The Nature of Things

Gardening is a hobby, some might say an obsession, of mine. I live in an area with a growing season that is virtually year-round so there's always something going on in the garden and I spend a lot of time attempting to grow many different kinds of plants. Many plants thrive here and it is very rewarding to watch them grow. But there are some that I've tried to grow that have been a bust. Among those failures are daffodils. You might think daffs would be easy. I mean you can see them growing wild around old abandoned home sites with no one to care for them, but there is something about the heat and humidity here, or maybe it's the soil, or perhaps a combination of both that is inimical to the growth of daffodils. I plant them and they bloom for one year and then they disappear, so I've pretty much given up on them and moved on to other things. Poets love daffodils, of course. One always thinks of William Wordsworth, but Robert Herrick was fond of them, too, and he saw t...

  A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Black Skimmers in the late evening sun photographed on the beach at Rockport, Texas. *~*~*~* Once again federal scientists are predicting an "above average" Atlantic hurricane season . This follows the record season in 2020 when there were 30 named storms. The scientists say there could be 13 to 20 named storms this year with 6 to 10 being hurricanes and perhaps 3 to 5 reaching category 3 status or above. *~*~*~* And on the other side of the continent, severe drought, made worse by climate change, is ravaging the West . Heat and shifting weather patterns have also intensified wildfires and sharply reduced water supplies across the Southwest, Pacific Coast, and North Dakota. *~*~*~* A new study warns of "zombie fires." With a changing climate, fires in northern forests that smolder through winter and erupt again in spring are expected to become more common. *~*~*~* And now we are seeing climate refug...

  This book was published just over five years ago but somehow it only came to my attention recently. I'm glad that it finally found me because it was an absolute joy to read. The title of the book might lead you to think that it is about iconoclastic sociologist/economist Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929) if indeed you had ever heard of him. Those of you who have ever had an introductory course in sociology as I did long ago will no doubt remember him as the coiner of phrases like "conspicuous consumption" and the author of the book The Theory of the Leisure Class . He had considerable influence on later economists like John Kenneth Galbraith. He also had influence on Melanie, the mother of our protagonist here. She named her daughter Veblen after Thorstein who was a distant relative. Our Veblen is a thirty-year-old woman living in Palo Alto, California in an old cottage that she has rescued and renovated. Veblen describes herself as a "freelance self." She never ...

There seem to be continuing problems with Google's Blogger platform. I experienced problems with publishing last Friday and I know other users of the platform did as well. Since then, I've been unable to comment on some of the blogs that I regularly visit. I'm not sure what is the source of the problem, but apparently, Google is working to fix it. If you have experienced such problems with my blog, I can only apologize. I have no control over that and can only hope that it is soon fixed.

  Biographies and memoirs are not really my favorite reading, but one of my goals for this year is to diversify my reading and free myself of some of my reading prejudices. Such as my prejudice against biographies and memoirs. When I saw a notice of the publication of this biography of Sylvia Plath, it seemed like a worthy addition to meeting my goal. I've long been interested in Plath's life, poetry, and the tragic end to her life, so this was a good opportunity to learn more about all that. And learn more about it I did! Heather Clark's 1,000-page biography of her is nothing if not exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting to read. She details the most complex and intricate events of her subject's daily life. At some points, it seems as though she is providing a daily, or even hourly, blow-by-blow account of Plath's complicated life.  It took me just about a month to read it, reading a bit on most days.  Clark's focus is clearly stated in the subtitle of her book: ...

I'm sure we've all experienced moments like the one that Jane Kenyon describes in her poem. Moments when we are overcome by a feeling of lethargy, languor, torpor - whatever you might choose to call it. Kenyon calls it inertia.  Inertia by Jane Kenyon My head was heavy, heavy; so was the atmosphere. I had to ask two times before my hand would scratch my ear. I thought I should be out and doing! The grass, for one thing, needed mowing. Just then a centipede reared from the spine of my open dictionary. lt tried the air with enterprising feelers, then made its way along the gorge between 202 and 203.  The valley of the shadow of death  came to mind inexorably. It can’t be easy for the left hand to know what the right is doing. And how, on such a day, when the sky is hazy and perfunctory, how does it get itself started without feeling muddled and heavy-hearted? Well, it had its fill of etymology. I watched it pull its tail over the edge of the page, and vanish In a pile of ma...

What's blooming in my zone 9a garden near Houston this month? Several things. Here are some of them.  If it's May, then of course the old southern magnolia must be in bloom. On the patio, a couple of pots of pentas brighten things.  Here's #1. And here's #2. And helping them brighten things is this pot of Helianthus 'Brown-eyed Girl.' 'Julia Child' rose with an insect friend. 'Peggy Martin' rose. Ever-dependable 'Lady of Shalott' rose. My antique polyantha rose, 'Caldwell Pink.' Some of the daylilies are blooming. Here's a beauty next to the goldfish pond. More daylilies, the variety name unfortunately lost. For the first time, this cestrum which I've had for many years was killed back to the roots in last winter's freeze, but it has recovered and is beginning to bloom. Coreopsis in a tangle of blooms next to my Japanese maple. I've just added this coreopsis, 'Uptick Gold & Bronze,' to the garden. I ha...

    A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : White Ibises  in flight photographed off South Padre Island, Texas. *~*~*~* An Environmental Protection Agency report that was delayed for years by the previous administration was released on Wednesday and the news is not good. The report documents the changes that are a signal that  climate change caused at least partly by human activity is intensifying  and negatively affecting public health and the environment. *~*~*~* In other EPA action this week, the agency  ordered a controversial refinery  on St. Croix in the Virgin Island to be shut for 60 days because it poses an imminent threat to human health. The refinery had been permitted to open by the previous administration. Since February, it had showered oil on local residents twice, spewed sulfuric gases into the surrounding area, and released hydrocarbons into the air.  *~*~*~* New research indicates that a third of  global ...

  Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) series is a favorite with my husband who has read about half of them. (There are twenty books in the series so far.) Periodically, he recommends the reading of them to me and I say that I will get to them. As a matter of fact, I have read two of them; the first one, Full Dark House , I read in 2014 and the second one, The Water Room , I read in 2017. Now it's four years later and I decided it was probably time for number three. So on to Seventy-seven Clocks . The chief detectives of the PCU are two elderly men, John May and Arthur Bryant. May is the dapper, organized one who follows clues where they lead. Bryant is the disheveled, instinctive, aging hippie type. Their skills complement each other and together they are a formidable team. The events of this book take place in 1973 and the idea of the narrative is that the events are being relayed to a reporter by Bryant at a later date. The plot of the novel involves a large, unru...

First of all, it must be admitted that not everyone has the blessing of an admirable mother. In fact, there are and have been some pretty awful mothers in the world and to the children of those mothers, all I can say is I'm sorry.  I did have an admirable mother and I learned many things from her, mostly from her actions rather than her words.  I think perhaps the most important thing I learned from her was empathy, caring for others. She spent her life caring for others. She had had a lot of tragedy in her life. The first one was losing her mother when she was only ten years old. She was a devoutly religious woman and I can still remember as a child hearing her pray that God would allow her to live until she could see me grown up. Of course, I did not then understand the source of the grief that led her to make such a prayer.  Because she had suffered loss, she understood the loss suffered by others and she always made a special effort to be there for them, to offer what...