There are puddles and fountains and falls and rivers of glorious gold sparkling in these Endless Mountains now. Some say that Forsythia can get out of hand and go wild. I agree. Most of the year ours is a raggedy mess, and we have plans to shape it up in a couple of weeks. But for now, I love this golden glorious gift of spring!
Man-oh-man, Mother Nature, you sure played a nasty April Fool’s joke this year here in northeastern Pennsylvania. For this first week of April, we have had nothing but rain, freezing rain, sleet, wind, clouds, snow showers, driving snow, sideways snow, and misery. Ha, ha!
But today winter ended. It was a quintessential blue-sky April Sunday, and we enjoyed it all the more after the crazy weather week we had just endured.
The first Johnny-jump-up showed up today with a smile upon its precious face. It’s here just in time for the solar eclipse tomorrow, and I hope it enjoys the show, with no need for eclipse glasses for this little darlin’.
My words are like
Dandelion parachutes
That float with the wind
When the gold
Has gone.
Hello there.
I have decided that rather than spend the afternoon cleaning the basement, I will start a new project. The seed for this project germinated as I stooped down to take a picture of some crocuses as my dog and I were coming home from our walk.
Here is my plan: I am going to use this not-used-enough blog to document all the flowers as they appear in our lawn and garden this year. If you follow along, I think that you will be amazed at how many flowers show up to at least nod hello, and I am starting today… instead of cleaning the basement. Actually, I am starting two weeks ago. Two weeks and ten years ago, to be precise.
I am going to have to cheat right off the bat, because the first flowers to appear were the snowdrops about two weeks ago, right before a week of horrible weather. I took a picture of those brave little souls, but I can’t find the darn thing on my phone or laptop. Where the heck did it go? So here is a picture that I took in 2014 of the first brave flowers of the season:
Snowdrops grow from tiny bulbs, and they multiply each year, so we have drifts of them here and there at the lower slope of our yard, sometimes amidst snow, sometimes bending in the wind. Sometimes possibly crying? Seeing the first snowdrops always makes my day.
Fast forward to the present. The snowdrops have withered and wilted.
Now the lovely lavender crocuses with their saffron stamens are blooming where I live in the countryside of northeastern Pennsylvania, and if you look closely at the photo, you can see that the edges are a bit weather-beaten. I can relate. But look how gorgeous these little gems are that bloom faithfully each year. They always make me happy.
I did not know the name of this last flower until I happened upon an article about it somewhere. It is a Hellebore, and it takes shelter against our basement wall. It is also called a Lenten Rose because it is likely to bloom around Lent, but sometimes it’s called a Christmas Rose because it also might bloom near Christmas, just not around this cold neck of the woods. These flowers are also extremely toxic, and I just held one up in order to get a better picture, and I’m thinking maybe I should go wash my hands before I die of Hellebore poisoning. Wouldn’t that be a tragic start/ending to my flower-picture project?
Ok, hands washed and still breathing fine, so you can stop worrying about me, if you were.
Anyway, it’s amazing what you can find on the Internet. Here is what the site tesselaar.net.au has to say about Hellebores: “There is a tale of Dionysus, who used his powers to turn the daughters of Argos mad. They roamed naked and hysterical, until Melampus of Plyos made a brew of Hellebore to save them from madness.”
How could you not love Hellebores?
That’s all for today. Well, maybe not.
I’m sitting here in the sunroom next to my Poinsettia that a dear friend gave me for Christmas and my Anthurium that I purchased at Longwood Gardens a couple of years ago. I think that the Poinsettia and Anthurium are jealous. They want their pictures taken. Ok, they are blooming. I’m throwing in a bonus here.
There are some interesting alternative names for the Anthurium, and I’ll leave it at that.
In a world that is a bit of a crappy mess sometimes, flowers never fail to make my day better. Flower power! Maybe that’s another reason to do this project: I hope that these pictures of humble flowers will also brighten your corner of the world.
Thank you for reading this!
January 25, 2024
Sometimes
The best way
To get through
The doldrums
Is to slog
Through the fog
With a dog.
Happy trails to you, and thanks for reading.
Greetings from the Arctic Circle, actually Pennsylvania, where I am struggling to get a running start on 2024. I had all my good intentions, and I am chasing them, but there are too many trails off to the side, and I have to go down each one to the point that if I had to say what I’ve accomplished so far this year, I would have to respond, “Er….um….” Yeah.
For example, the one thing that I am going to accomplish this year, as long as I am alive and breathing, is to finish my Storyworth Memoir, the subscription of which my daughter bought for me either in 2021 or 2022. It’s a bit fuzzy how long that I’ve been working on this tome. In fact, the good people at Storyworth stopped asking me questions about my life a long time ago. “Who was your hero growing up?” and many other questions have gone unanswered. Several months ago, well maybe it was last year, come to think, I sent the Storyworth people an email inquiry as to whether they would still publish my book once I finished, since it’s been a long time since I started. “Yes,” they responded, so I might have promised them that I’d get it done by a self-imposed dead-line, a dead-line which has passed me by, I assure you.
The problem is that I get sidetracked very easily. For instance, this afternoon I was going to write about my life in the 80’s and specifically about my foreign-studies abroad experience in Strasbourg, France. I kept an extensive journal about the experience, so I wanted to refresh my memory by reading my journal before I started writing about that period of my life. First, I had to find the journal. That’s the problem. I went up to my attic, a place which I have written about before. Alas, the attic is no more organized, reamed out, tote-a-fied than it was the last time I wrote about it. I did not find my French journal there, but I did find the ivory high heels that I wore for my wedding thirty-five years ago. Possibly I might bring myself to donate them to the Salvation Army. They are still pretty…only worn once. My feet have somewhat flattened out since that bright day, and maybe someone else might want them. Actually, I just found one shoe, so I will have to find the other one up there in that hellscape before I can give them to anyone. My attic=ugh.
But for today the attic was not my objective. So, I reminded myself of my objective and started looking for my journal in the back of my clothes closet, where I have stashed some other journals. (I have kept a journal pretty faithfully since I was a child, sometimes writing every day, sometimes once a month, and I have assorted journals here-there-and-everywhere around the house.) I did not find my journal from France in the back of my closet, but guess what else I found?
I found the Christmas candy that I had stashed there, planning to put it on the dining room table on Christmas morning. I had forgotten it. There it all was hiding out in the back of my closet, and the buttercrunch chocolates were calling my name. I ignored them for a minute because another goal for 2024 that was inspired by a book I just finished, Fat Mom on a Mountain, is to be almost as fit as the author, Kriste O’Brien, was when she reached her goal of summiting Half Dome in Yosemite National Park after months of preparation.
By this point of my own quest, I was feeling weak in body and spirit. Recently I’ve also been listening to Jason Seib’s podcasts about how you should embrace your discomfort and ignore the comfort zone of procrastination and eating chocolates in order to become one of the very few (5%) of the self-disciplined souls who conquer the bullies in their head and take freezing ice baths, run ultramarathons and write their Storyworth memoirs in the allotted timeframe. After about a minute of weakly mind-wrestling the bully within, the chocolates(s) won out, I’m afraid. I had one (ok several) and they were delicious.
Here is what I would like to tell you now: that as I’ve been writing this essay, I glanced up at my bookshelves across the room and discovered my French journal there, sandwiched between an old Methodist Hymnal (I did not steal it; they were giving them away) and The Official U.S. Army Survival Handbook. I did walk over to the bookshelves, but unfortunately, I did not discover the journal that I kept while I was a student in France. What I did find was a little, old, brown, 5-year diary with a clasp but no key. Thankfully it was unlocked. My very first diary. Of course, I had to start reading it. “Jan 1, 1972- Today Daddy suddenly had a spurt of energy and before I knew it, I was helping clean out Mommy and Daddy’s room.”
And now the afternoon has disappeared like a startled chickadee, and I have things to do before I sleep, so I will leave you, dear reader, until the next time when I hope that I will be able to tell you that I found my journal that I wrote as a Penn State student when I was far, far from home, that I captured some insights into my young-adult mind and finished writing about the decade of the 80’s, and that I have pushed onward towards my goal of finishing my memoir during this year, 2024.
I just hope I don’t keep getting side-tracked.
Thank you for reading this, and Peace to you in 2024!
Two weeks to the day after my mother slipped away, I was sitting at twilight, taking in my husband’s glorious garden: the lavender catmint, red-hot pokers, tangerine, peach, and saffron lilies, daisies, and pink roses from a cutting of his grandma's, long-gone. All of a sudden a flash of scarlet, a cardinal, of course, lit on the wall, for just a moment.
And farewell is harder than I had ever imagined.
I wrote the following essay in April, 1995 for “Meandering”, a bi-weekly column that I used to write for a farm newspaper, The Farmer’s Friend. This year Easter is late, and there are more signs of spring than usual, but here on our farm, we are just between crocuses and daffodils on nature’s calendar, and temperatures yoyo from the 30’s to 70’s so I still stand by what I wrote almost thirty years ago.
There are places where Easter is celebrated amidst riotous colors, where the grass is a rich shade of green, where flowers bloom—lemony daffodils, rose-hued azaleas, tulips dripping red, orange, purple.
Here in northeastern Pennsylvania though, you can color Easter in shades of chocolate, from the bare-boned trees and the muddy roads to murky, just-thawed ponds and skittish beige deer.
The skies you can color changeable at this time of the year. Depending on a whim they can be variations of gray, robin’s egg blue, or lily white. Streak them with a hazy rainbow after a shower; strew them with clouds—cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus. Be sure to make the clouds’ shapes interesting—form them into a goat’s head or a set of angel’s wings.
From your palette select pastels: amber for the stubble-strewn fields, shades of pink and mauve for the far-off forests—colors that hint of things to come. Touches of apple green should spike out here and there, pale, barely-touched-with-chlorophyll green.
In other places Easter is heralded with trumpet fanfares and 100-voice choirs echoing alleluias. In the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania the quiet colors are complemented with the muted music of geese honking overhead, with the robins singing their odes to spring, and with the spring peepers’ joyful fanfare. The sounds of wind and rain add to the northeastern concerto: whispering, bellowing, shrieking wind along with rain percussing—pattering, drumming, pounding a steady beat.
Easter temperatures in other places will be in the 70s or 80s, and people might wear sun dresses and short-sleeved shirts as they bask in the sun’s early glow at sunrise services. Easter temperatures here may be in the 20s, and we might wear our winter coats and gloves as we hunt for Easter eggs in 12 inches of snow!
There are many who prefer to flee south for Easter—to celebrate this holiday where flowers bloom, and skies are always sunny.
For those of us who stay here, spring is still but a promise—one last snowstorm and a hopeful daffodil away. Never mind what the calendar says, the physical evidence is sometimes mighty slim. For hardy northerners, spring is still something to be hoped for, something to have faith in.
I believe that our less-than-stellar days seem somehow appropriate at Easter-time. Faith, hope, a promise—isn’t that what Easter is about anyway?
Peace to you, and thank you for reading this!
I thought I saw a light at the end of the tunnel-- turns out it was just a break that led to another, darker tunnel. And, don't want to be, but I’m kind of mad at God because, like millions, I keep praying for a miracle— hasn’t happened yet. “Lose yourself in nature and find peace,” said Emerson. I’m trying, Ralph, I’m trying.
Early this week, in a fit of creative inspiration, I challenged myself to a daily blog entry for the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday went by and I met my challenge. Then Thursday evening my adversary named Self-Doubt stopped by, and I stalled out. So I wrote the following for Friday:
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The hell with the week-long challenge
So this has been fun, but it’s getting stressful, and I’m finding myself peeking at Facebook every five minutes, well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but sometimes when I write this blog, I find myself turning into an insecure person desperate for some likes. It’s getting really bad when you tell your son to like your blog post, so he likes them all even though he hasn’t read any of them. Aiie! I don’t care for that needy, insecure me that crops up sometimes, so I’m going to cut off this challenge today.
I will keep writing. I’m writing a children’s story for my grandchildren and great-niece and a Storyworth memoir. I also have some ideas for future blog posts. They will appear in March or April. Thank you to everyone who has supported me with a “like” or a comment. I do appreciate them. I just don’t want to depend upon them for my peace of mind!
Ciao for now!
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I wrote the preceding as my final/give-up-the-challenge blogpost for the week.
Then I peeked at Facebook one more time… and read an encouraging comment from a friend.
Oh, crap, I thought. I can’t end with that final post now. I have to continue and fulfill my challenge to myself. Then I wrote a post about my husband’s artwork.
Of course, watching the Olympics helped too. How can you not be motivated to persevere when hearing the stories of athletes who have struggled and kept on. Right now I am thinking of the women’s figure skating saga and the aftermath of almost everyone crying: one for joy, the youngest crumpled in anguish, another with mascara-tracks running down her cheeks and her eyes blazing, but the young Gold Medal Champion standing alone, stoic, probably in shock, but calm. Her perseverance and grace and that of Nathan Chen and so many more inspired me.
Perseverance: one of the best stories to come from the Olympic Games.
Finally, I want this last post of the week to remain in your mind as a thank note to every person who has encouraged me by leaving a comment (or, yes, liking a post 😎), or just taking the time to read my posts.
Sometimes we don’t even fully grasp the importance of support and encouragement, how far it can take another person.
Ciao for now. I’ll be back in March.
Dandelion Parachutes 