Epimediums are one of my easy-care favorites for spring. I have my collection right beside the paver perimeter of the pebble patio, so their complex blooms can be noticed.
These tough little plants have heart-shaped leaves and dainty blooms on wiry stems. I was not home to remove old growth earlier in the spring, but all three seem undisturbed by the neglect.
White Epimedium
White is the smallest and a slow-grower. Both yellow and orange spread more quickly with bigger, brighter leaves.
Yellow Epimedium
I call these Fairy Flowers because they have perfect size and form for fairy gardens.
I blew off the entrance bridge this morning. As I walked back across the porch, I noticed fresh grass on the mat. This has happened before. Last time it was a Phoebe.
I thought I had corrected the issue with a tight ring of hardware cloth which covers the top of the lamp and extends up to almost touch the ceiling.
I have been outdown by a tiny bird. This is not unusual here. It seems that tiny creatures are smarter than I am quite often.
I will wait to see which of my little friends has chosen to set up house on my porch. A Titmouse just scolded me. Is it she? Nope. She is in a house in the carport.
I had my Merlin App listen for possible suspects. See the screenshot below. Only a few are small enough.
Merlin App list of birds recorded.
I waited as patiently as an impatient person can, but never saw the nester. The nest must be removed. It is not only a mess-maker, it is also a fire hazard.
Somebody id. this nest.
Don’t hate on me bird people. I have enough problems without adding housefire to the list. Remember, I rescue mice, spiders and snakes.
A lot has happened in the first 8 days of my April Writing Odyssey. My reseach was going great. I needed more books, so I needed a mailbox. My only requirement for it was a flamingo flag. I was pleased that such a thing existed. My family helped me attach it securely to the uninteresting flag it came with and put it up in line with all the other mailboxes for the neighborhood.
Mountain MailboxesFLAMINGO FLAG
Why a flamingo? Because of Daddy of course. While he was dying, he said if there were jobs in heaven, he would like to help the birds. He paused. We were expecting him to say helping the bluebirds. Instead he said, “Maybe the flamingos. I think they may need help.”
I am tackling some hard questions as I lay out my plans for the three different storylines. I was kept awake last night by the imbalance of the three parts. I have drawn these out has three sets of circles. The working title for the book is TIME CIRCLE TRIO, but that will morph like many other parts.
The characters in the oldest story are long gone. The journals of the main character were burned, rightly so. I have hundreds of photos and artifacts from the life of the first pair, but only one photo and a sad newspaper clipping of the supporting man. This is so not fair and must be dealt with. He was a person, not a prop.
The second story involves two men who have passed on and a woman who has dementia. The catalyst for this tale was some things she said while she was already suffering from dementia, so they may not be true. There is no one alive to correct this. I do have many old letters so I do feel like I can get a good grasp on these characters. But there was no smoking gun, only the ramblings of an old woman struggling with confusion.
The latest story morphs on a regular basis. This is because there are THEN and NOW factors that must be teased apart. The THEN was over forty years ago and the NOW involves a conversation over five years ago and a revelation about it last spring. This needs clarification.
The THEN was a beast to deal with at the time. Judgement was called into question at a point when many important choices needed to be made. Confidence was shattered and perspective was altered. This result seemed to snowball over the next year and beyond.
When the third NOW occurred there was grief and loss in every direction. The past was being frantically sifted through until it seemed to transform and expand to confuse what was real and of value. The NOW has no chance to be remedied or clarified due to death and memory loss. So this circle keeps getting bigger with no possibility for balance.
The one thread that links all three circles is faith in judgement. Does anyone have a right to make decisions for another adult? In these cases, do the parents have the right to make decisions for their young, adult daughters? And when they do(which they did), what are the extrinsic and intrinsic results? Maybe what looks from the outside to be the wrong choice is really the right choice from a different perspective?
In these three stories I have observed the THEN parts of these three young women and the NOW (results) decades later. Their over-ruled hopes and dreams were still alive in these three as older women. That’s the gist of it. The prevented mistakes they were not allowed to make were not mistakes to them.
My isolation odyssey starts on April Fools Day. This is appropriate since the argument with my dad that changed everything involved my supposedly being made a fool of. This pivotal point in my past was based in love and misunderstanding. My dad was the best person I have ever known. He loved me unconditionally despite the fact that I was another daughter, not a son.
So my past has shifted from rock solid to fluid in the past year. The present swirls with political upheaval and I have let go of my expectations for my future. There is no solid ground to plant my feet on. I am strangly at peace in my floating, sinking and flinking. It has been a bit freeing not being the pole that others dance around. I am no longer holding down a fort or holding up the sky.
My talisman
I credit this peace to my friend Sandra. We used to use the term adapt like it was our code word. I have felt her with me many times since her death. I brought her framed photo here to keep her in my mind as I swim through the next month or more in isolation to write and change my mind from solid to fluid.
Papyrus card I send to friends hit by waves.
My new talisman is a wave pendant on a necklace and a shirt with the Kanagawa wave on it to remind me that energy moves and change is constant.
Kanagawa wave T-shirt
I may blog through April or I may be silent. Just know I am doing my best to tell three stories of three women from three generations in my family who were prevented from following their heart’s desire for their “own good” and how that turned out for them.
Paternalism is a double-edged sword. Men may be able to make women do what they want them to do, but they cannot make them WANT to do what they want them to do.
I have spent three glorious days among a tribe of over three hundred writers. Our heroic chief was the wonderfully brave Cheryl Strayed. The setting was a lovely site, The Art of Living Retreat Center in Boone, North Carolina.
This jewel is about a twenty minutes drive from my parents’ mountain house. The views were great, the food was delicious, but what I loved most was the people.
Every person I met had fascinating stories. These writers were from all over the country. They drove or flew here just to learn from an author who is fearlessly honest. She inspired courage over and over as she shared stories of her experiences in life and in writing.
Courage is just what I need as I figure out a new direction for myself. I am beyond grateful for this golden opportunity to meet so many kindred spirits who will now be my friends and fellow writers.
I have always been ‘Doer’, even as a child. I made plans and then I carried them out. My sister and friends were involved in all sorts of complex projects…a lean-to hideout built with spare plywood between the house and shrubbery, a rock polishing factory, a jewelry making production using poor Daddy’s colored wire, a cemetary in the woods for smashed toads from our street, and of course a school full of doll students under the apple tree. I was always busy.
My son still calls me ‘Busy Bee.’ It is hard for me NOT to be busy. Sometimes, this habit leads to what I call ‘Bad Busy.’ I wrote a post about this phenomenon on my other blog back in my busy days. (Link below)
Now, I have ended up on the other end of the busy spectrum. I cannot be active in many ways. There is a real risk that my injured hip will pop out again. I know pain, that was the worst yet. No drug could stop it until I was totally knocked out and intubated to pull the ball back into the socket. My right leg was visibly shorter.
So much for hiking trails alone for a while. That was my plan for April. I hope to eventually get there after physical therapy and two months of healing.
But for now, I have been forced to stop doing and start being. It sounds so cliche, but this has been hard for me. Being busy allows you to lose yourself in activities. Sometimes doing is an escape from being.
All that action is a distraction from reflection. It can be a way to avoid and ignore what is going on inside your head and heart. Once I stopped and rested, I looked around and was puzzled by my life.
Nothing was like I thought it should be. I know, ‘should’ is an expectation word with baggage. I know all about baggage. I rarely put anything down. I am a ‘History Hoarder.’ My past gets pulled along behind me like a wagon full of treasure and trash.
So me and my wagon have had to pause on our journey. The ‘Being Me’ is looking into the ‘Doing Me’s’ wagon. Whoa! What a load!
Do I really want to pull all this to the next phase of my life? Absolutely not.
So ‘Being Me’ is physically resting while mentally purging the wagonload of her past. This is a necessary step. I will not go so far as to call it a silver lining to this cloud. It has been painful. It is mentally exhausting. There has been a lot of reading and writing and thinking along with the healing.
My sincere hope is that when ” Busy Bee” flies back into action, her load will be lighter, her path will be brighter, and her hip will stay where it belongs so that she/me can finally find where we belong.
While my daddy was in hospice dying of cancer, I sat by his bed every morning and took notes about what he said. He made me read the notes back to him. It was important that I get everything right. I gave him a small notebook to jot down things he needed for me to do or bring to him. The lists he made for me ended up being the titles of stories he wanted to tell me to be written down. We used the list as an agenda for our daily meetings. I would read off a title and he would tell me the story. When it was properly recorded, the title would be checked off the list.
Notebook to the left is the list of titles in Daddy’s handwriting.
This was my job during the weeks before he died. It was important to him that his stories be preserved. Who he was made me who I am and who I am made my children who they are. These stories matter. That is the reason I am reading The Healing Power of Stories by Daniel Taylor Ph. D.. I want to have a clear goal of how I want to preserve Daddy’s stories before I begin. This will be my third family memoir project.
My daddy, the storyteller.
I am grateful to have these treasures to share with future generations. My two children are the only great, grand children on my daddy’s side of the family. His line may end after them, but I would like these stories to go to families who might enjoy the adventures of a little boy growing up in a small, southern town.
floweralley 