to the amount of mercury, a highly toxic element, in landfills and elsewhere.

The hard-core advertising that convinced us to make the change.

Legislation and public education were strong factors in the switch to CFLs. Would it have killed the educators to inform the public at the same time that the bulbs contain mercury and must be handled properly?  I suppose they didn't want their message diluted.  Get the people to follow the leader before they start worrying their pretty little heads about toxicity.
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Articles to re-read:  Revenge of the Introvert:  How Social Media Is Making Nerds, Geeks, and Wallflowers the Leaders of the Pack by Laurie Helgoe in Psychology Today, September 1, 2010.