Categories: Animals, Books, Censorship, Christian, Crafts, and a Public Service Announcement.
Animals
Colleen Redman celebrates the oddly lovable cicada:
This August I wondered whether any of my jewelweed, overgrown from the wet weather and consequently vulnerable, would be able to bloom enough for the hummingbirds. It took quite a mix of rain to keep the giant plants alive and sunshine to bring out their blossoms, but all through September the jewelweed bloomed abundantly. If anything I saw more of the hummingbirds than usual. They may be regular visitors, and accustomed to me; they may have been complaining about the sugar content of the jewelweed--this summer's berries were certainly watery. Now the jewelweeds, and goldenrod and galinsoga and other flowers that normally get about three feet tall but grew six to ten feet tall this year, are toppling like clear-cut trees and the cats are happily reclaiming ground to sit on in the not-a-lawn.
Not all of my flowers liked the rain so much. There were no hibiscus blooms and hardly any dayflowers, and the less said about the fruit trees and strawberries, the better. Hostas, iris, and roses bloomed well--even my natural sister's contribution to our iris collection, which almost never show a flower, bloomed this year--but the plants didn't grow. Flybush, which normally does grow ten feet tall, or taller, if it's not pruned brutally in June, grew very modestly this year; I pruned some stalks and not others, and in the last week of September they were all covered in blooms at about the same height.
Botanically speaking, what is flybush, anyway? I don't know. It's not native, not invasive; it's a cultivated flower that was madly popular in this part of the world about a hundred years ago, and is not popular any more. No garden catalogue has stocked it in my lifetime. It's still in many gardens; it came with the houses. It's pretty, anyway, when it blooms, with sprays of tiny flowerets streaked in shades of pink and red--they grow redder as they grow riper, and then turn brown.
Anyway here's a link to another hummingbird story:
Books
This poem...
recalls this book...
Censorship
A funny thing happened when I went to look up that book announcement post from last winter. I didn't remember the author's name; if I had, "Martin" is too common a name to be searchable, and although "Clancy" is not common and ought to be searchable it happens to be in use by a bestselling novelist. I didn't remember the title accurately, either. I tried searching my own posts--my own posts!--for "suicide." Ooohhh! Ooohhh! Google couldn't do that! Anyone thinking about suicide might be about to commit it! Quick, shunt the poor demented blogger back to saaaafety! I had to find my post about Clancy Martin's book by scrolling through the list of everything I posted in December.
People who are typing on computers are not usually standing on ledges, or aiming weapons at their heads.
Y'know, I'm not suicidal, actually. Very few people who are suicidal live to become Little Old Ladies. They don't live as long as the writer known as Brendan has lived, either. I think that, if I were suicidal, feeling that a computer was trying to control my thoughts would probably push me closer to the edge. Wouldn't it you? We need to do something, fast, about this very bad idea of trying to use computers to keep people "safe." Web sites need a good clear law specifying that if they advertise that they provide information, they are not responsible for what people do with that information, but they ARE responsible for not enabling any control freaks.
Christian
How do we forgive one another for tacky little acts of stupidity? It's not easy. Since youall don't post obnoxious pin-on-a-grin comments here, I trust you'll not post them on Grace Ellen's Mother's blog, either. (For those who came in late, Grace Ellen was a child whose petition for a Chemotherapy Barbie this web site started following, years ago.)
Crafts
This poem interests me strangely because it suggests a completely different attitude toward quilting than anyone I've ever seen actually doing it. I wonder who these women were--slaves, convicts, miners' wives?--and why they would be imagined to feel such bitterness and desperation about something that is normally done in a much more pleasant spirit. Quilting is, like knitting or embroidering, a privilege in its own right, a way to relax, be creative, bond with friends or all of the above...what circumstances ruined it so completely for the women of Gee's Bend?
Public Service Announcement
The cheerful deliveryman had a different take on this week's absolutely perfect weather. "In another month," he said, "when the weather gets cold, that first really cold day will be the day people remember their furnaces. They ought to think about that now, but they won't. They will wait until it's freezing outside, and their houses will get cold. Then they'll all call the office at once. "My heater's not coming on! Send someone who can fix it!' And I can, and I will--and I hate being cold."
Those who really do have babies, sick patients, shivering Chihuahuas or whatever? Apparently they tend to avoid thinking about their heating system before the situation gets desperate. But if you want real priority service, check your furnace now, while the mornings are just chilly enough, temperatures in the fifties and sixties Fahrenheit, that you can bear to think about heaters while sipping hot tea. The friendly fellows who know how to reset and restart your heater do better work when their fingers are not numb.
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