Pursuit of the Passion Flower

If you're not a gardener quit reading now because this will be BORING.
But if there's any botanical fervor in your heart, you'll get it.

Last year I spotted an exotic flower along the fence line of my neighbor's tobacco field. Not where you'd expect to find anything lovely. Later I saw one trained over an arbor in a garden shop and my friend identified it as a passion flower.

I vowed to have one in my yard. I snagged one of the pods from the wild plant to see if I could dry it. Unfortunately the pod rotted. I learned they supposedly don't have time to produce seeds in our climate.

I watched for it to sprout again this year. How horrible to see my farmer-neighbor uproot everything with a bulldozer! I held onto hope and kept watching just in case some little root survived. Actually, several plants have developed where there was just one. So much for the seeds-don't-work theory.

Not going to lose my chance again, I vowed to dig up the treasure as soon as it rained.

But I didn't have to, because in the ditch in front of the house, there are two, TWO! blooming there.

Forget Enlightenment - Go for Relishment

I have achieved relishment. (If enlightenment is a a word, a state of being, why can't relishment be a word too?)

Saturday may have been the last 80 degree day we will see for seven months. So I set out to putz my way around the yard, a little trimming here and there, tending the raised bed. Nothing long or strenuous. 

Here's how you can achieve relishment too.

R-Relax. Crumple up the do-list and toss it in the trash.

E-Enjoy the task. If you don't get pleasure from it, quit! 

L-Linger over every little accomplishment.

I- Let imagination, rather than industry, rule. Turn off the timer in your head. Let your mind meander and some new ideas may have room to slip in! 

S-Savor the moment. Take time to sit in your favorite lawn chair and look around. Listen quietly to what's happening around you. Run your nose along the warm green pepper you picked and breathe in its spice. Close your eyes and let the sun warm your face. 

H-If you're healthy enough to get around on your own, live in a place you love, and have a little money in the bank, be happy!  You're not forced to escape from war,  shepherd your family across oceans or confront hostile borders. 

Relish tomorrow! And let me know what you particularly enjoyed. 

Don't Need a Calendar to Know it's Fall

I don't need a calendar to know fall is here. There are signs all around:

Spiders spin webs between any two or more points in the yard and house.  :(  

By the way, if I put the period after the frowny face :(.  does it look like a mole?  

A cluster of stink bugs lurk outside hoping to sneak in. When they do, Bill drops them into soapy water to backstroke until they drown. 

The dogwood adorns herself with red berries. 

(Dogwoods are not dioecious, that is specifically male or female.)

The last watermelon in the garden just won't get ripe and we're in a race against the first frost. 

The corn is harvested.

As we near the equinox the sun shines like a klieg light directly through the west doors. The flower arrangement of rosy sedum, purple basil and zebra grass lights up until it glows as if lit from within. 





 

                       The usually dark hall turns golden.

Welcome, Autumn. I hope you are long and fair. 

Last link to another century's authors

The University of Missouri had an old library, my link to nineteenth and early twentieth century American novels. I browsed when I could, and they stoked my deep desire for more time to just read!  When a history course required a research paper on social history, I decided to read as many of the first ten years of bestsellers as were available. 

1896   from Wikipedia[edit]

1. Tom Grogan by Francis Hopkinson Smith
2. A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. The Seats of the Mighty by Gilbert Parker
4. A Singular Life by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
5. The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic
6. A House-Boat on the Styx by John Kendrick Bangs
7. Kate Carnegie by Ian Maclaren
8. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
9. Sentimental Tommy by J. M. Barrie
10. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush by Ian Maclaren

I didn't head for the heavy duty classics like Quo Vadis (1896) even though my grandmother had once seen it in my high school library and remarked that she'd enjoyed it. 

 Instead, I concentrated on the lighter reading, what she called "good stories."

Some of the titles, like Pollyanna, The Virginian, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Trail of the Lonesome Pine became movies. Remakes kept a few alive for another generation. But even updated film versions only draw new readers for so long. I've never talked to anyone who actually read Girl of the Limberlost which had four adaptations. 

These old novels have vocabulary far beyond that of most casual readers, and the settings seem so removed from today, most are just titles on a Wikipedia page.

Yet they transported me to early America, and led me to imagine an arduous, mostly rural society. Still, I empathized with the characters' struggles, the injustices they bore, the satisfaction of conflicts resolved and wisdom gained.

What contemporary youngsters will grieve with Jody when Flag destroys the corn and and his mother demands he kill the fawn (The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings)? Who will live in Jewish Poland through the folk stories collected and  written Isaac Bashevis Singer? She won a Pulitzer for her book, he, the Nobel Prize for literature.  

Cleaning out my old books (written before 1960) makes me sad. Half a century later, I know many of those gems of style and story will be lost to  future generations. Many of my favorite titles are on an endangered list now. Eventually they'll be as extinct as the quagga.

Venture to Mt. Vale Winery, Galax, Va.

The sedum heads are turning pink. The tomatoes are in decline. And it gets dark while the evening is still warm enough to be outside.

Autumn is coming too fast for my taste. 

So my husband planned an end-of-summer outing for us that was PERFECT!


We drove a mere forty minutes from home into southern Virginia. Mt. Vale Winery  perches on one of the rolling hills outside of Galax. The tasting room is in the same building as the winery, and the stainless steel tanks are visible just on the other side of the door. They grow about a ton and a half of their own grapes, and buy from other vineyards what they need to finish their wine making. We've sampled wines from many local wineries, and I think these were some of the best.

We got there early on Friday afternoon and enjoyed tasting four wines while chatting with the owner and vintner. We selected items from their mini-deli to add to our picnic. Then we walked halfway down the hill to one of the two gazebos and enjoyed a table overlooking the grapes and the farms across the road. It was like having our own estate.





Then we headed through Galax to the New River and strolled along the foot, bike and horse path for a short mile.  We took over the bench vacated by teenage fishermen who had biked in with their dads.












We watched and invented stories about the people living in the big white farm house on the other side of the river. The school bus lumbered down the narrow road from the right. Three dogs ran in from the left toward the girl getting off the bus and scampered around her knees. She ignored them but stopped for a chat and a hug with the person mowing the lawn. Would she go to the football game at her high school that night? Did she have a crush on a someone she'd see in the stand or on the field? When they went in the house we turned off our imaginations.


The afternoon was as slow and relaxed as the river gently rolling by us. 

On és el bany ( When Spanglish may not be enough)

When my 14 year old daughter was preparing for her solo trip to France, I bought language tapes for the basics: Where's the bathroom, I need help, How much does it cost? 

She would be staying with a family, but I  thought she should learn a little survival French. She laughed about how funny it would be if she needed to say something and couldn't. "Funny?" I said with alarm. She thought again. "Okay, maybe not so funny." But she didn't try to learn a word. 

It probably wouldn't have helped anyway. 

I knew some Spanish when I went to Costa Rica, but only enough to ask questions--not understand the answers. That's how we ended up in a restaurant with the local transvestites. Also how we got stuck in a horrific traffic jam the day of the presidential elections, crawling through the suburbs of San Jose. Plus, I hadn't figured out that avenues ran one way and intersected the streets of the same name. Crazy system. 

I'm trying to bring my Spanish to another level for our fall trip to Barcelona. As I listen to Spanish documentaries on Yabla, a fun listen-and-learn website, I realize that they drop endings of common words. I may never learn to lisp in the right places. Native speakers fly through their sentences and use idioms that don't even show up in online dictionaries.

This weekend I realized they don't even LIKE to speak Spanish in Barcelona because it's part of a separatist wannabe region called Catalunya with it's own language. 

So I hit youtube again, this time for a crash course in 20 basic phrases in Catalan. Oh, brother. 

I foresee a lot of confusion.  

As the days until departure dwindle, I'm feeling a lot like my daughter. Why bother studying?  I guess I'll just keep watching the hysterical Colombian muppets on Yabla. 

How to Harvest Flax Seeds

April blooms

Flax is one of my garden favorites. I want to spread it widely, so I decided to harvest the seed. Now's the time.





The lovely blue flowers of the flax have fallen off, and the dried fruit is a tiny beige capsule shaped like a bowl.

1. Once the bowl opens, the seeds are ready.









2. Cut off stems with the open heads and beat them against the inside of a bucket. Then, cut off the rest of the stem and roll a small handful of the heads between your palms to crush them. 

3. To separate the seeds from the debris, gently blow on the mix while tipping the bowl so the chaff gets lifted away and over the side of the bowl.






4. See how small the remaining seeds are? 







Originally I thought I would save money. In bulk, the seeds are $30.00 a pound.  

But now, after harvesting approximately .1 gram, which is 1/4550 of a pound, I've decided it's a bargain after all!