End of Summer

Collect your booty and scram, fella. And stop digging your winter fodder into my flower beds. Think about it--the ground will freeze and you'll never get it out.

You were a fine specimen and the birds loved you.

How about flyng south this year? Those practise runs don't fool us--we know you're going to stick around.

Last Showing

A gorgeous September morning.The sun soon made an appearance.

The roses just keep on blooming

Sweet William isn't ready to close shop for the winter. I hope we have a long, long fall.

The Ant and the Sunflower

Amazing thing, nature. We're so fortunate to be part of it.

September Song

Colchicum

These gorgeous little guys bloom at the end of summer.

I always forget to shoot pictures of the leaves that appear in clusters in the spring. They remain green and vigorous until the end of June and then--poof--they disappear, just like that.

Sometime in the fall that blank garden spot sprouts a magical grove of what look like giant crocus and the cycle is in motion again.

Chinaberry

My China Berry infatuation has about peaked; each day the colors become more intense and enhance that porcelain look.

I promise this is the last view of it for at least a year. It is gorgeous though.

It has completely overtaken the honeysuckle in its path and even the bird nest is looking squished.

I hope the next door neighbors like vines creeping over the fence; wait until they find it peeking in their bedroom window.

Ode to the Drosophila

Okay I'm showing off-- it's a fruit fly.

It's the season; they swarm in silently and they'll swarm out when it darned well pleases them.

I read somewhere that when civilization crumbles, the fruit fly will be the last living organism to pack it in and I believe that.

Open the fridge and a couple fly out; lift the lid off the tea pot--same thing.

To keep them at bay, my kitchen waste container remains outside  on the deck by the kitchen door, lid firmly shut. No matter--I open it to add more stuff and a cloud of them fly out, apparently having just met, courted, married, produced children and grandchildren in a five minute period.

No one will accuse me of wanted to be known for my spotless housekeeping but even I have qualms when those minuscule wretches are flitting about. There are only a few at any time, but they're there.

In the morning while I wait for the kettle to boil, I dampen a dishcloth and have at them, perched on the cupboard doors, probably wiggling their ears and chanting, "nah nah de nah nah."

Seems they are handy for lab experiments but frankly I wish they'd stick around the lab and leave us humble folk alone.

End of complaint.

The Old and The Old

When I was a kid I lived in the same house in the same neighborhood until I married; my dad worked for the same company until he retired and my mom was the homemaker, proud that her husband didn't want her to "work."

In all that time the furniture was rooted in the same spot,  the appliances never wore out and if a saucepan wore thin and developed a pin hole, you mended it; replacing it wasn't considered --you made do. It wasn't a case of thrift as much as custom--and  there were no house and garden magazines encouraging consumerism.

My mother had no interest in owning a refrigerator and we kept an ice box on the back porch. We were the last family to get a fridge and the only reason we got one then was mom's best friend moved out of the province and sold hers to mom. As a kid I remember the good thing about a fridge is that the jello sets quickly; with an ice box it takes much longer.

We augmented the ice box with a cooler, an ordinary cupboard  with some screened vent holes built against an outside wall,. We lived in Vancouver so the weather never got extraordinarily hot or cold and we used the cooler year-round.

Wringer washers were a fact of life and the laundry dried outside on the line and that might take days in Vancouver weather. Our wash day was Monday and it was an all-day affair, or it seemed that way to me when I was small.
Mom attended the wringer washer and the hired girl hung the wash out on the line that stretched from our back porch to the post at the very back of the garden.
When the wash came in,  the pull-down  ironing board in the kitchen came into play

This is a roundabout way of telling you about my fascination with my pal Vee who is a throwback to those times.

She is not affected by house and garden magazines or punchy consumer ads; she lives contentedly in her own time warp.

Vee and her husband built their house in 1962 and nothing has changed since they moved in. Same furniture in the same place, same wallpaper, same stove.
I haven't checked the washing machine and furnace.

The furniture is family pieces. I play bridge there and come to think of it I've never actually sat in that room.

We play bridge on the dining room table--yep, the same dining room table she has always had.

She does have a television set--just one, in the living room. I asked her once if she would consider getting a set for her bedroom and she looked at me as if I were nuts--Two televisions? What ever for?





I am fascinated with her stove. It was state-of-the-art when bought for the new house; for several years two burners weren't working and just recently she had them repaired.
If they couldn't have been fixed she would have carried on without them.That's an oven above the elements, not a microwave.



One of her daughter's slept in this room.
The lovely quilt was made by an aunt and there are many others folded away in old fashioned hump-back trunks.



Vee comes from local German stock and it was the custom, around here at least, to have an above-ground basement complete with living room with wood-burning fireplace, full kitchen and dining room. That's where the large visiting family members were entertained and by her description the meals were hearty.

After her husband died some twenty-odd years ago she swept out the fireplace and never used it again or the kitchen, and the furniture is gone from there.It wasn't as much sentiment as they shared the tasks and her practical side decided she didn't want to take on the full load herself.

She is a constant reminder to me of how far we have strayed from the habits and arrangements our parents established.

I doubt that Vee has ever thrown away any family items and eventually her daughters are going to have a problem sorting through that collection.

No matter--she thoroughly enjoys her home and her life on your own terms and may the stove elements last another twenty years.

My Resident Chip-Punk

I shamelessly stole the name from my daughter.
Chip-punk is sitting in valuable bird space, his cheeks so full he probably can't shift the ballast to maneuver his way home.



Until I checked, I thought that chip-punks were considered the neighborhood mascot and that all animals left them alone.
Silly me.
Dogs, cats, foxes, owls and hawks consider them fair game.
Yikes.

My little guy has his home deep inside the rockery piled around the fish pond and I have no doubt he already has a larder stocked for winter.

He will probably live there for his full three-year life-span, if all of the above predators leave him alone.

I wonder if has a reclusive wife in that little nest.

Such a cute little guy.

Happy un-Anniversary

Hal and I were married sixty years ago today.

We were a couple of clueless optimistic kids, just as it is with young kids marrying or the equivalent today.

We met when I was hired as the only permanent staff of a local neighborhood weekly paper; he edited the paper while taking a full course load at the local university. He'd take the streetcar over from campus after classes each day and he seldom slept.

I wrote some, managed the classified ads and young paper carriers and did my best to avoid my lecherous boss.

In the blink of an eye, Hal graduated, took a job as reporter with a daily newspaper, I worked as a commercial artist painting flowers on wooden salad bowls and it seemed a perfect time to get married.
In hindsight if we'd waited until we could afford it, we'd still be waiting.

My parents had dreamed of a fluffy white wedding for their only daughter so that's what we had. Still, by today's standards it was simple and relatively unpretentious.



We were dumb as sticks about the way the world works and it's probably just as well.

We quickly had two children and we moved to his new job three thousand miles away.

As an example of our dumbness and extreme good luck, we found a tract house an hour's drive from his workplace and we wrote a cheque for a down payment. This was on a Saturday; we had no money but for some reason this wasn't daunting.

Hal got on the phone and by Monday we had money to cover the down payment along with a mortgage and two demand loans.

We celebrated by having another baby.

We had six children all told and he spent the better part of our marriage working as a free-lance writer working from our house.
another time I'll tell you what that was like.

This may sound strange but the last year of his life was a happy one.

He had cancer and we both knew he wouldn't survive; every silly marriage game fell away and I learned what unconditional love really means.

We were together every step of the way and he died a week short of our thirty-eighth anniversary.

We had time to say all the things we needed to say.

This I've learned -- we never get truly smart about life--we just bumble along doing our best, trying not to hurt others in the process. Eventually we learn not to repeat the same mistakes and we concentrate on our own behaviour and forget about judging others.

Happy anniversary Hal, wherever you are; that was quite the adventure we shared.

Sunflower Insubordination

I really, really like sunflowers but--why do they refuse to face the same direction as the rest of the garden blooms?

The sun rises in the east and that's good enough for them, so east it is.



This one looks as though it's in detention.



No need to run for the compass--





I see you you big rascal.

My daughter plants hers in big pots so she can turn them at will.

Next year.

Gardening 101

Our local nurseries have a native plant section and they claim this is Lobelia, Canadian style.
So they say. Anyway, I couldn't resist and we'll see how this one handles life in a suburban patch of land.
So far it behaves like a rather pretty and sturdy weed.



And on that subject, If I were to give advice to a novice gardener and it seems I am about to--never never buy anything with the word "wort" attached to it. It may look just lovely in the pictures but consider it a weed. Another word for weed is prolific. You will spend a lot of your natural gardening life trying to keep it controlled.

I do have one or two in my garden and deliberately so. But I know how to control then. In the spring I attack them ruthlessly so that only a small clump blooms for the remainder of the summer.

It's sound garden planning to invest in perennials like Delphinium-- lots and lots of them and keep them clustered, Hostas for the shade (they spread out in time) and any kind of Daisy and you have the start of a garden.

A few annuals planted in bunches of one color give a lush appearance to their surroundings.

It isn't written anywhere that you must plant rigidly around the edges of your property. Go wild and dig out a bed in the middle or somewhere off-center to draw your eye in a pleasing fashion.

Perennials will stay with you for many years and they are usually at their peak in the sixth year. After that, you might want to thin them out or divide the roots but by this time you won't worry about doing that. It's like cutting your kid's hair or removing a sliver.

Once you get the general idea, you start layering colors and textures like a wardrobe and add a berm or two so the land isn't too flat.

I'm not a big fan of lawns.I say leave them to golf courses and have some fun substituting ornamental grasses, rocks, ponds, anything but lawn. They require fertilizers, they get grubs and other nasties and it's tough to maintain them since those awful poisons are taboo now. Sneak poisons in if you want but remember your children play and roll on that lawn and is that good for them?

End of lesson



I'm still on my hydrangea kick; these show another beautiful facet each day.

Perfection