Bow Pots and Flower Pots

I love making flower arrangements -- though they're never much more than shoving a bunch of flowers into a receptacle of some sort -- certainly there's none of that garden club stuff with Hogarth's curve and the rule of three that my mother-in-law used to talk about.

A friend of mine -- who grew up in the piedmont of North Carolina -- calls this 'making a flower pot' and once I realized she wasn't talking about potted plants, I remembered something similar from Thackery's Vanity Fair (a truly delightful book, by the way.

" . . . we have made her a bowpot."
"Say a bouquet, sister Jemima, 'tis more genteel."
"Well, a booky as big almost as a haystack . . ."

Vanity Fair was written in 1848-- in England. I wonder if 'flowerpot' and 'bowpot' are related. Have any of you heard either term used?

Click on the sundial for an early morning stroll.

The Glorious Fourth

Listening this morning to NPR, I was moved, as always, by the annual reading of The Declaration of Independence. Boy, that Thos. Jefferson could turn a phrase like nobody's business!

I have always loved the long list of complaints, directed at "the present King of Great Britain" -- poor old George III who ended his life in madness.

The charges range from the relatively staid "He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good" to my personal favorite "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people."

A busy monarch -- I picture him descending like Gulliver on the Lilliputians, like Godzilla on Tokyo,white wig awry, snatching up ships and helpless colonists.

But that's just my vivid imagination at work.

What I really came here to talk about was the line that says "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

It's been 233 years and we, the people, are getting closer than ever to living up to this manifesto. The men who signed this stirring declaration said "all men are created equal" but were pretty limited in what they meant by 'men.'

White males only need apply. Protestant property owners preferred.

In the years since the signing of the Declaration, our country's laws have discriminated against women, African-Americans, Native Americans ("the merciless Indian savages" mentioned in the Declaration) and immigrants of all sorts -- and then there are all those discriminated against for their religion (or lack of it), their disabilities, or their sexual orientation.

We've come a very long way toward affirmation of that statement of equality. But we're not there yet.

(That was the end of this post. Then I took John in to pick up his truck from the garage. Coming back, I turned on the radio and was looking for some music. Instead I got He Who Shall Not Be Named -- the chubby right wing pundit whose initials are R.L. He was just talking about The Declaration of Independence and he mentioned the need to 'return to the principles of the Founding Fathers.'

All of their principles? I wonder how old R.L. feels about slavery. )