Garden Meditations...

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

For children who are our second planting, and though they
grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may
they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where
their roots are.

Let us give thanks;

For generous friends…with hearts…and smiles as bright
as their blossoms;

For feisty friends, as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them;

For crotchety friends, sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and
as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as
potatoes and so good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and
as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes;

And serious friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle
as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as
dill, as endless as zucchini and who, like parsnips, can be
counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time,
and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold
us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past
that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that
we might have life thereafter.

For all these we give thanks.

~Rev. Max Coots

Looking for cooperation…

My dog Olive always does this when she sees the camera coming…

It seems like she is sick of being photographed, like she’s some kind of celebrity or something and is fed up with the paparazzi.  Goofy little dog. 

So I have to find more cooperative photo subjects.  The latest one I found was at on sale at my local supermarket…a bunch of white roses.  Beautiful, aren’t they?  And they don’t bark and turn their backs.

Another thing I happened on earlier this summer was a misty morning.   The conditions have to be just right to get morning light like this.  It doesn’t seem to last very long, but this particular morning, I got lucky.

Second honeymoons...

We bought a new refrigerator last week.  To our consternation, this house was fridgeless when we moved in ten years ago.  So the fridge we bought in a rush was too small for us, but we had to be able to fit it in until we could afford to update the old kitchen.  By the time we had had enough of it, that fridge no longer made ice and was leaking cold air like a sieve even though it was only ten years old.  The new one is the fridge of my dreams.  It makes ice and holds everything the old one did with room to spare.  That’s cool!  No pun intended.  So what if we probably paid a grand plus more for it than that old piece of “you know what.”  Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Seeing the new sparkling clean refrigerator sparked something in me and while I was doing some cleaning yesterday, I came across some old baseball game ticket stubs I had thrown into a dusty ceramic pot we bought on a vacation out west years ago.  One of the stubs was from the Boston Red Sox game that Greg and I attended on our honeymoon…our first time in Fenway Park.  The face value of the ticket was $3.00.  Granted, we sat in the bleachers, but $3.00?  Wow!  The seats we sit in these days have about a $90 face value…meaning we only go to two games a year and know we are lucky for that. 

  We now sit in better seats…but are they 80-some dollars better?

Well, it made me think about the way things have changed over the years.  Though we paid a lot for our new refrigerator, we will probably enjoy it much more than that old one that I never was happy with.  This one seems to be better in so many ways.

  Maybe it’s worth all that money.

On the other hand, I can remember going to the ballgame back in the day.  It was good, cheap entertainment for us when we lived in Cleveland.  We went pretty much any time we wanted.  The ballpark was old and decrepit but we always had lots of fun.  The Indians were not so good, but we loved them…especially when they managed to beat the Yankees.  One cold and nasty night in May of 1981, we actually witnessed the Len Barker perfect game.  What a thrill!  While it didn’t rank up there with the birth of my kids, for this baseball lover, it was pretty darn close.  And that game we went to on our honeymoon…the couple who sat behind us was on their honeymoon, too.  We took each other’s pictures.  I hope they are still happy and every now and then think of us when they come across that photo or maybe that old ticket stub.

I have no point here.  It’s just that things change all the time and, for me, change is sometimes hard to get used to.  I know that just because something costs a lot, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better…but, you know, sometimes it is better.

  Sometimes you actually do get what you pay for.

  And sometimes a $3.00 ticket can make a honeymoon special.

Now, my bubblies get to stand up straight.

Flash from the past:  Greg with our friends Mike and Eileen at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland.  Note the Red Sox fan in the background.  Red Sox Nation was alive and well even then.

Another flash from the past.  We're getting ready for Opening Day in Cleveland with my brothers Rob and Mark.  The old photo of us at Fenway is in our slide collection and hasn't been digitalized yet.  One of these days... 

Back to the Rock House…

I did something stupid the other day.  Well, most days I do something stupid, I will admit.  But the other day, I had a batch of photos that I took of some pretty spectacular mushrooms we have growing in our yard.  After I downloaded them and when I went to copy them, I cut them instead and forgot that when I went to copy something else that they were there.  So off they went off to the cloud, never to be seen again.

  Oh, well…stuff happens.

I have managed to get some more shots of those mushrooms but haven’t really looked at them yet.  I have been thinking about the Rock House Reservation again and went back to those photos.  I’ll post a few of those here today.  It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place.  This is an area of forest that had been cleared for farm lands and now has been allowed to revert back to its original state.  The beauty of this particular area is the massive outcropping of rocks that rest on the land.  That is a good reason not to even bother to farm the land.  Sometimes things were just meant to be undisturbed…

I have another turkey pic to post as well.  This little family wanders through our yard most days, but it is not always bright enough to get any decent pictures of them.  You can see that the little guys are getting bigger.  I guess they have to be big enough to be on their own very soon, but I don’t really know the ways of wild turkeys.  I guess I have to google that when I’m done here.

Seeing the light and color....

I think I am beginning to come out of the doldrums.  Thanks to a good dose of Northampton, Massachusetts and lots of color.

I drove out last week to have lunch with my daughter Carrie, but the real reason for the drive was the gifts that I ordered for her for her birthday didn’t arrive until about a week and a half after the day.  So it gave me a good excuse to drive out and spend some time with her.

It was a hot day and it was also the day of the annual Noho sidewalk sale so people were out in great numbers.  To me, everything looked saturated with color.  Of course, when I finally got around to looking at the photos yesterday, they weren’t nearly as colorful as I thought they would be so I took a few liberties.  Sometimes that’s just fun.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art had a booth at the sidewalk sale.  The museum is in Amherst, MA and is a great place to visit for kids, kids-at-heart and even stuffy old farts.

My daughter Carrie...she has flowers in her eyes.