Flowers in spikes

The snapdragons I planted last fall are beginning to bloom.

And there's also lyreleaf sage blooming all around the roadsides. (I took this photo a few weeks ago; they're done blooming now.)

Salvia lyrata (lyreleaf sage)

Sunset Rice

I love cooking with colorful ingredients. One spice I've learned to use this year is saffron. I love the golden yellow color it gives things. Recently, I've been experimenting with beet juice. There was one thing I tried that I thought came out well, so I'll share it in case anyone else wants to try. I call it sunset rice, because the rice was in shades of yellow, orange, red, pink, and salmon.

Sunset Rice

Ingredients:

1 cup Calrose rice
1 3/4 cup broth or stock (I used bone broth)
1/4 cup beetroot juice (I used some from a glass bottle I got at the grocery store)
Salt to taste
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes (optional)

Directions:

Combine broth and rice in a pot and stir. Slowly drizzle beetroot juice in a spiral pattern over the top. Do not stir. Sprinkle pepper flakes. Bring to boil then reduce heat and cook 20 minutes or until liquid is absorbed. (I used a pressure cooker on the low setting). Fluff and serve.

Comments:
By not stirring in the beetroot juice, it stained the rice unevenly, which creates the varying sunset hues. The cooking mellows out the beet flavor and it combines well with the flavor of the broth. I like spicy things, so I added red pepper. I also experimented with various spices. A pinch of cumin was nice. Next time I may saute onions or garlic before adding the broth to the pot, or vary the proportions of beetroot juice and broth and/or add saffron to get deeper color.

Here's a photo:

Gratitude & Reverence

Gratitude and reverence are related virtues.

Gratitude recognizes that everything is a gift that isn't deserved. Reverence recognizes that everything has a significance that hasn't been grasped.

Attitudes contrary to gratitude are squandering and entitlement. Attitudes contrary to reverence are dismissiveness and contempt.

Just as one who lacks gratitude cannot receive more gifts, one who lacks reverence cannot receive more understanding.

Irreverence is an intellectual vice of an adolescent mind. "I am not young enough to know everything" goes the quip attributed to Oscar Wilde. How often we look at our younger selves, at how sure we were that we had grasped the meaning of things, how impervious we were to evidence of the contrary, how our parents and other adults were idiots if they disagreed with us, how their problems were trivial and could easily be overcome if they were our problems.

Irreverence is blinding. Who cannot see that there is more to be seen cannot see what is more to see.

Attitudes opposed to reverence on the other extreme, opposite of dismissiveness and contempt, are idolatry and superstition. These oppose reverence by assigning false and undue significance to a thing. Dismissiveness and contempt say there is nothing to grasp or nothing worth grasping in a thing; idolatry and superstition grasp or hope to grasp in a thing what is not there. The former lead to lack of understanding; the latter lead to false understanding.

Some memorabilia of Mema

My mom sent me Mema's list of favorite gospel songs that we found in her Bible:

I also found out a way to save voicemail messages. I'm glad I know this because there were a number of voicemail messages that were dear to me, such as one by my friend Nathan. There was a great one Mema sent me on my birthday one year, but it is lost. I have this one she sent me in 2010 after I had come home to Auburn while I was in FOCUS. No voice other than my mom's is dearer to me than the voice of my Mema.

Mema as a girl (in front with her arm on the table corner)

Mema as a teenager

Mema with her younger brother and sister

Mema as a young woman

Mema as a young woman. My sister reminds me of her.

Mema in the 60s.

Mema at right, with her mother (center) and my mom (left)

Sweet Hour of Prayer

Mema died on Holy Saturday around 5:45pm. Her nurse said she would die on Friday, but she kept on fighting, though unconscious. Some of the women suggested she hadn't been able to say goodbye to everyone she wanted to say goodbye to. Another said it was my father, Nigel, who hadn't been to see her yet, whom she wanted to say goodbye to. Never doubt a mother's intuition. On Saturday afternoon, my dad went to visit Mema. He cried and whispered that he loved her in her ear. A few moments afterward, while he was there, Mema quietly stopped breathing, her daughters and grandchildren at her side. I was there in the room and saw it with my own eyes.

In her Bible, Mema had an index card with a list of her favorite gospel songs. Mema from her youngest years loved to go to singings, both gospel singings and "fa-sol-la" singings (as they called Sacred Harp music). When she was in the garden I remember her soft voice singing gospel songs as she worked.

One of the songs on her list was Sweet Hour of Prayer. I love this song:

Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!

That calls me from a world of care,

And bids me at my Father’s throne

Make all my wants and wishes known.

In seasons of distress and grief,

My soul has often found relief,

And oft escaped the tempter’s snare,

By thy return, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!

The joys I feel, the bliss I share,

Of those whose anxious spirits burn

With strong desires for thy return!

With such I hasten to the place

Where God my Savior shows His face,

And gladly take my station there,

And wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!

Thy wings shall my petition bear

To Him whose truth and faithfulness

Engage the waiting soul to bless.

And since He bids me seek His face,

Believe His Word and trust His grace,

I’ll cast on Him my every care,

And wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!

May I thy consolation share,

Till, from Mount Pisgah’s lofty height,

I view my home and take my flight.

This robe of flesh I’ll drop, and rise

To seize the everlasting prize,

And shout, while passing through the air,

“Farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer!”

Sweet Mema

My grandmother, whom I call Mema, is expected to die today. She declined sharply over the past week. After going to Holy Thursday Mass last night, I went by to visit her. She was in a state somewhere between conscious and unconscious. I got to spend a while with her alone. I saw Granny's Bible was in the room, so I opened it and read the passage in John's Gospel where Lazarus dies.

When I saw her on Monday, she was awake. I kept telling her bye, and she kept saying "I love you," and I'd say, "I love you too, Mema." And she'd say it again.

When I saw her last week, she called me by my name and told me she loved me. When I was in the room, she sat up and looked at me intently. This was important for me, because her memory had gotten so bad, but she remembered me.

Please keep her and my family in your prayers. It has especially been hard on my mom and my aunt, who take care of her daily.

'Stratosphere' and others

Some more daffodils are blooming. The bearded irises will start soon. Daylilies not far behind. 

First up in my recent photos is 'Stratosphere', a very tall jonquil. It is about as tall as 'Gigantic Star', though with much smaller flowers, smaller than 'Trevithian' or 'Sweetness'. The flowers have a very clean look and are fragrant.

Narcissus 'Stratosphere'

Next up is 'Hillstar', the ones from Brent & Becky's. I did a lot of pollinating with them since they are supposed to be fertile. In daffodil terminology these are considered reverse bicolors, since most bicolor daffodils have a darker cup with lighter petals. Being jonquils, they're fragrant also.

'Hillstar'

I also took photos of some other things.

Byzantine gladiolus (Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus). This is not the heirloom garden form, which has much bigger flowers than this one.

A fleabane I found in the woods. (Erigeron sp.)

Out of the corner of my eye one day I saw a bright orange light in the sky. It was a sunlit cloud behind a shaded cloud.

Daffodil Season After(?)thoughts

Earlier this week, as I was gathering seeds from many daffodil pods, I was reflecting on the daffodil season and thinking about how it was all ending until next year. I've learned a lot this year. Daffodils in real life are different than daffodils in my head.

For one, in real life, they just come and go. One day they look great, and the next they're gone.

Also, they all come at once for the most part. You go from no daffodils to daffodils of all types everywhere then back to no daffodils.

I didn't keep records as thoroughly this year as I'd hoped. For the most part, my main records are my photos.

So, in this post, I'd like to record some things that my photos didn't capture that I might otherwise forget.

• Some daffodils, such as N. jonquilla and 'Trevithian', bloom 2-3 weeks earlier when grown in pots.
• Of the 'Thalia' bulbs I transplanted, none of the ones in pots bloomed, but all the ones I planted in the ground bloomed, even the ones I planted at the last minute.
• N. jonquilla henriquesii blooms like crazy when pot-bound. When it gets hot, though, it should be moved to afternoon shade.
• Leucojum does much better in the ground than in pots.
• I read somewhere that some daffodils such as 'Canaliculatus' which prefer dividing over flowering can be coaxed into flowering by setting the dried bulbs out to bake on concrete through the summer. (I wonder if this applies also to the South, where summer is much hotter than, say, England).
• The bulbs I planted from Brent & Becky's bloomed a month later than the bulbs acclimatized here. In particular, both 'Carlton' and 'Hillstar' from Brent and Becky's bloomed a month later than the same cultivars in my garden.
• 'Gigantic Star', 'Barrett Browning', and 'Hillstar' set no seed, even though I pollinated them and expected them to be fertile. Perhaps I pollinated with incompatible cultivars or at the wrong time. Or, the 'Hillstar' is not true 'Hillstar'.
• 'Prosecco', 'Sweet Love', 'Sun Disc', and 'Brooke Ager' still have not bloomed, nor barely sent up foliage. Will they survive?
• 'Quail' and 'Kedron' were the most visually-striking of the new daffodils I grew.
• 'Trevithian' would look better planted more closely together than my  current 3" spacing.
• I wonder if I could plant daffodils more shallowly than the 6" I did this year to get them to bloom earlier.
• It's mid-April and Twin Sisters (N. x medioluteus) is just now sending up flower stalks. This means there could still be blooms among all the foliage I saw at Granny's a few weeks ago.

I hope to get photos of a new jonquil, 'Stratosphere', today.

Tyler, Selma, and Old Cahawba

For her birthday my mom wanted me to go with her to see where her father grew up. She was 14 when he died, and he was 22 years older than my grandmother, so he is a mystery to most of my family. My grandmother knew him best, but her memory is all but gone now.

My grandfather grew up in the Selma area. His name was Herbert Lamar but people called him Herb or Lamar. He was a dentist.

First we stopped off of US-80 near Tyler, Alabama, where my grandfather's homeplace was. The old house burned down, but my mom's half-cousin's widower named Jimmy lives in a newer house on the property. He was an older man, "a good country boy" as my mom called him. He has a white house on the edge of a field with crinums planted along the front porch. He had two large dogs that barked and jumped all over us. He would yell at them and hit them with a horse whip.

He showed us all the old photos he could find. He misplaced the best old album, but he found a metal box with half-burned pictures from the old house that burned down. It was one of those old Southern houses with 12-foot-high ceilings. "I know," he said, "because they had me paint the walls one time when I was coming up."

From there, we drove to Selma and picked up some belongings of one of my mom's cousins that were being stored in a church there.

We drove around town and ate at an awesome bar-b-q place. We were the only white people there.

We stopped at Sturdivant Hall, an antebellum mansion in Selma.

Sturdivant Hall, Selma, Alabama

Then we went to Live Oak Cemetery in Selma. We don't have relatives buried there, that we know of, but it's a beautiful old cemetery.

Me, posing with the live oaks

Confederate veterans

Next we went to Old Cahawba, the site of Alabama's first state capital. It was built on the site of an old Indian village where the Cahaba River runs into the Alabama River. Almost nothing is left of the town, other than an extensive grid of dirt streets, and occasional columns, ruins, and cemeteries. It's a eerie place.

One of the few intact buildings is a two-story slave quarters. The main house was in front of this but now all you can see are the four corners of its foundation. When I went to Old Cahawba ten years ago, there was a two-level porch with columns on this house, which are now gone (removed?).

Slave quarters at Old Cahawba

In the old graveyard in Old Cahawba there are planted a lot of trifoliate orange trees (Poncirus trifoliata). These are Chinese relatives of citrus with vicious thorns. The lady in the information office said it was to remind visitors of the Crown of Thorns.

Artesian well in Old Cahawba

After Old Cahawba we went to a church south of Selma where some relatives were supposed to be buried.

Shiloh Baptist Church, near Sardis, Alabama

Shiloh Baptist Church

Family graves:

My great-great grandmother, Emma Huffman (my maternal grandfather's maternal grandmother). My great-great-grandfather was buried next to her, along with some distant uncles and cousins.