Watering the garden around midday and the children from the nearby preschool walk by. They squeal with delight as they say hi to their beloved elephant friend Ned, who lives in our garden. Ned guards the flowerbed along with a few other friends including a dalmatian puppy, a turtle, a koala bear and my wingless cherub.
If you look close at the pic above you can see Ned’s outline in the background. :)
This is a snapshot of me, just after I finished my chemotherapy treatments. My hair was staring to grow back in and I still wasn’t wearing a prosthetic leg very often. You can see that I’m starting to gain back some of my lost weight–I’m guessing that I’m probably up to nearly 90 lbs here.
In this pic I was panning for gold in a mountain stream with my family. It’s one of the very few pictures that I have of myself in the post-chemo era.
I’ve been a bit depressed about living in SoCal for a few weeks, ever since we returned from Boston, really. I felt like I wanted to flee away to somewhere with four seasons, somewhere where people wear wool. All of your lovely pictures of autumn leaves made this longing even more intense. I wanted to look out my window and see red and orange and not green, green, green.
So this was on my mind as I was in my garden a few days ago. I decided to go on a hunt for color, to see just how many different shades I could capture in 15 minutes in my plot. Below are a few of the results:
PURPLE
RED
PINK
ORANGE
YELLOW
GREEN
BLUE
After I came home and sorted through my photos I felt a bit better. I made myself a big salad with garden lettuce and thinly sliced up a zucchini and drizzled it with a bit of flavored vinegar & oil and spiced with some cracked pepper (yum).
True, we have little seasonal variety here–just a range of somewhere in the 70s and 80s year-round, but the local food is good and the gardening opportunities abound. I suspect that someday we’ll be living somewhere we I get true seasons again. But for now I’ll stop complaining and just enjoy being here. :)
One of my more illustrious ancestors–a former governor of New York.
I’m not seeing much of a family resemblance. Heaven knows I didn’t inherit his hair! (and what’s truly amazing about his ‘do is that was long before the days of the carefully-crafted bedhead look…makes me wonder if he didn’t have some special tin of bear grease pomade on his bathroom counter…)
On second thought, his eyebrows might look just a bit like mine when my tweezers have gone missing for a few weeks…
A picture from my garden meditation time yesterday. My roses are still blooming (joy)! This one smelled so fruity and flowerly–I so wish you could’ve been there with me…(and I did pluck just one from the bush to add to my kitchen sink windowsill).
A quotation that I have been pondering the past few days:
“If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.”
~Gelett Burgess
I want to be open to new ideas, to continue learning, growing and changing. A life lived with fear and rigidity is not, for me, a satisfying one! I think life is too short to not be open. We should be absorbing and experiencing many new things…to tread in places where we are are unsure. To be like this rose–showing our most vulnerable inner places and sharing it with everyone, even those who may not recognize the courage that it takes to be open.
Yah, just as you were sitting back in your office chair and yawning a bit, thinking, “Naw, there’s no way she’ll post again today” (thus breaking her previous record of three posts in one day), she goes and posts again. What is it with that pilgrimgirl?
People:
For those of you who just can’t get enough of trains (and you know who you are), don’t you dare miss today’s Daily Dose of Imagery. Sit back and just feel those rails moving beneath you as you move forward into the horizon….
And if you really want to sleep well tonite, you can add a bit of this to your mind just as you’re drifing off into a train-induced dreamworld….
A photo of me by Kaimi, taken with his super-dark-Coppertone tan lens (and another one with me in the background). :)
I came across the wee little spider in this picture as I was snapping flower pics on the Alcott farm. He was so hard to see, as his color blended in perfectly with the yellow of the petals on the sunflower. But what a delight it was to capture his image on film. Charming!
On another note, I keep thinking about this post from Liz. What does is mean to be a cancer survivor with so much enthusiasm for life who finds no one to dance with? And what about those moments when you realize that your body, your disease make you unappealing or untouchable? And what about the Gilroy test–the true test of love:
“The Gilroy test is the one true metric of real love. So-named because my aunt once had a large orange cat who was the most beautiful cat in the world before he got kitty leukemia and started wasting away. I was kind of an oblivious twit when I was a teenager and must have made some unthinking remark because my aunt spent some time gently explaining to me that it’s very easy to think you love someone when they’re beautiful. But that the test of real love is whether you love them with the same intensity when they’re ugly.
“Everyone gets ugly from time to time,” she told me, stroking Gilroy.
This photo and Liz’s post evoke such a jumble of emotions for me, especially the connection between love and beauty. Can we only love what is beautiful? Or is true love the ability to see beauty in all things? I think the latter. My heart soars when I see how gorgeous my kids and my John and my flowers are. But they are beautiful to me because I already love them, not because they are inherently beautiful. Does that make sense?
I think our recognition of beauty is more about being aware and in tune with our surroundings than it is with seeing what’s inherently visually appealing. An example: as I rode my bike home from the library in the dark last night, everything was beautiful to me–the sliver of moon in the sky, the taste and smell of the humid air, the taut feeling in my leg muscles as I pedaled home, and the joy of nearing the end of a well-spent day. In being completely there I felt so satisfied, so full of joy. That was beauty.
“It’s frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children. Long ago children were forbidden the Gardens, and at that time there was not a fairy in the place ; then the children were admitted, and the fairies came trooping in that very evening, they can’t resist following the children, but you seldom see them, partly because they live in the daytime behind the railings, where you are not allowed to go, and also partly because they are so cunning. They are not a bit cunning after Lock-out, but until Lock-out, my word !”
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1906.
Note: I copied this quotation from this delightful post at Le Fumoir…
There is a magical time in my garden each night as the sun sets behind the hills and the solar lights along my main pathway start to twinkle. It’s a time of day that I generally find myself chatting with friends rather than gardening. It’s a time for contemplation and not for work. :)
So in the gloaming a few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and her young daughter and when the lights came on, I mentioned that it was now “fairy time” in the garden. Such times remind me of when my kids were littler and the joy they had in finding all of the nooks & crannies of the garden where the ‘fairies’ lived. Oddly, though, I don’t think my kids really believed in fairies. It was more of a game for us….a way of acknowledging the magic and creativity of the garden. At least that’s what I tell myself now.
I didn’t foster my children’s belief in Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Yes, the kids would get some money under their pillow after they lost a tooth, but it was more of a ritual than a practice in deception. And at Christmastime I often put gifts under the tree with only a “To” on the tag and no “From.” Sometimes the kids said this meant these gifts were from Santa. I don’t think I purposefully encouraged this belief, but it was just there given the cultural milieu in which they were raised. And at Easter we often gave little treats and hid colored eggs, but the Easter Bunny part of the holiday was just an excuse for a little fun, much as in the dress-up part of Halloween.
So now I wonder why I still speak of fairies? Why did that comment so easily pop out of my mouth at dusk? Why do I feel the need to linger and relish the transition from night to day, the “fairytime,” in my garden?
I believe it’s because I use the image of the ‘fairy’ as a kind of cultural shorthand. The notion of little sprites darting around in the plants expresses my feelings about the mystical presence of my garden: the flowers that spring up in unintended spaces, the persistence of some plants against all odds, the continued ‘unexpected’ of each visit to my “Secret Garden” space.
Just as I still enjoy myths and fairytales and ripping-good yarns, I still speak of fairies. I think I still believe in them, too. Not of the Disney/ Tinkerbell variety, but as embodiments of the healing, enlivening energy that surrounds my flowers & plants.
What about you? Do you believe in fairies?
One of my favorite visits was to the Orchard House in Concord, the home where the Alcotts lived during the era depicted in Little Women.
The guide told many charming stories about the family and major funding has restored the house to its former glory. The best part were the paintings all over the walls done by the artistic sister, May (or Amy). I especially loved the little angelic doodles around the window frames in her bedroom.
Can I just say how much I wanted to be Jo when I was growing up? I’m just sure I would’ve cut my hair to feed the family and would’ve been as headstrong and would’ve married Prof Bhaer. Did you feel this, too, when you first read Little Women?
I took the photo above the small flower garden in front of the house. In the guidebook it explains that the garden around the house was primarily fruits & veggies back in the day, but now it’s all flowers. Though I loved the flowers, I think I liked Thoreau’s vegetable garden at the Emerson/Hawthorne house much better. But more on that garden later….
“If in Emerson’s study perpetual twilight reigns,” wrote a visitor to Orchard House in 1874,” in Alcott’s it is always noon. The great sun shines in it all day, the great fireplace roars, and the warm crimson hangings temper the sunlight and reflect the firelight. Quaint mottoes and pictures hang on the walls.”
A got a good cemetery fix while in Boston. Unfortunately, though, the lighting was never ideal for photos–either rainy & dark or too sunny. I do like how this one turned out, though, because of the filtered sunlight on the headstones behind the one in the foreground. It gives the photo somewhat of an ethereal quality, I think.
I Died For Beauty But Was Scarce
I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
~Emily Dickinson
From a set of photos that I snapped at an organic garden/farm in Concord.
All Things Live
All Things live;
The innermost thoughts
Of a [wo]man’s soul
Walk the highway
Of the Universe,
And are seen
By all the pilgrims,
Who have gone before.
~Opal Whiteley
