… when I was out early this morning. Walking down the street, to the delightful fragrance of magnolia trees in bloom. So wonderful to walk the streets and smell them all the way across the block when the aroma seems to saturate the neighborhood. I snapped one off the tree from the house just across the street, that was not yet open, and brought it in to put in a little vase of water, so it would permeate the entire house: Oh. My. Goodness. Surely some chemist has figured out how to bottle this and sell that alluring aroma? This might be what we will encounter when we get to the Pearly Gates, peering through as we are waiting in line, getting a whiff of what’s on the other side…

And some amazing calla lilies blooming in the fence of a neighbor a couple of blocks along on my walk to the end of Beulah street. I’ve been observing different things planted in her landscape over the weeks of warming weather and enjoyed seeing her care and attention to her plants pay off as they bloom in season. A large planting of early-blooming Lenten rose that was so pretty when nothing else had any color. Daffodils and narcissus, Chinese tallow lily in a bed of pine straw. A low fence out near the street with an assortment of things planted right in front, with the white pickets as a backdrop: phlox, and this delightful stand of calla lily plants.

Even the foliage is interesting: variegated with pink spots on the leaves. It seems likely the plant might have been a gift, in a container, from a florist or supermarket when some holiday came around. Then she planted it outdoors, with straw mulch to help protect it from the weather. No telling how many times over the years when employed in a floral shop I have told customers it will re-bloom with care and patience. According to google, it is native to south Africa, grows everywhere except Antarctica, from a rhizome that will flourish out of doors in well drained, sunny location.

I have seen another one on my walks, in a yard nearby that has several white blooms on it. But inside a fence making me reluctant to step into the yard to take a photo. If I could spot the homeowner, I would ask for permission…

… by prolific author Jodi Picoult. Herein lies a tremendous amount of research about a number of different topics. Lately it seems there is so much information about how the book came into existence when you take the time to read the acknowledgements at the end of story, be it a novel or non-fiction. In order to build the back story of the characters Picoult has made so human, believable, fallible and interesting, she had to find people who would share a wealth of knowledge about Egyptology, airplanes falling from the sky, physicists, neurosurgery, and most interestingly: death doulas. The death doula is a person who does the opposite of a birth doula: will provide for anything needed by a person who is dying, other than drugs. From contacting funeral homes to make arrangements, and writing obituaries, to finding long lost lovers or family members, to cleaning out the attic – whatever that person feels needs to be done for them to let go and have a sense of completion, no regrets.

Dawn is in a airplane crash, has a head injury requiring surgery, after surviving the fall landing in North Carolina following a trans-Atlantic crossing. She has been married for fifteen years, is the mother of a teenage daughter, lives in Boston. Before: she was a student at Yale, studying Egyptology, and spending time on a dig in the desert. Where she met another post grad. student, Wyatt, where after months of animosity and sharp-edged competition the let go of their hostility and found themselves deeply attracted to each other. In a relationship with Wyatt, she receives a call from the US, her mother is in hospice care after unsuccessful treatment for cancer.

In the hospice house, where she spends many hours a day sitting at her mother’s bedside, she encounters Brian, who waits with his grandmother, who raised him from childhood. They begin to talk and find support in each other in this time of emotional exhaustion. Brian is a physicist, talks in the abstract language of dimensions and particles, but is drawn to this beautiful young, heartbroken student. When Dawn’s mother dies, she becomes the guardian of a thirteen year old brother, and realizes she is being forced to become an adult: get a job, go to work, support a family.

The title of the book is a reference to how the Egyptians four-thousand-years ago believed they could reach their version of heaven: spells and hieroglyphics were painted on coffins to help the soul find it’s way to the other side. There was a map called the Book of Two Ways to aid their travels that indicated there are two ways to get to that perfection they hoped for after death – a rejoining of body and soul. Also food and drink,various preserved internal organs, animals, servants, boats, jewelry, everything needed to nourish these two components until reunited.

Fascinating. Long: almost 450 pages, but filled with insights into human behavior, contemplation of life and death, how we get through. A little much technical stuff about hieroglyphics/translating, but well worth reading. It went with me to VA and back, just finished this morning.

“I know how something in you changes with a parent dies. You go about the rest of your days just like you have before, pretending you are fine, knowing it is all a lie. It isn’t until you loose a parent that you become an actor in the play of your own life.” page 236

“The opposite of love isn’t hate… it’s complacency.”

… weeks: since Mother’s Day when the people across the street brought two Adirondack-type chairs to go on my front stoop, by the door. After I went for a walk and made that one cup of coffee-flavored milk I enjoy each morning, I took my book and went out to sit. Beautiful cool, quiet day, birds singing, sun shining, peaceful and serene.

… there is a house on the corner where a man lives who surely must enjoy puttering in this yard. I noticed the native plant ‘beard tongue’ growing recently and stopped late yesterday afternoon to inquire about another plant I could not identify. I reported to him about accidentally buying several plants at wallyworld north of town on Friday, when I went in the garden shop. Always a mistake, but I wanted to get some bagged dirt to plant the tomatoes in five-gallon buckets.

Bought these two, plus a tall lavender fox glove plant, perennials all,which is the only reason I took complete leave of my senses and paid for them when I only intended to buy dirt. Comically when I was sending photos to my email to put on the blog, I could not name that plant, and called it a dragon breath – which is not terribly far from beard tongue of you think of what happens when a dragon gets angry…

I was out watering things, and pinching fading blooms off some of the plants, like dianthus in containers. Stuff that needs to be dead-headed in order to keep making buds and blooms instead of going to seed. Turned around when I heard a bee buzzing about, and watched it go into the tubular bloom on the tall foxglove spike. How cool is that!!?? This is why I keep buying plants to attract bees, butterflies and humming birds…

… after spending the better part of a year as a house guest, where the baskets are emptied on Sunday. In decent weather most of the wet items are hung out on a clothes line to dry, then brought back in smelling like sunshine to be folded and put away. Or sit in the basket until needed…

This caused me to get in the habit of doing my little minuscule bit of laundry on Sunday. It usually takes two loads, and both are often on a ‘low’ water level setting. Reset that to a medium today when washing linens, as it was time to change the sheets on the bed. When I put the bottom one back on after drying, I found this:

Which would have been like that fairy tale story of the “Princess and the Pea”. The lump is a pair of wool socks that live in the dryer: got tangled up in the corner of the fitted sheet when tumbling over and over. There are about six pairs of matched wool socks that are permanent residents of the electric clothes dryer, and have been in there for years. I quit using dryer sheets, like ‘Downy’, when I read about how that stuff coats your clothing and although it helps with static, the evil of fabric softeners far outweighs the benefit. Rather than buy the commercially available felted-wool balls you can purchase to put in the dryer that will tumble around with your articles of clothing, I just added worn out socks, after the heels and toes gets to threadbare they don’t keep my feet warm in the winter.

After I finished putting all four corners on, and realized there was a big lump in the middle, where the balled up wool socks had hidden while the sheet was in the dryer tumbling around, I had a good laugh. Went to get my phone to take a photo before I reached in to remove the socks, thinking: I am finally to the age where I can not only laugh at myself, I hope that everyone else who sees this will get a chuckle as well.

… all seem to want to caution those of us who struggle with inadequate sleep that the addiction to ‘devices’ is a problem. Too much time spent looking at screens, both large and small seem to be part of the reason we cannot reduce the chaos in our brains enough to slow the frenzied cells down enough to let our brains and bodies get the rest we need to get up and do it all over again. Cautionary tales about going to bed with a cell phone in your hand, lying in a dark room as the thumb scrolls along on the screen, overwhelming the nervous system with images that are not conducive to closing ones eyes and peaceful dreams.

Although I have yet to figure out the best combination here in 52nd street, it seems like sitting at the computer and looking at silly stuff on YouTube is more beneficial than not. Amusing pet videos, and images of people doing things that make you wince when you see someone asking for trouble actually might be helpful: it makes your eyes tired. And tired eyes are asking to be rested.

… the very rural street in the suburbs where my sister-in-law has lived for decades. I can imagine that much of the area was farm land centuries ago, but now housing with all the lots having trees, and densely wooded where there is no lawn or homes. Large lots at a good distance from any commercial property, where homeowners enjoy peace and quiet of country living when the commercial mow-and-blow teams pack up their noise to leave immaculate lawns and tidy paved driveways. Still trying to do some walking daily hoping that newest knee replacement will continue to improve, the street has no sidewalk: but so little traffic during the day it seems safe to walk down the middle of the asphalt, similar to what happens most of the time in the densely packed neighborhood of St.Elmo.

If you look closely at the cropped photo below, you can spot the deer in the center of the picture. In an effort to keep up with the walking, hoping for continued improvement post knee surgery, I was out in the street, roaming the neighborhood. Looking at houses, landscaping, studying nature as I walked along. No sidewalk, no center line and a relatively narrow paved strip of asphalt, that drops off into shallow ditches on either side. I looked through a gap in the trees and undergrowth close to the street, out into a pasture where I have seen livestock in years past: and saw the deer. There in the distance, where it was apparently grazing until detecting slight motion of me strolling along the street.

My sister-in-law has reported numerous times that between deer grazing on the landscaping and rabbits eating things she has tried to grow, she does not plant much around her house. Lots of pretty bloomers in containers up on the deck she can see and enjoy looking out the windows, but unwilling to purchase plants that will only feed the wildlife if she tries to add color with flowering annuals. Apparently the deer do not care for iris, or day lily plants in a raised planted my brother built, or the daisies I saw blooming in the front of the house. They also had lantana growing under the mailbox for years, so that is obviously not their definition of ‘tasty treat’.

So often you go to the supermarket for some random item, and find yourself lured into buying plants, often colorful bloomers this time of year, displayed in the lobby, or out on the sidewalk. Snookered into a impulse purchase, something with cheerful flowers you certainly did not have on your list and never intended to buy. Bright eye-catching colors you adopt to take home, that make you smile with each sighting, hoping they will continue to bloom throughout the growing season to produce flowers – and smiles – all summer long…

… TN on Thursday evening, although the traffic in metro ATL was hellacious. There have been times when it felt like self-flagellation inching through tedious miles and hours of traffic that was going at the break-neck speed of 12 m.p.h. for no apparent reason, and me right there in the middle of that frustrating misery. Apparently the cause of the misery was merely a SNAFU. If you are familiar with military acronyms, you will fill in the blanks, and immediately read the missing letters between the capitals. When I was quite young and heard the term used, asked my dad what it meant: he gave me the sanitized interpretation and said it was army-speak for ‘situation normal, all fouled up’. Years later my interpretation was corrected, with a different word the coarse drill sergeant would use instead of ‘fouled’.

I can usually, even factoring in how stressful the grinding, snarling traffic with ten million vehicles can be inching along, get inside the 285 perimeter highway in less than two hours. Even with driving in from the north, all the way into the east side of town into Decatur. But on a Thursday afternoon, of a holiday weekend, with graduations of all shape and size from Kindergarten to universities, and people starting summer vacations: it was awfuller than awful. Four hours of driving.

You never know if you should believe what the GPS on the cell phone is telling you when instructed to go east and you know you need to be heading west. Should you take the advice of the Waze voice that is getting information from satellites, and tracking your every move? Or go the way you have been so frequently in the past that has been fool-proof and time tested? After a couple of hours, when I was still ridiculously close to downtown Atlanta, I thought: I need to be rescued. We all know the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same foolish behavior and expecting different results? I will just be thankful I don’t do it everyday like those other ten million fool-hardy commuters do…

… to north: drove to Decatur on Monday afternoon to spend the night, and get a ride to ATL early on Tuesday. Reservations to fly from Hartsfield-Jackson International on Southwest Air to Richmond. I’ve not been since last summer, although for a while it was much more frequent. Circumstances on both ends have curtailed travel for over six months: tedious rehab post-surgery on this end, and family crisis in eastern VA that saw my sister-in-law devoting her time to caring for her dad, who had relocated from AL to live nearby for over ten years.

Back during the unforgettable pandemic era, there were times when there was practically no foot-traffic in the terminal, few riders on the PlaneTrain and nearly no pedestrians rolling baggage along the concourses -of which there are now six: A,B,C,D,E,F and T. Southwest flies out of concourse C, at least that is where all the flights I can recall originated and ended. In fact – I thought I might be slipping through a narrow tear in time this week when my outgoing and incoming flight were at the same gate: as if I vanished into another dimension and then reappeared three days later walking back into the same spot to resume daily activities like it had only been a milliseconds time since strolling down the gangway.

It was the strangest thing to be there, in those early days of the covid crisis, when people were all trying to stay safe: quarantined and sheltering in place to avoid contamination. Travelers were amazingly sparse, and I remember taking a photo of this same mosaic of Stone Mountain reflected in the lake as I was heading down the wide hallway, sans feets and rolling luggage. Looking at the many seating areas adjacent to windows: a view of empty stalls where there were no airplanes parked, and row upon row of empty seating at various gates where no travelers were awaiting boarding. Remember the scenes that set you up to feel desolation in the old western movies where the wind blew tumbleweeds across the dirt streets of long-deserted ghost towns, doors eerily creaking in the breeze? It is such a clear memory, looking back, I have to wonder where the bouncing tumbleweeds were!

There was actually a barricade closing off half of the length of that long hallway: one end of the concourse was completely blocked during the early months following the quarantine period of no travel whatsoever. There were big panels on wheels standing shoulder to shoulder barring passage from dozens of gates designed for entry into the gangways that provide access to planes. Hard to imagine the long wide hallways that are normally filled with travelers scurrying from one eatery, restroom, incoming flight to departing connections: almost without activity. But the schedules were so devoid of flights, and so few people willing to put themselves at risk by traveling in that narrow tube, enclosed with other humans, most flights were sparse populated, with half the seats vacant.

… weeds at the seldom seen and out of the way Tennessee state park where indigenous Nancy Ward is buried. She was a beloved woman of the Cherokee Nation, interred on a small hill near the Ocoee River in a rural area near Cleveland. Along with a son and a brother, where she lived in her latter years in a house overlooking the countryside that she loved, now a pocket-sized park dedicated to her memory. The small park, surrounded by farm land, has several large shade trees and benches. It is maintained by the state, with periodic clean-up days when volunteers with work gloves, spades, dandelion diggers from area chapters of Daughters of the American Revolution chapters will gather to provide care, sprucing up the area.

We met at 9 am, to pull weeds and spread mulch along a paved walkway leading up to a large red cedar that stands over the burial site of the three native Americans in a small plot, enclosed by wrought iron fencing. There are a number of native flowering plants lining the walk way, where the state has planted things like false indigo and butterfly weed to attract pollinators. In the edge of landscaping blocks, along a constructed wall where the plants are flourishing, and raised to make them amazingly easy for volunteers to maintain, clean out the undesirables and spread mulch. Also lots of other things that are equally attractive as well as profoundly invasive like Queen Anne’s lace and the thoroughly disliked and disparaged kudzu (that smells so mouth-wateringly delightful in the late summer when it blooms.)

You do know, right: that the difference in a wild flower and a weed is all about ‘location’? If it is somewhere the plant is nurtured and welcomed, approved of and given plenty of space to grow, it is a beloved wild-flower, native plant that is indigenous to a particular environment. Whereas: that same plant will be considered as a weed, when it appears to be thriving in a place it is unwanted, growing where it is undesirable, out of control and often attacked with weed-killer to eliminate before it can flower and go to seed to reproduce.

From a state historical marker at the site in rural southeast TN: “Nancy Ward: High Priestess of the Cherokees and always a loyal friend of white settlers, is buried on the ridge to the west. She repeatedly prevented massacres of white settlers and several times rescued captives from death at the hands of her people. She is also credited with the introduction of milk cows and many improvements in homemaking into the Cherokee economy.”

This is carved on a bench, placed along the winding path that goes up to the top of the hill where the beloved mother is buried, under the dappled shade of a tree. Stop and rest before you complete the walk up the incline to the hilltop.

In the planter along the path: various native bloomers grow. This photo is after we worked for a couple of hours pulling out a wide variety of unwelcome plants that had seeded and grown in the narrow space between the two retaining walls, and mulch had been spread. It makes no sense at all for the state to purchase mulch by the bag to take to this location and scatter in an effort to help retard weed growth as well as retain moisture: a truck load makes much more sense. Sadly, I was not in charge, but would happily give the people who were not good stewards of taxpayer dollars the benefit of my opinion.