Morning glories are some of my favorite volunteers, climbing up the side of the house to peek in at my coral cupboard and spreading their vines everywhere.
They are descended from seeds I planted long ago and sometimes I have to be ruthless if I don't want them overwhelming everything else in a deep blue and green tide.
But in many places, they are welcome invaders.
Bold adventurer!
Spreading your blue parasols
Step by stealthy step...
Black-eyed Susans shine
Bright yellow-rayed suns circling
A single blue star.
Clematis bloom past,
Now morning glory arrives,
Blue trumpets blaring.
Stars of old Japan,
Morning glories shine serene
Captured for all time.
Click on the images of the prints to learn more about them.
Some time back -- ten, maybe fifteen years ago -- I decided it would be nice to paint the inside of my kitchen cabinets red -- or rather, a coral-ish red. Just a nice surprising pop of color when I opened a cabinet, I thought, would be refreshing.
And I thought and thought about it and now and then brought home paint chips of the sort of color I envisioned but it remained a 'someday' project -- hardly necessary but fun.
Then, finally, last year, when I had turned in the manuscript for The Day of Small Things, I actually went and bought some paint, mixed to what, according to the paint chip, was just the color that had been haunting me, lo these many years.
Well, you know how that goes. Suddenly I was caught up in writing Under the Skin -- and playing catch up from the beginning. The brave little can of coral paint languished in a dark corner, collecting dust.
Yesterday dawned hot and humid and it seemed a good time for an indoor project -- preferably one that could be executed in front of a fan and listening to a recorded book.
In fact, it seemed a good time to begin the coral paint project!
I began with the cupboard where my spices and baking supplies, teas and vitamins stay. Just getting things out, deciding if they really needed to be tossed out or if the jars only needed a good wipe -- that part took well over an hour.
Finally though, the cupboard was empty and wiped down with alcohol in hopes of providing a clean surface for my long-awaited coral paint. I pried open the can and began.
Horrors! What appeared was a dreadful Pepto-Bismal pink! I mean, REALLY awful!
Arrgh!
The dab of dry paint on the can's lid, however, was the coral-ish red I'd wanted and I know that paint color changes as it dries so, only slightly daunted, I painted on, enjoying Neil Gaiman's Ananzi Boys as I worked.
Three coats later, it settled down to a more respectable coral -- not yet as dark as the color on the paint can lid but okay by me. After all. it would be mostly hidden when I put things back.
Later in the evening, as I was doing the dishes after supper, I glanced at my handiwork and was startled by a quick flash of memory -- when I was growing up, our neighbors had an outdoor party room with a tiny enclosed bar. I think that I remember this coral color back there -- behind the shelves? Inside the cabinets?
I can't be sure -- but is it possible I've been carrying this idea -- not ten or fifteen years but over fifty?
And what other projects does my subconscious have in store for me?
Friday night we had dinner with old friends and we were talking about high school days back in Tampa. My husband and Shelia and I all went to H.B. Plant High (class of '60) whereas Shelia's sister-in-law Angela attended the Academy of the Holy Names.
I shuddered when she mentioned this.
The Academy was the stick my mother shook at me to bend me into compliance with her idea of what I should be doing.
"If you don't (insert demand here,) I'll send you to the Academy as a boarder."
That threat was usually enough to make me do whatever it was she had decided would be an improvement.
I had no experience with nuns but Marcella, across the street, who went to another parochial school had told me plenty. I wanted nothing to do with these scary creatures.
And then there was the matter of the uniform.
I'd seen what the poor prisoners at the Academy wore -- their exercise yard phys ed area was behind the school separated by just a chain link fence from a road we often traveled. (I probably imagined the razor wire.)
There's a snapshot in my memory of Academy girls in pleated navy blue wool skirts, wilted white shirts escaping from their waist bands, playing sweaty volley ball on a hot day.
Nope, not for me.
This was the Fifties and I was quite fond of my full skirts, buoyed up by crinolines, the cinch belts, the bobby socks . . . the whole look.
The whole idea of an all-girls schools, of nuns who, it was whispered, shaved their heads, of uniforms ---no, it was unthinkable and the threat of the Academy continued to keep me in line.
As dinner continued and I had another glass of wine, I confided in Angela my long-ago fear of being uprooted from Plant High and sent to the Academy.
She grinned. "I loved the Academy. And when my mother got mad at me, she used to threaten to send me to Plant High."
Since my older son's birthday is today, it seems appropriate to commemorate the occasion with this blast from 1979.I think it was '79 -- and Ethan was seven.
The blow-up light saber was a hit. The rocking horse (named Philly) was a survival from my childhood.
Thirty one years ago --and several of these little children round the table have children of their own. Sadly, three of those grown ups in the picture below are gone -- my neighbor Betty, Vicky Owen, my friend from college, and my mother-in-law Frances --- Frannie, in an earlier Sepia Saturday post.
Why is a winding road more romantic than a straight one?
Why has this hydrangea, which had chartreuse blooms when I bought it last year, produced white flowers this year?
Why do male turkeys (these are young ones called 'jakes') have those weird 'beards' sprouting from their chests? And why do hunters (usually male, not always young) keep those 'beards' as trophies?
What gave Sir Edwin Lutyens the idea for such an amazing bench? Was he on psychedelics?
If someone dug up the pot of gold on my friend Rob's hill, would the rainbow stop appearing over there?
"It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.
There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves.
There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life."
I've always loved The Secret Gardenby Frances Hodgson Burnett and though there are no walls and only one rose, when I tackled this area yesterday, it was the long forgotten and much overgrown secret garden of the book that came to mind.
There's the blue bench Elizabeth and Phillip sit on in one novel -- it was being covered up by apple and forsythia branches. Elsewhere wild grapevines were hiding the rhododenrons and the smoke tree. What was a lovely garden room a few years ago is, to use a technical term, a BIG MESS.
Alas! I've let Elizabeth's garden go while trying to tell her story. In the best of all possible worlds, those stories would have brought in enough income to hire some help -- Julio? Homero? Donde estan?
Not here, more's the pity. So yesterday I took pruning shears and loppers and began to rediscover my garden. A hint of blue was winking at me from beyond a green fountain of forsythia and I hacked my way through to find a forgotten lace cap hydrangea -- a nice reward for a sweaty few hours.
Today I'll attack the wilderness once more -- load the clippings up and take them to our brush pile and resume my battle with the wild grape.
As I recall, there's a Kousa dogwood back in there.
This coleus cutting with its extravagant flowing roots is so pretty that I keep postponing moving it into a pot.
Catching the light in my kitchen window, it tempts me in for a closer look.
Patterns, patterns, everywhere.
A brief post today -- I spent a lot of time over at my Day of Small Things blog, answering new questions about dealing with rejection and editing. If you're interested in these topics. go here and scroll down to this image.
Yesterday I participated in a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird at Malaprop's bookstore in Asheville.
Billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's renowned work, the Read-A-Thon began with Sarah Addison Allen at 4pm after which a lineup of regional authors each read for 15 minutes before passing the microphone. Authors included Brian Lee Knopp, Maria Fire, Charles Gershon, Mark de Castrique, Rose Senehi, Rob Neufeld, Peter Loewer, Howard Hanger, Sallie Bissell, George Ivey, Cynn Chadwick, Glenis Redmond, Allan Wolf, John Lane, Gene Cheek, Vicki Lane, and Wayne Caldwell.
It had been a shamefully long time since I read Harper Lee's great book -- my maiden name is in the paperback copy on my book shelf -- I'm guessing I purchased it in '62. So I read it again to be prepared for my fifteen minutes at the mic.
Oh, my! What a revelation! It was like revisiting my childhood -- my memories of my grandparents and my Alabama relatives. Peach pickles and camellias and those timeless summers . . .
As I read the description of the small town, I couldn't help remembering my visit to my brother's home in Headland, Alaama -- the same town square surrounded by small shops.
Of course, the book's not all nostalgia and moonlight and magnolias -- the ugly racism of the times is the story -- the racism and one decent man's attempt to stand up to it. I think this book did a lot to help bring awareness of these backward attitudes to many people who hadn't thought beyond 'that's just the way things are.'
It was a pleasure to be a part of the read-a-thon -- there were no introductions -- just each of us reading our 15 minutes and wordlessly passing the mic to the next reader. It seemed to me a charming way to honor the 50th anniversary of this important American novel
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