My parent’s garden has a rosemary bush. It has survived Texas drought and ice storms to bloom in December. I noticed the blooms when I went to cut some springs to put in a soup. They are small and located on the very ends of the branches; it is a bush that decorates itself for the holidays.
I am missing home today - having not been there at all this month (see hospital experiences blog posts). Nothing is ‘normal’ or ‘planned’ right now. It is hard to focus on more than getting through the next day or two.
My husband sent me a picture of the fog at Centennial Lake yesterday. The almost masked trees across the lake - their reflection in the water - the stones of the boat launch….I know the place well. The image evokes a bubble of calm for me. I’ll find myself looking at it frequently over the next few days when I need to fortify my emotional reserves.
This is the second post in a series with thoughts about my recent experience having an elderly family member in the hospital - focusing on how life continues on with that disruption.
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Modern medicine is full of specialists and it is not always clear which - if any - are caring for the whole patient. There is a “who’s on first” confusion that occurs for the patient and the family as each specialist comes by to assess the patient. Our family eventually started keeping a log to track it all so that we could ask questions rather than simply accept everything that was going on. The family was thus able to point out to the doctors that one medication intended to be calming - was causing heightened anxiety and agitation instead.
The food in this particular hospital is upscale - presented more like a hotel room service than institutional fare: a menu from which to order via phone (the kitchen knows the dietary restrictions as soon as they are told the patient’s name, black trays and plate covers….delivered by people in black uniforms. It is quite an upgrade from the stereotypical hospital food.
On the ‘life goes on’ front - we have finally finished decorating the Christmas tree. Enjoy the photographic show below.
I’ll write about the experience of our family member moving from ICU to a regular room….a move in the right direction.
The Bradford pear trees are in full fall colors right now around Dallas, Texas. Many of the trees are quite large. The tree was very popular for medians and yards 20 years ago. More of them have survived in this area than in Maryland where there have been enough instances of high winds to take most of them down….and they are replaced by other types of trees.
Today I am enjoying the beauty of the trees in fall - remembering them full of flowers in the spring - but glad that I no longer have one in my yard.
As I got out Christmas decorations this year, thoughts of how and when they became part of the collection contributed to the joy of unpacking the bins and boxes.
The oldest ornaments were acquired when I was in elementary school in Wichita Falls, Texas. The caroling girls candle holder (minus a candle) was a gift from a friend. The gold and red tree was part of a set purchased by my mother and then passed along to me about 20 years later; I remember the drug store as a place we got a special treat for me: ‘cherry limeade with plain water.’
The felt birds were among the first ornaments for our tree as we moved into our first house almost 35 years ago. It was a red and white themed tree for years - birds and apples and lights.
The dough ornament is part of a set made by my sister almost 25 years ago - before either of us had children.
The ‘old woman’ ornament was purchased by my mother-in-law over 20 years ago; there is an ‘old man’ too. They were just a small part of her contribution to the one Christmas she lived with us. She really enjoyed decorating for Christmas!
The ‘tomato’ is part of a set of vegetable ornaments that we got by saving labels from cans - my daughter enjoyed them as a baby and now - 23 years later - our cats sometimes take them off the tree.
I am celebrating the memories of the many Christmases these decorations remind me of today.
Sunrise in November….possible to photograph from my front doorstep now that the leaves have fallen from the trees. It happens about 7 AM so no need to get up any earlier than usual. It does tend to be cold. This morning - when I took these pictures - it was below freezing; there was frost on the lawn.
The early part of the sunrise has the most red - it’s my favorite and means that my favorite photographs are always 15-20 minutes before the actual sunrise.
Sunrise is always the hopeful beginning of the day but some are interesting than others. Patchy clouds near the horizon reflect the colorful light. The ones this morning were moving too. The silhouettes of trees give us scale and stabilize the context of the image.
Of course the color of the light itself enhances other images. I captured the frozen day lilies - my confused plant that bloomed in the spring and then again in the late fall.
Enjoy the Monday after Thanksgiving!
Rather than shopping on Black Friday, my family unpacks Christmas. We have plastic bins and aging boxes of decorations. Last year I did some cleaning out so this year my strategy was to get out everything - enjoy it or donate/trash it. The unpacking is taking several days. The traditional arrangements from years past are not adequate to display everything in the boxes! Here are some examples of items from the boxes used in new ways this year:
The collection of small boxes from jewelry purchases and gifts (I always save them thinking I will need them for something) and small pieces of wrapping paper became a ‘decoration’ - as they filled baskets and a sleigh used in the past for a floral arrangement (and still containing pine cones and chili pepper lights).
A collection of Christmas cookie cutters used 20 years ago for play dough was hung on the tree.
Several extra strands of lights were bundled up and put in large bowl to light up a coffee table.
Packages of glittery blue and green pipe cleaners purchased years ago at a $1 store were transformed into spirals to hang on the tree by wrapping them around a wooden spoon handle.
And the mantle is loaded up with garlands of 20 year old tinsel that has not been out of the boxes in 10 years. It fills in all the gaps between the snow globe, ceramic figures, and clown music box. I'll have to put the Christmas cards that arrive in the mail somewhere else this year.
Unpacking Christmas has been uite a creative experience this year!
Back in mid-August I posted about finding things to celebrate each day. It’s an easy thing for me to do and getting into the habit of writing it down each day reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. Here are some ‘little celebrations’ I’ve noted this month:
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starting. I had my outline and spreadsheet of character notes ready to go; it was a relief to finally start writing on November 1. I celebrated at the end of the day because I had successfully reached my goal of 3000 words.
Hot chocolate on a cold day. I celebrated that there were packets of hot chocolate mix in the pantry left from last winter. It is a nice contrast to hot tea.
Raking finished in the back yard. I celebrated even though I knew that it was only ‘finished’ for the day. There were still too many leaves on the trees.
Forest near at hand. Even though I live in an area that is full of houses and businesses, there are forested areas too - along the rivers and creeks, around catchment basins, in the medians and along the sides of roads. The forest has the effect of hiding the population density - a cloak of beauty over whatever flaws our ‘civilization’ has made.
The election. However fractured we are politically - the US held an election that told us more about ourselves than the polls had been screaming for months in advance. That is something worth celebrating.
Brookside Gardens could be on my celebration list every month of the year. There is always something new to see. The ‘river of leaves’ under the gingko tree was one of my favorite images this month.
Perfect score on a weekly quiz. I took a Coursera course on Obesity Economics and finally - managed to get familiar enough with the jargon to do well on the 3rd of 4 weekly quizzes.
50,000 words mark on my NaNoWriMo novel. The NaNoWriMo goals if 50,000 words and I managed to write them in the first 12 days of the month - and discovered I still had a lot of my outline to go. It took me another 7 days and over 20,000 words to finish the outline. I have had mini-celebrations all along the way; there are so many personal firsts.
A family medical emergency that ended well. I had a family member than was rushed to the hospital - had surgery the next day - and went home two days after the surgery. It was an emotional roller coaster for a few days….but turned into a series of little celebrations.
Gift wrapping. I volunteered to gift wrap packages at a local Nature Center shop to advertise the Friends group for the Center. It’s a great way to start off the holiday season - and I learned how to make a pretty bows with paper ribbon.
Previous ‘little celebrations’ posts can be found here.
Scissors are a popular tool. One of my grandmothers always used to emphasize using the right tool for the job - and somehow scissors are often the most appropriate tool.
I have accumulated many pairs of scissors over the years - rarely lose them - and am surprised at how frequently I use them. There are the black handled office scissors that I use for opening packages and envelopes as well as trimming labels and stickers to the perfect size. The red handled sewing scissors left over from long ago when I made quite a few of my clothes. Now I use them infrequently and mostly for just cutting thread and patches rather than yards of fabric. Cuticle scissors have done double duty to tighten the tiny screws in eyeglasses. The sturdy kitchen scissors I use most frequently of all - cutting up herbs, pizza or pieces of chicken; they are the scissors that tend to wear out from use and myriad passes through the high heat of the dishwasher. And lastly - the steel scissors I inherited from my mother-in-law. I don’t know their whole history but they are still quite sharp and I think of her every time I pick them up to cut wrapping paper or curl ribbon or open a package.
My office looks out over the roof of a covered deck and then trees - a maple on one side of the yard, pines on the other, and a tulip poplar at the fore of the forest that lies beyond. One morning this past week was cloudy and the color from the leaves had already faded. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of birds. I managed to photograph some through the window. The window glass and the amount of magnification required makes them look like they were taken on a foggy day but it was simply cloudy. I saw
Doves in the maple,
A woodpecker on a neighbor’s roof,
A flicker looking around the base of a pine,
And blue jays - there seemed to be a flock of them - in the leaves.
I saw a cardinal and a chickadee - but they were too fast for me to catch with the camera.
The birds had distracted me from what I should have been doing - but I celebrated seeing them for the rest of the day.
Sycamores are often awkward looking trees. When they are young their trunks are skinny and their leaves look too big. The young trunks often redeem themselves with their flexibility. The one that came up on my back flowerbed - which I have been cultivating the past few years - survived both the derecho that came through our area last July and Hurricane Sandy more recently.
The leaves keep growing for the whole season and are quite tough. They don’t decompose as easily as many other leaves. When I cleaned out my garden at the beginning of the summer there were some brown leathery sycamore leaves that appeared as intact as the day they fell from the tree.
But this particular tree has made up for is awkwardness by holding onto its leaves a little longer than many of the other trees this year. Their fading of green to yellow to brown - the combination of points and curves - fluttering…they are the holdout of the season right now. It is the last hurrah of summer.
The tree in my garden is not old enough to have the white bark that would make it so easily identifiable in winter. It takes years for a sycamore to become a ghost tree.....perhaps more than I will live in this house.
Maryland in November is the time the raking of the leaves peaks. The leaves on our sycamore have stayed on longer than I thought it would since we already had a few of them falling in early October.
The hydrangea blossoms have deepened their color as they’ve dried. I am considering bringing some inside for a dried flower arrangement.
The seeds for next year’s crop of onions are ready to fall in the garden.
And it’s definitely time to rake the leaves into mounds to they won’t kill the grass. The maples and tulip poplars are the most prevalent in our yard.
I have a vase of peacock feathers in my office behind my monitor. They are about 30 years old; my grandmother raised peacocks and picked up the feathers as they were shed. I got a small box of them for Christmas one year. It’s probably old fashioned to have a vase of them; decorating with them was more popular in the Victorian era. I like them because of the memories they evoke and their beauty. They draw me in because they have an exotic aspect:
So - today I am celebrating peacock feathers.
How do you celebrate in November? Here are some ideas:
Going off Daylight Savings Time. Maybe this isn’t something everyone celebrates. I do because it means that the time difference between where my daughter is (in Arizona) and where I am (in Maryland) does from 3 hours to 2 hours….and communication gets a little easier.
Veterans Day. Celebrating everyone that has served in the military; more and more of us know someone that has served or is serving. Celebrating from a different perspective - it may be a three day weekend; surely one of them will be a sunny fall day to celebrate outdoors before winter weather comes.
Thanksgiving. A day full of family and food and football. That’s the tradition in my family. The food does not have to be the traditional turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I tend to make something a little different every year although my family always wants at least one batch of pumpkin custard (nobody seems to miss the crust!)
Gift buying. There are lots of sales in November that work well for those of us that are planning ahead for December. I tend to avoid the Friday after Thanksgiving and do my shopping earlier in the month. When I find the perfect gift for someone....I celebrate….knowing that I’ll celebrate again with them when they open it during the December holidays.
Decorating for the holidays. Rather than shopping the day after Thanksgiving, I decorate my house. It’s an all day celebration of family history as we unload boxes of decorations accumulated over 40 years.
What are your favorite smells of fall?
The smells I most strongly associate with fall are:
Leaf tea. The smell of wet leaves and pine needles on walks through the neighborhood or hikes through a forest are earthy and often very much like black tea and herbal teas. They remind me of how much I like hot tea as the weather turns colder.
Harvested herbs like basil and mint. I let them dry on a tray in the kitchen before storing them away for use all during the winter.
Pumpkin pie baking. The wafts of cinnamon, cloves, and ginger are so appealing whether they are the real thing or in candle form.
Roses. Roses tend to burst into bloom when the summer heat wanes. They have a wonderful last hurray in fall before the frost takes them.
What are your favorite smells of fall?
The change in seasons is an opportune time to clean out your clothes closet. While I get out a few warmer clothes that are good to layer for cool fall mornings, I take a look at every single garment that has been in the closet all summer and make a pile that will, one way another, leave the house. The key question
Will I ever wear this again?
Should be easy to answer.
If the answer is no - then it goes in the pile. Most of my pile goes into a bag to donate to charity. The key is to not store it away for another time. Once you have made the decision that it is not something you will wear again, follow through so that you won’t have to spend any more time revisiting the decision.
If the answer is yes - then make sure the garment is in good repair (no missing buttons, clean) and make the decision to keep it in the closet of the upcoming season or store it somewhere else so that it can be easily retrieved next spring.
Hopefully, by the time this process is finished, you’ll have plenty of room to get all your winter clothes into the closet!
October is the key fall month in Maryland. The leaves are turning and falling. The onions blooming in September now have seed heads. The dahlias are still going strong and there are more puffballs that ever. There were lovely pink mushrooms growing in the grass. There is a new group of caterpillars on the parsley that may not get to chrysalis stage before it gets too cold. Enjoy my October slide show below!
Posts from previous months are here.
It is easy to feel energized in September. Maybe it’s prompted by the cooling trend in the weather or the year after year jangling of a new school year - even if we are not actually in school this particular year.
New projects started…the garden harvested….the house and car ready for winter…house guests invited and welcomed…all good ways to channel that energy and enjoy September.
I’ve never quite synced with the notion of ‘spring cleaning’ because the burst of energy toward homemaking has always caught me in the early fall instead. In the past week I’ve cleaned out under bathroom sinks and the linen closet. Spending an hour or two a day on cleaning out storage areas of the house and cleaning those areas that only get cleaned about once a year seems very appealing right now.
And then there are the gardening pots on the deck. The sweet potatoes will be the last things I will harvest (picture on right) - just before 1st frost; the plant has at least one very large sweat potato that has pushed its way above the soil twice (I’ve added soil to cover it!). All the other herbs are going to be started along the drying process this week. I also have a bucket of day lily bulbs that were too crowded in their bed; now I need to replant them in new flowerbeds.
And I have 3 sets of house guests scheduled to arrive at various times over the next couple of months!
September is definitely a high energy month for me. Is it for you too?
What are you normally doing at 10 AM on Saturday morning?
Are you sleeping in…getting children to a practice/lesson/event…shopping or running errands? Is it different every Saturday or pretty much consistent?
For years - I was putting away groceries. Saturday morning was my time for weekly grocery shopping. I always did it as early as I could along with the other errands of the week. Generally I was done and home right around 10 AM. It was a very regular rhythm.
Now - I do my grocery shopping on a weekday morning and avoid the Saturday shoppers. That leaves my Saturdays in the ‘different every week’ category. Sometimes there is a scheduled community event on Saturday. 10AM is about the earliest they start. There are some Fall Festivals coming up that I’d enjoy; I’ll have to put them on the calendar as I hear about them.
Taking a time check like this highlights how significantly my life has changed over the past months…and it’s all for the good!
The series of photos below shows ordinary objects from around the house photographed ‘close up.’ It was a fun project and one I will do again in several months (Christmas time with decorations out would be good). There are some I intentionally did not include - the antique crocheted doily with cat hair and the wooden puppet with grime/dust on its nose - but I did get motivated to a new level of house cleaning!
Enjoy the slide show!
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
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