This is not a case of altruism. It is an example of my mindlessness…again. Head one place; hand somewhere else.
We moved the Century Plants back to their favorite spots on the wall. They love the heat from underneath.
Two Centurys
I put on gloves to prune off dead leaves. These plants need sun and very little water. The only time I touch them is to trim old leaves and remove pups.
Mama agave and pup
When they stayed inside I clipped off the spikes. They are big enough to leave out, so they may go in the ground this fall. These bloom only once in a lifetime. I hope I live to see the giant flower stalks.
Century plants
I put sticks with balls on the ends to prevent passers-by from running into the mean spikes at the end of each leaf.
I needed one more stick. I took off my gloves to search, but did not put them back on. OUCH! The sap is poisonous.
Red but not swollen.
I think I heard a whisper from one of the agaves. It sounded like ” Touche!”
I may be a weakened and injured warrior, but I still have a fighting heart for my green babies. It is past time for Deer Protection Phase II. That means that fence rings were put around all deer delicacies to protect the emerging foliage, but no stakes were in place to hang the rings.
Three rings ready for bloom stalks to rise.
My family tried to intervene with deer deterants, but the herd is so big now, they were undeterred. When we moved here there were no deer or squirrels and very few people. Things have changed drastically in the past decade.
Any fence or stake is put in the defense.Rings hanging and fences blocking walkways
I have been hiking and hauling up and down the hills for hours. Stakes were placed for Mr. Flower to hammer in, since I should not stomp them in as usual. My body is now too expensive to be used as a gardening tool.
I must admit that I automatically stomped several in before I caught myself. I was pleased to get away with this move without an ambulance ride following. I hope my two PT people, Rick and Jeff, do not read this.
I also use tomato cages and a hanging fence ring. Things start looking a bit messy this time of year, due to my using any old thing on hand to inconvenience our hungry herd.
HEAVY Tomato cage and fence ring
They eat daylily and Asiatic lily buds before they open. They behead all sedums be it new foliage or blooms. This year I was shocked to find an entire Tiger lily topped off. They usually leave the tigers alone.
Beheaded Tiger lilies. Bummer
I am pleased that my hips, knees and shoulder allowed me to work all day. I am sure they will not allow me to sleep tonight as punishment.
I hope all this will save my blooms. I am too old to battle a big herd of hungry deer, but I am not out of the fight yet!
My bank is where the wild things grow. I do not fight the weeds over there. It let plants battle it out on the bank. Only the fittest thrive across the drive.
A weed and some passion
Two of my favorites are this wild purple passion vine we call Maypop. The orange is butterfly weed. I love this combination of color.
Maypop
I watch this bank for butterflies all summer long. It is a well-remembered spot for my flying friends.
Butterflies and deer love it.
I highly recommend a wild spot in your garden. It is a place I enjoy without all the maintenance. I do not fight weeds nor deer over here.
I found another treasure from my mama this Mother’s Day….My first Mother’s Day without a mother.
KiKi would find important things at the house at Enwood and bring them up to the mountains. She put my treasures in the chest of drawers in my room there. This was her way of making sure we kept the things that were important.
My find this past weekend was a single slide. It is of my sister and her deceased husband (Bill), me, my mama and three friends from Lebanon.
Semaan Saikali, his brother Salah and cousin Fouad came to our house for dinner. They brought a bottle of wine to my tea-totaling parents. In the photo they are showing my mama their photos from home.
Lebanese friends with my family
Later they played music and slithered around the livingroom writhing like cobras. They were charming entertainment. My sister and I enjoyed remembering our times with them this weekend. I would have never found this slide if Mama had not slipped it into my dresser drawer.
I have letters from the Lebanese in my writing box, but no photos. This is an important artifact to help me remember things. I am grateful to my thoughtful mother for saving this and stashing it in a safe place.
Our parents just keep on helping us. My dad left the box for the lost garage door opener and a spare battery inside it, so I would know what to order and which battery. This is how my parents were. Their legacy lives on every day. More gratitude from me!
These Lebanese are in a book I have been writing. I have gotten bogged down in the details. I like to think this was Mama’s way of reminding me to remember the important moments. That is what a story is for.
I think I finally figured out how to get this Epiphyllum to bloom. It spent all winter in front of a sunny window. It had buds before it was set outside.
EPIPHYLLUM Orchid Cactus
I gave it a good dose of Bloom Food and some succulent fertilizer. Last, I trimmed off about two dozen cuttings to share.
Red Orchid Cactus
Bingo. This plant has never bloomed this prolifically. It has stolen the show.
These three hybrids are the best bloomers. Strong stems are a must. I missed staking the stems before a storm, so some ended up soaked on the ground. I will put circles in place earlier next spring to prevent this.
Karl Rosenfield has dozens of blooms on each plant. There are also multiple blooms per stem.
Karl Rosenfield peony
Sarah Bernhardt is slow to open. But the buds are gorgeous.
Sarah Bernhardt peony
Duchess de Nemour has slightly asymmetrical blooms.
Duchess de Nemours
This last hot pink p double is from my great grandma Pearson’s farm in Ohio. It now belongs to four generations of my family.
Pearson peony
I put some beside my mama’s pink urn at her memorial service this weekend. It felt right to have those flowers with Mama for her service.
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.
Contact info to reach out to Congress: Senator Thom Tillis (R) Elected to seat 2014; next election 2026https://www.tillis.senate.gov/202.244.6342 (press “3” to leave general message, this mailbox fills less frequently) Senator Ted Budd (R) Elected to seat 2022; next election 2028 https://www.budd.senate.gov/contact/202.224.3154 (frequently fills & will not take messages; Advance ofc: 336.941.4470) Congressman Pat Harrigan (R) […]
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