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Before: New aloe and kalanchoe ready for planting.
After: Kalanchoe Corner. Can you see the two lizards on the bricks above the chair?
We had red kalanchoe at The Compound that were planted by my mother and did well. These were on sale at the nursery because they’re no longer in full bloom. Tom did a great job repotting them. Let’s hope they make it!
All of us here at the Hall have been trying to do a little gardening and yard work/cleaning to spruce up the place. I’ll be sharing photos now and then, but for today, I wanted to share a tiny find.
After last year’s freeze, we lost botanicals that I’d been nurturing for thirty years. We had a lot of pots filled with nothing but dirt. After more than a year of being bothered by those plant-less reminders, and prompted by a couple of other things (mini health crisis; finally getting to see Lynne’s new home and her always-gorgeous gardens), I got Tom to help me brainstorm what we could do to provide a more pleasing place to enjoy our yard (when the heat and mosquitos will allow it).
One of the first dirty jobs he did was dumping the old soil from all those pots. There’s a certain section along the fence where some dogs like to dig (notably, the late Penny, along with Anime and sometimes Delta), so he used the soil to fill in there. A lot of it was tangled in old dead root balls that he had to break up. In doing so, he found a ceramic frog that my mother had used in one of her potted plants. Don’t know how it ended up there, but if she were here, she’d remind me that if I maintained my plants better, the frog would never have been lost. (I’ll say it again: ONLY David and Debby got the plant-growing gene from her.)
We’d bought some new aloe for small pots on the back patio because I usually have good luck with aloe. However, there’s one aloe plant in Aaron’s Garden on our front porch that has always struggled. I transplanted it to a new pot in the backyard with a thriving aloe plant, gave it some succulent food, and took one of the new plants for Aaron’s Garden. And that’s where I put the frog, so now his garden has a little gift from a grandmother he loved and who loved him so much.
The nights are getting longer, it won’t be long
Won’t be long ’til summer comes
Now that the boys are here again
The boys are back in town
…But man, I still think them cats are crazy…
Showing loyalty to the original, but I could as easily have put the Bon Jovi version here because it’s a favorite.
Current Photo Friday theme: Grass
“Roll it if you got it.” –Pixie
Me and Jack just want to stare into space and are not feeling the posting vibe today. ALTHOUGH, let me note, today is Rhonda’s birthday, and we hope to be celebrating it this weekend. It’s also Star Wars day, which is always fun on social media, especially animals dressed as characters from the films. Those are fun and good things.
On the flip side, the date is a somber one for me. We lost a friend to AIDS on May 4 in 1995, and for most of my life, the date has meant the shootings at Kent State in 1970. There’s a 1981 made-for-TV-movie about the incident based on the book by James Michener which I read back then. It was depressing and maddening. The movie was filmed near the town(s) where I lived in Alabama, and someone we knew was in it. I’ve seen it only once before, so I watched a copy on YouTube tonight that’s poor quality for some of the sound and some of the night scenes.
That incident was a perfect storm, and I feel like over the decades, we’ve seen too many of those. It makes me sad when I read people on social media from around the world who say they’re afraid to visit the U.S. anymore. Some countries issue travel advisories to their citizens about coming here because of gun violence, and travelers are warned:
The small-town girl who tried to process Kent State in 1970 could never have predicted this is where we’d be now.
Today is a New Moon solar eclipse–happening in Houston mid-afternoon, around 3:30, I think? It likely won’t be visible to North America or the UK, but there will surely be online videos of it from other parts of the world.
This is the second New Moon of April, the Black Moon. Every day, we’re offered celestial gifts from the heavens with the stars, planets, comets, moons (and the litter humans are leaving there, as Lynne reminded me the other day). Now and then, however, we seem to get a special treat, a reason to say thank you for the abundance of good things.
I woke up determined to make the most of the day in ways that feed my soul. It actually began with feeding my body a breakfast using a tiny portion of the leftovers from our friend Steve R’s birthday cake we had on April 28. His last birthday was in 1992, and though he was in the hospital, other friends joined us to fill the room with laughter, stories, cake, balloons, cards, and joy. He died a couple of months later, and the following year, I knew I’d rather relive the joy of his birthday than the pain of his loss, and we’ve been doing this–always with some version of chocolate, because that’s what he loved–every year since 1993. The number and variety of friends, family, and colleagues joining us through the years has been exactly what Steve would have wanted: inclusive, a reminder that love never dies, and there is always a reason to celebrate.
Lovely as that is, since I was involved, kitchen mishaps were fated. On Wednesday night, I decided to put the recipe and a box of cocoa on the kitchen counter so I’d remember when I woke up on Thursday that I intended to bake a chocolate pound cake. This is one of the few cakes I make completely from scratch, using the recipe we were given in Home Ec when I was fifteen. Now mind you, there are certainly other chocolate pound cake recipes–in fact, Lynne has one from her Aunt Lil that’s fabulous. But this one is pretty mistake-proof for me after all these years. Or so I believed.
First up, I couldn’t find the recipe. This caused me to go through my three little recipe boxes (two are mine because I outgrew the first one; one was my mother’s). No recipe, but the effort did lead me to get those things organized during my frantic second attempt to find it. For a brief moment, I considered texting Lynne–she had the same home ec class, and for all I know, she still has HER old recipe box–then I looked at the clock and knew that was a bad idea.
I finally found it clipped with my most-often-used recipes that I keep more accessible. Why chocolate pound cake was included, I have NO idea. I don’t even make one a year. But whatever. Panic managed.
The next day, I realized I didn’t have one of the ingredients I needed. I checked online for a good substitute and worked through it, but it was chaotic. Bowls, measuring spoons, and cups everywhere; flour and cocoa powdering the counters; and for some reason, my mixer was NOT blending butter and sugar into a creamy texture and kept spitting bits of butter out of the bowl. Fortunately, adding eggs taught that mixer and its mixture a lesson.
There was also vanilla extract in that part of the batter, so let’s pause to discuss challenges that come with age and a…quirky…immune system. When I took the cap off the bottle of vanilla extract, I realized it was new. It had one of those white seals on it that has a little plastic tab that you pull and the seal comes off. IN THEORY. When you have arthritis-weakened fingers, it’s not always easy. Tom wasn’t home in that moment, so I finally improvised by getting a pair of pliers to pull the tab. It STILL wouldn’t cooperate, so I stabbed it to death with a paring knife.
My kitchen looked like some cartoon character threw in a stick of dynamite. Dynamite. Knives. Explosions of flour and cocoa. BAKING IS VIOLENT.
Finally, this lovely batter was in the oven. I cleaned up the scene of the crime(s), and the timer was set, so all should have been peaceful. I went back to my manuscript and was on a flight from NYC to Atlanta when I smelled… something burning? Was a fictitious engine on fire? I don’t write those kinds of novels. Was it…THE CAKE? How was that possible? THE TIMER WAS SET. It was nowhere near time for it to be finished baking, much less burning.
I rushed to the kitchen and opened the oven door to find the batter had overflowed and was landing on the floor of the oven to burn and smoke. Fortunately, Tom was now back at his desk and working, so he hurried the dogs outside before the smoke detectors began to shriek. That shrieking triggers more dog drama than you’d see in a performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (which I’ve only seen small clips from, so for all I know, that’s a lousy analogy).
Out came the cake. Out came the racks dripping with batter. Got those cleaned. Trimmed the over-baked edges from the batter and off the sides of my baking dish. Got the bottom of the oven cleaned. Had the kitchen window open, the exhaust fan over the oven on high, and my kitchen fan blowing smoke away from the smoke detectors, which never went off, thank goodness. Once everything was clean, I put the cake back in the oven to finish baking and hoped for the best as I set the timer at five-minute intervals to cause myself maximum beeping annoyance.
It turned out fine according to the Houndstooth Hall humans and was served with fresh strawberries, thawed frozen strawberries in juice, whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream.
What was this post originally about?
New Moons are a good time to set intentions, so I began today with my own kind of ritual. On a happy visit to Body Mind and Soul earlier in the week (that reminds me, today is INDEPENDENT Bookstore Day, support your local booksellers, of which BM&S is one), I got a new Focus blend for the Writing Sanctuary’s Mr. Mister. An amethyst heart and an aquamarine are on this nice little incense burner, looked over by a striking amazonite point, all new and lovely finds at BM&S. I’m prepared for a good day of writing.
Apparently, today, a gnat’s intention was to drown in coffee. He succeeded, and I traded my coffee cup in for lemonade in a bottle with a gnat-defying cap.
Except Tom must have known my original intention was to imbibe coffee, so he came home from his regular Saturday volunteering gig with this surprise for me.
I’m gonna have a good day. And now that you’ve been treated to a sight of your daily cow, I hope you are, too!
Minute in the lantana. Behind her in the distance, Rocky keeps a stony vigil over Houndstooth Hall.
Lynne and Minute came to visit. =)
Hope, mixed media on canvas
Becky Cochrane, 2000
Our family is thinking of Aaron, who died of suicide on this day in 2012. Each year, I clean up the little garden I keep in his memory. It’s raining, but the garden is a protected bed on our porch. Incense is burning out there, the plants are living, and fresh stones and shells have been added. Several things in the garden are gifts of friends and family.
To meet Aaron was to recognize a beautiful soul, filled with compassion toward others, who could also be playful and liked to hear people’s stories. He loved dogs. He played the violin. He was interested in photography. He liked the band One Republic and The Hunger Games Trilogy and along with those, got me hooked on “The Vampire Diaries.” He’s survived by his parents, his brothers and sister, and many cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends.
So loved all his life; so loved now.
We miss you, Aaron.
In its metamorphosis from the common, colorless caterpillar to the exquisite winged creature of delicate beauty, the butterfly has become a metaphor for transformation and hope; across cultures, it has become a symbol for rebirth and resurrection, for the triumph of the spirit and the soul over the physical prison, the material world. Among the ancients, [it] is an emblem of the soul and of unconscious attraction towards light. It is the soul as the opposite of the worm. In Western culture, the butterfly represents lightness and fickleness.*
Next door to Houndstooth Hall this morning, roofers are working on our neighbor’s house. Roofing is loud: the hammering, banging, dropping of shingles; the calls of the workers to one another. Inside, the dogs’ reaction is also loud, and while I can modify how much they can see and are aware of, there are frequent, outraged outbursts that all of this should be disturbing their peace.
The dogs don’t have my appreciation, despite the noise, for the job next door. It means something is being repaired. My neighbor has the means to afford it. Work is being given to people with a hard job. They’ll be paid for it, and that money allows them to pay for their own roofs and the needs of the families who live under those roofs. This is the noise of something that is working, something that has value beyond its immediate reward to my neighbor.
It does mean I don’t have quite the best environment for writing, even though I got a great night’s sleep, which I always hope for because it means I’ll have a sharp mind when I awaken, but I see that as an opportunity to adapt.
On my birthday, my mother-in-law sent the butterfly she drew that you see colored above. She based the butterfly’s pattern on that on the Stone of Turoe, Lochgrea, Galway, Ireland, which has particular significance to her, her family, and their origins.
Later…
It was a pleasure to color Mary’s butterfly this morning while I finished listening, on Apple Podcasts, to the Renegades: Born in the USA Spotify podcasts featuring conversations between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It was a riveting journey, to hear these two discuss so many parts of their lives, both with commonalities and differences, as related to childhood and definitions of masculinity; race, war, family and fatherhood with strong partners; country, careers, and the larger picture of America. Some of the conversations were painful. Some gave me insights into the hearts and consciences of the characters I write. I compared my own American story to theirs. I got other perspectives of the power of determination, the frailties we share as humans, the personal and cultural reasons we have to always look forward and feel hopeful. The need to recognize the better natures in ourselves and in others.
All is metamorphosis.
The podcasts were worth hearing on many levels. Now, the roofers are still working but are not as noisy, the dogs have been out and seen Pixie and Pollock, and all is mostly quiet inside. Time for me to get back to the Neverending Saga. Hope you’re all having a good hump day.
*Description of Metamorphosis from The Dictionary of Symbolism, originally constructed by Allison Protas, augmented and refined by Geoff Brown and Jamie Smith in 1997 and by Eric Jaffe in 2001.
Recently I found something in the top of a closet that was one of those out-of-sight/out-of-mind things. I blogged about it on October 9, 2017. We were just beginning our second moving of debris to the curb after all the insurance adjusters had come post-Harvey flood. I had a lot going on. I must have been a little crazy to have bought this.
Four and a half years later, I’ve colored the BACK of one card. I probably colored it four and half years ago. That’s 77 backs and 78 fronts left to color. At this rate, I’m going to need to hire a coloring crew. Payment would be the standard currency: gratitude.
