Coffee With Regina

Hello, Friends!  I missed the entire month of April.  This post just sat there waiting for me to finish it.  I started the post to share my Iris with you.  I declare, I must have zillions of photographs of the Iris now.  I never paid the slightest attention to the old-fashioned iris.  I never really liked them.  My daughter included these plants in the landscape plan for this house primarily because of the nice, slender clumps of foliage that don’t die in the winter.  She had no idea what the blossoms might look like.  They bloomed for the first time this spring and they have delighted me.

This bud reminded me of a little bird.  I loved him.

As you can see, the bud base grows directly out of the side of the grass-like blade.

I am fascinated by the growth pattern of these flowers.   The intricate architecture of the leaf that allows the bud base to grow up the leaf for a considerable distance before it pushes through the side is remarkable.

The photo above was taken through the screen window of my porch.  I included it because you can see the long stem of the bud base growing inside the leaf.  The bud on the right is emerging from the leaf.

The flower above is fully opened.  The blossoms open and wilt within a day.

In the photo above, one bud base has developed and another one is emerging from within the the same bud base.  The brown tip of it is visible underneath the blossom.

Here, you can see the bud as it begins to unfold into a blossom.  The iris blossoms open in the mornings.  This one still has the droplets from the sprinkler system clinging to her petals.

This iris grows to a height of about four to five feet.  The blossoms change character and color depending on the light.  The blossoms are not large, but they are dramatic.  One day, the plant is a clump of unremarkable green grass-like foliage.  Suddenly, the next morning a flurry of lovely blossoms seem to appear as if by overnight magic.  She is a thoroughly delightful plant for the careful observer.

She is a walking iris whose name is ‘Regina’ Iris (Neomarica Caerulea).  I understand that she is commonly referred to as Giant Apostle’s Iris.  We will simply call her Regina.  This spring, she has treated me to this view from my chair on the screened porch where I drink my coffee, and I thank her.  I cannot think of a more lovely companion.

I have had a couple of little adventures since I last talked to you, but certainly nothing very exciting since I swore off robbing mosques.  I still haven’t discovered what they did with the oranges. 

The Wages of Sin

Several weeks ago,  I stopped at the Islamic Center.  I had been watching a row of orange trees along the perimeter of the property adjacent to a parking lot.  They were heavy with fruit.  I could hardly believe that nobody was picking them.  Perhaps I was mistaken in my impression that they were ripe.

I parked my car and looked around for somebody who might give me permission to photograph and to sample the oranges.  Nobody was around the mosque although there were several cars in the parking lot.  I figured I’d done due diligence in my effort to obtain permission and proceeded toward my objective.  Stealing oranges from a house of worship.

The oranges didn’t look spectacular, but they were orange and the sky was a lovely benign blue, and I figured that homegrown oranges probably don’t have flawless skins like store-bought oranges.  I even found the patterns on the skins to be interesting.  I was amazed that orange trees, laden with fruit, flourished unmolested by man or beast.  How had folks from the adjacent business parking lot resisted them?  Where were the birds?

As I turned around to walk back to my car, I saw a perfect orange lying at my feet.  It had fallen off the tree almost as if it were a gift to me.  I picked it up and walked back to the center where I sat down on a concrete support underneath a palm and looked back at the dome against the sky.  I was having a fine, warm day in the sun.

I began to peel the orange.  It looked fine inside.  Then, I took a big bite.  Oh, dear.  I cannot describe the bitterness of that fruit.  It was awful.  I began spitting and choking and desperately wishing I had a drink of water.  Immediately, I grabbed my camera and hurried toward my car.  On the way, I saw two men emptying garbage cans into a dumpster at the corner of the parking lot.  I’m certain they saw me tasting the bitter fruit.  I’m also fairly certain they laughed.  The next week, every one of the oranges was gone from the trees.  Not one remained on the grounds.  “The Wages Of Sin” flitted through my head.  And I chuckled.

NOTE:  The alem is a finial or a sign that is essential in the construction of a mosque.  The history of this construction of this architectural element is interesting.  Thanks to Nia and Ottoman Dandy for their help here.  billgncs tells me the name of the orange tree is “Seville” which is confirmed by Wiki.  Thank you too.

               There really is a “sour orange“, George. 

Spring

Early this morning, I saw a pair of courting doves sitting on the fence outside my screened porch.  Stealthy hunter that I am, I sneaked out behind the pergola where I could get a bead on them with the camera.  Of course, they saw me in my bright pink robe and sailed away.  I only got one quick shot of them from my hiding place.

When I looked down, I discovered a couple of blossoms on the Morea Iris hiding in the foliage.  I was rewarded after all for getting my wool house shoes wet.  Unless I walk around the garden often, I miss seeing these blossoms since they are hidden by the wall of the pergola.  I don’t spend much time outside in the cooler weather.

Last spring, I took a walk around the garden and posted a number of photographs of the blooming trees and plants.  During the summer, I bored you to death with photographs of Mr. Anole and the Trumpet Vine.  I have a love-hate relationship with the Trumpet Vine, as you know.  She’s still as bare as she was all winter, but I spied blossoms on a Texas Mountain Laurel.  I didn’t know that it was blooming too.  The Laurel is a small evergreen tree that is attractive for landscape plantings, but the leaves, blossoms and seeds are poisonous to humans and animals.  This one is outside the fences and away from the areas where the dogs play.

As I walked around the house, I noticed what is supp0sed to be a variegated Pittsporum bush.  There was only one leaf cluster that wasn’t solid green.  I suppose it has reverted to its original un-variegated state.  At first glance, I thought it was a flower.  The poor thing looked a little worse for wear from the winter, but it is forming leaf new buds in the center in a valiant effort to spruce up a bit for spring, I suppose.

Pintas are attractive from a distance, but they don’t appeal to me.  I suppose I don’t like the color.  I did a number on this lady with what may be questionable results, but she does look a little more interesting to me this way.  I suppose I should be nicer to the Pintas since they do blossom during mild winters.

As I walked back toward the porch, I saw the couple chatting on the roof of the kids’ house next door.  Perhaps, it was a different couple.  I am happy to see them returning from their winter migration.  I think they fly further south to the Texas Valley or into Mexico for the winter.  They will begin to refurbish their nests in our porch gutters soon, and we will be treated to the ritual of the babies’ learning to fly again this year.

The Little Longhorn Herd

When my husband (Dean) was living, he had two loves:  Boy and his longhorns.  He got his first two bulls from a friend who maintains a herd of them here and one in Tennessee.  He’s the same eccentric, mountain-man friend of the Muffler Morgue post.  The two babies, whom Dean christened “Tom and Jerry”, were sickly little critters.  Dean had them delivered to our vet, Tom Moscatelli, who kept them for weeks while he nursed them back to health and turned them into steers.  Longhorns are ‘good-fer-nuthin’ cattle who are kept nostalgically to look at, I suppose.  Tom and Jerry were not much to look at.  Dean built a corral and a fence around the back acres of our plant property for his new herd of two stringy little steers.

He fed them the best food including Bull Builder that was supposed to transform them into mighty steers.  He sat for hours on his golf cart admiring them.  He kept them in the corral where they would be safe.  They were born in a herd at pasture and never approached by humans so they were a bit skittish.  Never mind.  He adored them and devoted considerable time toward their taming.  At that point in Dean’s career, Kelli and Jeremy had assumed the lion’s share of running the business leaving Dean the luxury to do as he pleased, and he did.   The steers were an integral part of that plan.

Each had his own feed bucket.  Sometimes they agreed to eat together.

Sometimes they argued about whose food looked better, and ended up squeezing their heads into the same bucket to eat.

Tom was more reserved than Jerry.  When the boys saw Dean drive into the pasture in his golf cart, Jerry always came running to drink iced tea from the big cup that he knew Dean kept in a cup holder on the cart.  Dean said that Jerry would have climbed into the cart with him if he had been small enough to fit.  One day when I drove the cart into the pasture, a young Jerry came to investigate.  When he discovered that I had no iced tea, he lost interest and ambled away.

Tom and Jerry grew into big, healthy steers.  But, Tom got his horns trapped in a round hay rack and in his struggle to free himself, he slid into the pond and drowned one weekend when nobody was at the plant to help him.  It was a sad time.  Nobody imagined that a commonly used hay rack could be a death trap.  Round bales of hay are a pretty, benign-looking sight in fields all over Texas.  These old bales sit abandoned near the corral.

When Tom and Jerry were older, Dean turned them out of the corral to eat grass and live like longhorns.  Two more babies arrived from their old herd.  Prissy Missy (left) and Fat Butt (right).  Fat Butt was not his original name, but when he grew into a gigantic bull with a huge set of horns and big, muscular haunches, Kelli renamed him.  Tom and Jerry were relegated to supervisory roles outside the corral.

Prissy Missy was calm and sweet from the beginning.  Fat Butt was just full of himself.  Here he is putting on his big-boy act for effect.  If anybody had said “boo”,  he would have high-tailed it out of there.  His was a convincing act, however, and won him a reputation as the bad boy of the little herd.  He seemed to know that he would be the sire of many sons if he established his dominance early on.

Eventually, Dean turned the new babies out to pasture with Tom and Jerry to learn how to be longhorns.  In this photo (taken by my son-in-law) Tom and Jerry, who were still young steers themselves, were mentoring little Fat Butt.  I don’t have a photograph of Fat Butt as a full-grown bull.  He was a handsome fellow, and he was protective of the ladies in his own herd.  A rivalry arose between him and a Black Angus bull from the adjoining pasture.  Black Angus bulls are notorious agitators, and Fat Butt was itching for a fight.  Eventually, he’d had enough of the interloper, and simply broke through the fence and whipped up on the Black Angus something awful.  After three days of persuasion, the guys were able to corral him and load him in the trailer for the livestock sale.  I was sorry to see him leave us.  He was just too big and too rowdy for us to manage, and Dean was no longer there to intervene on his behalf.   I hoped he would have many ladies to court and many handsome sons in his new herd.

Prissy Missy grew into a sweet mama.  To date, she’s had three or four babies.  This is her latest offspring.  She looks a little tired and a bit thin.  Babies are notoriously greedy little critters for their milk.  One day, she will stop feeding this baby.  For now, he is glued to her side wherever she goes.

Tinkerbell and her young son, Hershey Kisses, and another youngster, whose name I don’t know, came up from the pasture to see if anybody had brought sweet feed.  They didn’t join in, but  they stayed at a distance watching.  Tinkerbell is the daughter of Fat Butt and Prissy Missy.  I never knew her, but I remember that her birth was cause for celebration since she was Prissy Missy’s first baby.  Prissy was very young and there was some concern about her welfare, but she fared just fine and was a good mother from the start.  I suspect that the Interloper sired Hershey Kisses (on Tinkerbell’s right).

Dean would be happy to know that Jerry is still here watching over the herd.  He is a steer so none of the babies are his offspring.  I suppose he is the patriarch of the family, however, since he can claim original longhorn status.  On this day, he was happy to accommodate my camera as he chewed on his hay and watched Jeremy and Boy shoot targets beside him.  He’s accustomed to noise as are all of the longhorns.  A train roared along the track beside the pasture, and the boys were shooting a rifle.  The little herd seemed oblivious to the commotion.

As I left the pasture, I looked back to find that a somber Jerry had followed me part of the way to my car.  He was staring at me as if to say, “I remember you, but where is Deano and his golf cart?”.  Or, more likely, he hoped I’d return with sweet feed.  Prissy Missy was still standing with the herd watching me as I left.  I don’t visit the longhorns often, but I have fond memories of these first members of the little family.

The Star Wars Cowboy

When Boy was little, his parents assembled a fort in his yard.  He was excited.  He was a little afraid.  The fort was very tall, and he was very small.

Soon enough and with considerable encouragement, he mastered the climb to the top of his newly discovered world.

The Fort became Boy’s little kingdom.  He popped up halting any intruder who dared to set foot on the pathway near the fort.

Countless gun battles ensued between Granny Gringo and the Star Wars Cowboy.

One day while Granny wasn’t paying attention, Boy grew older.  The fort lost its magic.  The sounds of ferocious gun battles waged against the forces of evil disappeared for good.  The old Fort stood abandoned.

Little Boy had moved on to other wondrous discoveries in a wider world.  The magic telescope stared absently at the sky waiting for another little Star Wars Cowboy, perhaps.

The guns are silent now.  No little Cowboy scales the wall to the lookout tower.

The squirrels and the birds come and go with abandon.  The only trace of the little Cowboy is a broken six-shooter left behind in the lookout tower.

Time and the changing seasons have assaulted the old Fort.  A broken step, a crack here and there appear unnoticed.  The reign of the Cowboy Kingdom is nearing its end.  With it, the glorious summer days of epic battles will become distant memories.

Only the wind sweeps the leaves from the fort now.

Boy’s dog watched, still and silent, as I climbed around the fort.  His curious eyes followed me as if to ask why even I was there.

The Cowboy Kingdom is fading into the stuff of dreams.  Only the photographs and the memories will remain as proof that there really was a Star Wars Cowboy and his sidekick, Granny Gringo, who loved him.

A Holiday Walk

Today is a holiday in the United States.  It is a time of gathering together with family and friends to reflect on our lives.

Today, I was in the company of my dogs and my chinchilla, Che, and my parrot companion, Rita

The sun was shining and it was warm in the garden.

Since I wrote the first three lines, the weeks have come and gone and it’s almost Christmas.

As I walked, I found interesting things … secrets hidden in plain sight.  The light was alternately a soft hazy light flowing into a mysterious darkness as I found my way into the recesses of the garden.

As anyone who knows me understands, the fan palms fascinate me.  They are magical.  They play with light in a way that no other plant does.  When I photographed this leaf some weeks ago, they were happy to display their chameleon-like fans in all of their mystery.

I was careful to avoid Miss Pidey as I crept past her home to reach the crepe myrtle tree who has lost her blossoms and most of her foliage revealing the critters who make their homes on her bark.  This is an earlier photograph of her, but she was out repairing damage to her web from a recent storm on this day.  As I write this, she is no longer with me.  Romero apparently spied her web when he was applying plant food last week.  I forgot to tell him that she had lifetime rights to her home.

I have no idea what kinds of critters live here.  I suspect that they have grown up and moved away, however, since their homes look deserted now.  I suppose they know that the bark will separate from the tree,  and their homes will be destroyed with it so they arrange their occupancy accordingly.

I never saw this critter while he lived in his round house.  I only noticed the ruins after he went away.  If I remember, I will ask Romero what kind of creature builds such a house.

The unusual and really long-lasting blossoms of the bromeliad interest me.  This blossom has been on the plant for several months.  The blossoms die in stages eventually losing all of their pink and blue leaving a flat parchment.  I leave the blossoms on the plant until they separate from it because I enjoy watching them change appearance and catch the dried trumpet “bases” that you see here.  The tale of my love affair with the Trumpet Vine continues…

Of course, I can never resist taking a shot of the Queen Palm trunk.  She fascinates me too.  This area of the trunk is colorful.  The bark is the most interesting part of the tree.  The fronds at the top are rather ordinary compared to the varied textures and colors of the trunk.

This yellow hibiscus lives down the path between my house and Boy’s house.  My favorites are the double pink ones.  My daughter likes the single yellows.  I admit that I said some disparaging stuff about the yellows when she planted them.  Now, when I walk past them, their lovely single blossoms gaze at me in silent rebuke.  Somehow, I have come to see a kind of simple symmetry in their faces that I do not see in the showy double-pinks.  My apologies to the Yellows…  This old girl is fading, but she’s pretty still.

Staghorn Ferns hang in the pergola.  They are among my favorite plants.  I like the way the base clings to anything it finds in its effort to anchor the leaves.  The new base “anchor” is a tender-looking, slightly fuzzy, silver-gray that matures into a dried leaf that has the appearance of an ancient plant.  The tones and shapes and texture of these bases are fascinating as they grow old.  The simplicity of their role in the life of the plant is lovely.

Of course, I can never pass by Miss Lily without stopping to try, once again, to capture her.  She is my garden nemesis, as you know.  Today, I am blinded by the sun, struggling to squint through the viewfinder, cursing my glaucoma and cataracts, my tremor and her elusive skeleton.  At the end, I squatted on the ground at her eye level and laughed.  I imagined Miss Lily laughing too.  She is such a coy lady!

My beloved Trumpet Vine is in hibernation already, but her feelers are always out and on the move in their never-ending quest to dominate the world of the Pergola.  Your eyes are fine.  The photograph is slightly fuzzy.  Some of the runners are as big as small tree limbs.  They worm their way between the open spaces of the pergola framework in a perennial climb to the top where they display their  trumpets from spring to fall every year.  Their invasion is destructive.  They will … eventually … destroy the pergola on which they depend.  I am reminded of the human parallels.  I am conflicted about the destruction in progress before me, but I have made an uneasy peace with the Trumpet.

Buds hide everywhere.  The magical thing about them is that you have to look for them.  I laughed when I saw this one looking as if the Pygmy Date Palm had grown a very strange blossom.  Of course, a branch of the Hibiscus had simply grown up through the palm frond.  I am always delighted when something in the garden surprises me.

I enjoy the Pygmy Date palms that grow outside my screened porch.  In my part of the world, there are very few deciduous trees to produce fall color.  An occasional yellow leaf falls from the crepe myrtles onto the fronds of the Pygmy reminding me of the colorful fall leaves of my childhood.

The Pygmy Palm seed pods appear as large green spherical-shaped “fruits” which grow fat as they mature.  They break open spilling out a luxurious plume of creamy blossom-like shapes tightly attached to the collection of long stems that make up the immature seeds.

Eventually, the outer shell of the pod dries and falls off leaving hanging stems filled with maturing berries.  These berries turn from cream to dark grape-blue and finally to hard brown seeds and eventually drop off.  I dried some of them this year since Romero pruned them away.  I found them on the ground beside the trees.  They were too pretty to discard so I kept them.

The fan palms collect the falling leaves and little acorns from the oak trees.  A fat little squirrel has a nest in an oak among the palms.  I see him collecting the acorns sometimes.

There is nothing extraordinary about this plant.  There are a number of them planted around the garden … for color… according to my daughter’s design.  I’ve forgotten the name.  They bloom from spring to frost without fail.  Somehow, I don’t pay much attention to them until I photograph one and realize that the budding blossom formations are interesting after all.

This is my daughter’s favorite landscape plant, I think.  It grows in a medium-sized, bushy form or in a taller form depending on where it is planted and how much sunlight falls on it.  The blossoms are a lemon-color or a deeper yellow depending on the same circumstances.  I never notice the plants until the blossoms appear suddenly.  I have come to appreciate them in the fall when fewer plants are blossoming.

This is a Pinta.  Another of Kelli’s favorite landscape plants.  It grows like a weed.  They are supposed to grow in a very low, rounded shape, but the ones around the jar fountain grew uncharacteristically tall.  Kelli laughs about the way our plants always grow into monstrous sizes since they receive so much food and water.  I haven’t turned on the fountain for many months.  I will do that again soon.  I like to hear the sound of the water gurgling from the fountain and falling onto the slate below.

This is the fall garden.  Soon, the cold nights will come with their frost and ice.  The blossoming plants will not survive.  Romero will wait until they are dead and the spring is near to cut them all back to the ground.  Then the warm rains will come and they will reappear to start the cycle over again.  The winter is a quiet time as if everything in the garden has retreated inside itself waiting for the spring.  As much as I miss the Trumpet and Miss Lily and all of the blossoms, I think their absence makes their return more joyful.

I started this blog last January.  That was years ago, I think.  I didn’t have the slightest notion of what a blog is.  What a wonderful time I have had with all of you.  I have visited remote and exotic parts of your worlds.  You have been kind to me.  You have welcomed me, enlightened me, entertained me, made me laugh, and befriended me in a way that I never anticipated.  Thank you.  All of you.

Bloggers Helping Bloggers

Help From A Fellow Blogger

There is a phenomenon at work here on WordPress.  It is a Twenty-First Century style community that feels very much like a Nineteenth or Twentieth Century rural community in which neighbors help neighbors.  A barn-raising kind of community.  I wanted to share an experience that I had recently with a blogger who lives in Australia.   Her name is Leanne Cole, and one of her blogs is Leanne Cole’s Photography Field Trips.  She is a professional photographer who is also skilled in the use of graphics programs to edit her photographs.  She regularly has over a hundred visitors a day who come to her blog to discover the ways in which she utilizes Paintshop Pro and other programs to enhance and transform her photographs.

EPIC FAIL

I posted this photograph as an epic fail in a post on The Fuzzy Foto.  Following is the photograph.

I knew that the photograph had no real point of focus … maybe, no point at all.  I knew it was a bad photo, but I had no idea what to do about it.

Leanne saw it on my blog, The Fuzzy Foto, and kindly suggested that I crop some of the sky to bring the end of the tracks closer to the top in order to draw the eye toward a focal point.  I tried that in the next photo that I posted:

The photograph didn’t get any better.  I was not pleased with this result either and was ready to declare it a total fail and forget it.

~THEN~

Leanne offered to work on the photograph for me.  Here is her description of what she did and the result.

Leanne’s Tutorial

The first thing I noticed is that the image seemed quite dark, so I lightened it up with levels, and that made a massive improvement straight away.  Now the next bit isn’t going to make much sense, but if you saw my tutorial on Monday, where I darkened the whole image and then lightened up a small section, that will help you to understand what I did next.

 

So I decided to darken the whole image,and I kept doing it until there was a lot more detail in the sky.  I wanted to bring out those clouds. 

Of course, it then made the entire image too dark, so I selected a the railway line with the lasso too, then feathered it at 300 pixels and then used the curves to lighten the railway line.

 

After that, I added a new layer and allied the image, then added a small amount of Gaussian blur.  I added a mask and took the blur away from the railway lines and everything in between  leaving it on the outside.

 

I cropped the image so there wasn’t so much space on either side, and I added some gradient to the top and the bottom through that list bit I love.   I don’t know if others do.

 

That was pretty much it.

~♥~

When I opened the email and saw the photo, I was amazed at the difference.  I think the photograph is much improved.  I am happy with the result.  And, I am happy to know that bloggers here help other bloggers!  This community has been unbelievably kind to me, and I am constantly encouraged and cheered by the support I receive from all of you!

Thank you, Leanne!

Leanne offers critiques of other photographers’ photographs as well as offering an editing service for photographs.

 

Sister Angel

Those of you who recall the post titled “Sister Angels” know how distressed I was at the vandalism that left one of the angels destroyed.  A few weeks ago, I drove by the cemetery and looked over at the tombstone expecting to see only one intact angel.  To my absolute delight, I saw that the ravaged angel was whole again.  I could hardly believe it.  A bird sat on her wing watching as if he knew and was happy too.

The destroyed sister’s head had been replaced and her wing repaired.  The repairs were incomplete, but she looked wonderful to me.

The grout on her wings would require smoothing and reshaping.

Her neck repair would be smoothed and the excess grout removed when it dried.  Somehow, she looked as if she were patiently waiting to be restored.

She looks perfect to me.

Downtown

A Ride Downtown

The first building I saw on my ride was Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church.  Worshipers were coming out of the church, but they were kind enough to wait for me to snap this photo.  I was stopped in the middle of the street blocking traffic!  I believe this is the oldest Catholic church in Victoria.

A couple of blocks away, I saw Trinity Lutheran church.  I liked the reflection in the window.

And the reflection in this window too.

Bell towers are my favorite architectural elements.

The twin spires of St. Mary’s catholic church are a landmark sight in our town.  The church stands opposite the police department at the intersection of Main Street.

In order to get a photograph of the front of the church, I turned the wrong way into the police department parking area (in front of a sheriff’s department patrol car!  I half expected the officer to ticket me, but he didn’t stop.  I suppose, as Elisa suggested, it was change of shift time!

Main Street is a one-way street lined with beautiful historic buildings.  This block houses arts and cultural organizations.

This detail of the building on the corner in the previous photo shows the Texas Historical Site designation plaque on its front.  The architectural elements incorporated into the facade of this building are beautiful.  Here, I notice that some repair must be going on to the roof of the building.

There is a huge parking area between this building and a bank building to your left and across the street.  I have no idea what this building is!  I don’t think I ever knew.  It is interesting, however, so I snapped it.  I have to inquire, I suppose. 

This is another very interesting example of the varied architecture along Main Street.

Although I have lived and worked in Victoria since 1976, I know very little about the historical buildings.  I walked by many of them on this street every day when I was a social worker for the Department of Human Services located in a building downtown.   I suppose my focus was not on historical buildings at the time!

The courthouse in any small Texas town is usually the most elaborate building in town.  When we moved to Victoria and began to drive through small towns, I was struck most by the huge courthouse buildings and how elaborate they were.  Most are constructed of imported marble and stone and tiles and other materials not available in the areas in which the buildings were built.   It appears, at least to an outsider, that the first buildings of any significance to be built in these towns were churches, courthouses and banks.  They survive as the most intriguing examples of period architecture in Texas.  This photograph is of the side of the courthouse adjacent to the jail.   Court is no longer held in this building.  The functioning court is held in the white building beside the old courthouse.

Clock tower detail. 

On my way out of downtown, I took some photos of a few businesses and old houses under renovation, but they seemed too shabby for inclusion here.

NOTE:  If the perspective in these photographs seems strange, it is because they are shot from my car window.  I have a tremor which is prohibitive when I attempt to walk around holding my camera.  I brace my arms on the car door window frame or on the steering wheel to steady the camera.   In the process, I am watching traffic (cars are trying to eliminate me) and trying not to be such a terrible nuisance!  I appreciate your kindness in accepting my strange photographs and accepting me with such kindness and grace in the blogging community.  Bless all of you! 

Memories Of Concrete

A Family Business

When I took the photographs of the old equipment and buildings at our concrete business several months ago, I posted most of them.   Then I realized that I had talked about the business, but I didn’t do it in a way that tells you what it represents to me. I hope this post tells you something about me that I believe is essential to who I am. When people visit our plant, I am certain that they never see what I see when I walk out to production.  I see beautiful shapes and colors and textures.

The next photo illustrates what I see when I look at an old, steel cylinder cap sitting discarded on a steel beam at eye level next to the oxygen and acetylene tanks.

This hook and chain are critical components of the lifting device that is used to lift thousands of pounds of concrete tank to a level above the crane operator’s head. His life depends on the integrity of this device. She is a beautiful sight to me.  She is rusty on the surface, but she is inspected and strength tested, watched and cared for.  This device is used to lift smaller tanks.  It is the device that I used to load and move five-hundred and thousand-gallon tanks in the old days.

Ah, the beauty of a stick of rebar with its wonderful rust.  Steel is a remarkable material.  These sticks have been cut with a cutting torch so you see the melted steel at the ends.  The welder culled these pieces for some reason so they were leaning against the building when I passed the rebar welding rack.

The next photo is of a concrete pier.   We made them to use for leveling houses and supporting small structures of all kinds.  This pier has been under one corner of a vibrating table for many, many years.  It has layers of old cement and oil and grease deposits much like a stalactite in a cave.  The deposits create an interesting texture.

A concrete pier under a lid form that is ready to be poured.   (Pouring is the term for filling a form with cement.)

The next image is of an old brace with clamps on each end.  It is placed across the steel form and tightened to help to prevent the sides of the form from “bowing” under the pressure of the wet concrete.  This brace is used only on the old forms.  The newer forms do not require it.  This one is many years old and covered in concrete. This simple bar is a clear reminder of the early years.

The next photo is of a lifting device.  In the background, you see the other end of this device.  Between the two bars with lifting eyes there is a set of chains that wrap around the tank and tighten against the tank when it is raised.   This device has safety features to insure that it doesn’t fail and drop the tank that weighs several tons.  There is a concrete tank in the background showing an inlet.  I never used this device since it lifts the big tanks that I never poured or worked with.  To hear the chains and steel whine and clank is an alarming sound to the uninitiated, but it is everyday music to a concrete manufacturer’s ear!  It means that production is running smoothly.

This is another view of a stack of rebar waiting to be cut to the required lengths and welded into a flat reinforcement mat to be installed in a steel tank lid form over which wet cement will be poured to form a lid.

There is one item that no concrete manufacturer ever needs to buy.  Hooks for hanging stuff.  Need a hook?  Cut a length of rebar, bend it, and weld it to a steel upright in the plant for instant storage of anything that needs a hook … electrical cords, hoses, wire, chain, apron, hats, anything.   Lovely to look at and as handy as sliced bread too!

This is a roll of wire ties.  They’re used to tie rebar together for reinforcing concrete in precast concrete production or in slab construction or anywhere that requires holding reinforcement steel together.  There is a handheld tool that is used to twist these wires around the joining lengths of rebar to hold them together.  I’d like to have a nickel for ever wire I ever twisted!  Now, most of the steel is welded together.

One summer, against my better judgment, I agreed to hire the teenage son of a guy who ran a construction business.   He was assigned to tie mats of wire mesh together to form “cages” to use as reinforcement in tanks.  We were all eating at a nearby convenience store one day, and I was sitting beside the kid who was eating a greasy hamburger and fries.  I noticed that his hands were completely covered in rust from the wire.  That is, all except the tips of his fingers which he’d licked clean!  He effectively ended his career as a concrete magnate later that day when he jumped off the platform onto a stack of wire mesh and stuck a piece through his tennis shoe into his foot.  We took him howling to his mama who was a nurse at one of the local hospitals.

This is a valve on a welding tank.  I don’t know who Victor is, but he left his welding glasses here… 

This is typical of the old days.  An old apron hanging with a saw on a rebar hook in production.  It looks as if it’s been there for awhile.  It probably belonged to Eulogio who used to run production for us.  He’d been in concrete production for so many years that he was always clean.  The measure of experience in this business is how clean a person can manage to remain.  The newbies are covered from head to toe in oil and cement and rust within an hour into the day.

This sledge hammer must be as old as the business.  Often, you can hear the unmistakable sound of somebody pounding steel with it.  I’d guess that it’s one of the things that has been around as long as I have.  Sledge hammers just don’t wear out.  When you need one, nothing else will do.

This old pair of wire cutters has survived too.  I guess they look too bad to walk off.

This is a corner latch on a steel form door.  The latch is a safety feature that is designed to keep the form door from opening when the form is filled with wet concrete.  There is one on each corner of every form except the big forms.

As it is with everything employees use, the hard hats end up being tossed aside somewhere.  This one has been lying in an unused steel form for a long time.  Everybody in production is issued a hard hat, gloves, and eye protection.  Nobody wears them, of course.  Hey, it’s a family business.  We never wore safety gear either.

This is a step.  It hangs on the side of  steel forms that are too tall for the employees to reach.  They step up onto this hanging grate to work inside the form and to level the wet concrete when it is poured into the form.  It’s been around a long time too.  It’s beaten and battered and covered with concrete, but it works.  I’d like to know how many guys have stood on this step.  I no longer remember where it came from or who made it.   The bigger forms have boards that run along the entire side of the form.  One of our employees was acting the fool during a pour one day and stepped off the platform.  He fell flat and broke his collar bone.  It had to be surgically repaired.  He was out of work for six months.  Silly boy.  Believe it or not, he still works for us.   We call him “Giggles”.

This is a rebar bender that we use to bend handles into a u-shape to use as lifting eyes for concrete tank lids.  The lifting eyes are tied or welded onto the rebar mats and placed into the steel lid forms before they are filled with wet concrete.  I have no idea why somebody wound a rope around it.  Dry cement dust is constantly settling on everything in the production area.  It is corrosive in the humid air and rusts everything it touches.  Our production is in the open air.  It is under a twenty-foot overhead building, but the sides have to remain open for ventilation.  I suppose this bender could be cleaned up, but it wouldn’t work any better.  I’m certain that it will outlive me.

I’ve shown you some of the old stuff from my end of the production area where the five-hundred-gallon to twelve-hundred-gallon tanks are made.  I am familiar with the manufacture of these tanks along with parking blocks, cattleguards, and other pads and miscellaneous concrete stuff .  If we walk further down the slab, we come to the big tank forms that are components of the aerobic treatment plant.  One tank weighs twenty thousand pounds.  The crane operator punched “down” on the controls one day while one of these tanks was suspended mid-air.  She came down all right.  Straight down, non-stop, and crashed on the concrete floor.  The controls had failed.  Chunks of concrete, wire, steel and every other component inside the tank flew off in all directions.  Miraculously, nobody was hurt.  This stuff is too big for me.

This is one of the steel forms like the one in which the fallen tank was made.  The tool leaning against it is used to punch the wet concrete down into areas of the mold evenly.  Concrete has to have a specified “slump” which means that it does not pour into the form like milkshake.  This is a bigger and a more complicated form than any that I ever worked with.  I stopped working in production when we moved to our present location and began manufacturing larger thanks.  I am not familiar with the operation of this steel form.  It has several compartments.  The tanks that are made on it are used in the aerobic treatment plant that we sell.

I still love the sounds of production.  The clank of steel against steel, the clatter of chains, the ominous creak of chain against concrete as the wenches grumble and the chains settle into the tank grooves as they are lifted onto the trucks, the sound of the concrete mixer running, the guys’ banter, the radio blasting over the din of production.  Then the heightened alertness when the big tanks are being turned over; the crane operator releases the latch; the monster tank hesitates and moves tentatively; then she flips over in what looks like an uncontrolled roll accompanied by the sounds of groaning chains and clanking steel; she rocks back and forth and finally settles down; the tank is safely lowered to the plant floor; the banter and noise resume.   That moment before the roll always reminds us that we are ants on the other end of a leash trying to control a twenty-thousand pound lady with an unforgiving attitude!

To a concrete manufacturer, this is “liquid gold”.   There is a “recipe” for making it, but anybody who works with the mix for very long knows how it should look.  The principle is the same whether the person is a baker working with dough or a batch mixer working with wet concrete.  Each knows how his mix should look.  Each is equally satisfied when the mix “cooks” and comes out in a lovely form.

This stuff is dusty, dirty, wet, caustic and very heavy.  It sets up fast leaving little room for mistakes.  When water is added, it begins to cure.  Nothing can stop it at that point.  Wet concrete is fickle and susceptible to heat and cold and all sorts of variables.  When she works, she works well.  When she fails, she fails big time.  I don’t know how we who work with her come to love her, but we do.

When the heat subsides here in South Texas, I will take you out to the plant to see how precast concrete is manufactured.

Here are other photos of miscellaneous stuff around the production area of the plant:

Water settled in a steel lid form covering some odd washer-looking pieces of steel.

Edge of a cement pour bucket after it has emptied its load into a steel form.

Oxygen and acetylene tanks for welding and cutting steel

Safety lock on a steel form

The ever present chains are a reminder of the danger inherent in precast concrete production.

Safety devices and chains hold the production world together!

Sealant between the lid and the tank.  It has melted in the heat and the excess has run down the tank a bit.  Once this sealant is applied, the lid cannot be removed.

This steel form is called a gang form because it allows us to pour twelve parking blocks in one form.  We used to pour the cement into single forms to make one block at a time.  This was a messy, difficult business and the blocks were heavy to lift creating the potential for back injuries, smashed fingers and crushed toes.  With the introduction of the gang form, the new generation has eliminated much of the labor and the danger involved in the production of these blocks.  I suppose this steel form alone represents the transition from the old to the new … from parents to children … the forging ahead of generation after generation of American family businesses.

THE BOSS

This young man is the face of a new generation of young business people in this country.  They are second-generation operators of family businesses.  No, they don’t start out with a dream, their life savings, a couple of trucks and a few steel forms on a bare concrete slab with a portable building for an office.  They miss the sweat, the long hours, the uncertainty.  But, they also miss the adventure.  They inherit far more complicated problems than the first generation encountered.  Their responsibility is a heavier load to carry in many ways because they must work through the transition from the old to the new to find their own voice and their own vision for the future.  That is the way it has always been and it is my real hope that is the way it will always be.

Thank you for sharing my reflection on my life in the concrete business and my vision for the future.

The Cactus Garden That Was…

The Ill-Fated Cactus Garden

Boy’s mom is a designer of onsite sewage treatment systems.  She is also a fantastic landscape designer.  What she is not is a potted plant person.  Her CAD program does not extend beyond design … certainly not to potted plant care.  Boy went along with her to the nursery one day to choose some plants for her landscape project.  There, he fell in love with cacti … the potting kind.  Being the indulgent mom that she is, she helped him to choose a pot and some cactus plants and succulents to pot.  Also, being the sensible one, she donned her work gloves before she potted the things.  The pot with its lovely cacti arrived at my house, of course.  Here are some photos of it.

I am not a big fan of cactus gardens, but I am a big fan of Boy.  So, I explained cactus care to him.  All was well in Cactus farming at this point.  However, I did notice one potential problem in cactus paradise.  No drain hole in the container.  I told Boy that this might be a problem if he watered too much.

Boy was particularly fond of Cactus Man.

He was fascinated by the pencil succulent.  I kind of liked it too.  I never saw one before.

I used to have succulents much like this one.  We called them “hen and chicks” because new ones grew around the mama plant all the time.  When I told Boy about the hen thing, he kept looking for little chicks to appear.  None did.  I think this is a different kind.  The chickless hen kind.

Boy watered only infrequently and very carefully.  One day, we decided the cactus garden needed sunlight.  We moved it into the pergola.  There, dead leaves and blossoms often fell onto it.  It seemed to like the extra light.

Then one day it rained.  It poured.  I forgot the cactus garden.  It turned into a cactus lake.  Uh-oh.  By the time I noticed it, the garden was looking poorly.  Mr. Cactus Man had turned into the incredible shrinking cactus man.  I did the only sensible thing.  I sent the garden home with Irma (The-cleaning-fetish-Irma).  As I write this, she is carefully nursing the cactus garden back to health.  Meanwhile, Boy has moved on to other projects.   On the bright side, I am grateful that he didn’t bring something else that has to be fed and let outside…   Or, worse yet, pees on the carpet!  :-)

Mr. Anole’s New Coat

Tea With Miss Lucy Anole

Mr. Anole made a surprise appearance in his new coat yesterday.  A green one instead of the brown one he was wearing when we met.  He heard that he was being photographed, I am fairly certain.  I told him he looked dapper in it.  I noticed a bit of pink blush spread under his chin as he agreed that green really is his best color.  He could only linger for a few moments .  He was on his way to tea with Miss Lucy Anole.   Her bug Juice Tea is the envy of all the lady Anoles  in Trumpet Town, you know.

 

Mr. Anole told me to tentatively pencil him in for next Tuesday at four and headed off to meet Ms. Lucy in the Bouganvilla on the Smith’s veranda.  I waved and called out, Hasta la vista!  Then I headed off to pick up Boy from his tennis lesson.  Mr. Anole and I have such conflicting social calendars  that it is difficult for us to sit down for tea and a long chat these days.

On my way to pick up Boy, I stopped for my iced coffee, of course.  After I picked it up, I turned the wrong way down Rio Grande Street.  Dang!  I would just have to turn around since I really wanted to go the other way around town.  When I pulled into the parking lot of an old Victoria restaurant to turn around, I noticed a reflection in the side windows.  I liked it so I snapped a couple of photos of it.  I am going to show this to Mr. Anole on Tuesday, I thought to myself, since he loved the hot flies that he ate at La Siesta when he was a boy.    All of the Anoles knew La Siesta had the best flies in town.  That was before the owners moved to a better location and took his dad with them on a potted plant.  But, his emigration to the North Side is another story.

Meanwhile, I have visiting to do and a story to write about all of my children at Mickey D’s!

Hasta luego, Amigos!

Un Poco Más!

As anybody who has been in South Texas for more than thirty days says, Un pequito mas, and holds up a finger and the thumb to make the sign of a tiny bit more.   Thus, the title of this post.  I couldn’t resist sharing my encounter with you.   This time, Mr. Anole was jumping from one stem to another so I knew right away that he was alive … for sure.   There was a steady breeze with fairly strong gusts, but he rode two limbs like a tightrope walker in a storm.   Cool as a cucumber, that Mr. Anole.

He looked directly at me and waited for me to fetch Little Lumix.  The blossoms put him in a fine mood, no doubt.  If I weren’t so deaf, I bet I could have heard him singing as he was swinging back and forth!

I was excited to see Mr. Anole again.  And, I was grinning from ear to ear when I realized that I actually captured a photograph of him.

All is well in the Garden.

Hasta mañana!

The Fuzzy Foto

A MOTHER’S KEEPER

For a long time, I’ve wanted to have a place to put photographs.  Just odd photographs that don’t fit into my blog.  The other night, I decided to create a drop-box file for my favorite photographs.  About two-o’clock in the morning, I hastily created The Fuzzy Foto.  If you’re interested, I’ll be dropping my fuzzies and an occasional sharp one into the Fuzzy Foto box.   My mother’s urn that sits on the living room mantle is one of them.  I always liked this photo, but I never used it here.

My mother is so much a part of who I am that I am not sufficiently objective to talk much about her.  She lived in a separate house across the patio from our house.  She lived there for over twenty years before she died.  Our life together is a long and, I think, an  interesting story that I might be able to tell in episodic fashion.  I will think about how to do that.   It is not an easy story to tell.

Mother wanted the two of us to have a portrait.  That was a few years before she died.  This is a photograph of the print on canvas that hung in her house.  She liked it.  I smile every time I look at it because I can hear my dad saying, “Wait until your mama puts on her hat!”, every time we left the house.  That’s what he called the outrageous wig she wore because she thought she didn’t have enough hair.  This was a particularly awful one.  Her hair was fine like a baby’s hair and as white as the wig … the resemblance ends there unfortunately.   During the last years of her life, I cut her hair very short and dispensed with the hat.  It was pretty hair.   I am sorry that I lost all of my snapshots of her when my computer crashed a few years ago.  I remember them, but I no longer have a print record.

I called her “Lucy”.

Trumpets On The Pergola

The Carolina Trumpet

From my chair on the porch, I can see the trumpets.  They hang down almost to waist level as I walk the path to Boy’s house.  When we took our spring walk in the garden, I promised that the Carolina Trumpet Vine would be filled with coral trumpets by summertime.  I think it has outdone itself this year.  Blossoms continually appear and fall arranging themselves into surprising and delightful patterns on everything around the pergola.  I only noticed the two bees who came to breakfast after I looked at the photographs!

The trumpets fall and sit softly among the plants as if they are arranging themselves in a vase to please whoever is sitting there.  They fall while they are still in perfect form.  They are making way for the bean that will grow out of the center of the base of the trumpet blossom.

I think they are making mulch for the staghorn fern by design.

Last night, it rained.  There was a lovely carpet of blossoms on the pergola floor, on the path, and around the outside of the pergola.  Some of the bases of the blossoms fall too.  Usually, they remain on the vine stem to grow a bean.  My artsy photos showed them still on the stems.

When I sit under the hanging vines filled with blossoms, I am fascinated by them.  I am always snapping photos.  It is impossible to choose one to post.  I would like to post all of them!   I don’t remember having enjoyed the trumpets quite as much as I have this year.  I sit on my porch and watch the bees and the hummingbirds and even the flies lapping up the sticky goodness inside the trumpets.  An occasional butterfly comes along too.

If you aren’t paying attention when you walk around the pergola, you are likely to walk right into a clump of hanging blossoms!

I enjoy the way the light through the pergola top plays on the fallen blossoms and on the ones hanging through the roof.

I’ll tell you a secret if you promise not to tell my children.  The trumpets whisper to me.  They say, “Take it pit-ture”.  When my daughter was a baby, she sat on her papa’s lap and begged him to “daw it pit-ture!” on her foot.  He drew funny faces, always the same, on the soles of her little feet.  She delighted in the game.

Rita is sitting among the trumpets at the old house.  This vine is different from the one at the new house.  It was covered in an unbelievable mass of blossoms once each year.  The foliage was different and the blossoms were more coral-colored and smaller than the Carolina Trumpet.  While that vine was invasive, the stems were much smaller and broke away easily.  They attached themselves by tendrils that were not so destructive or hard to remove.  The foliage was a deep green like a shrub compared to the small-leaf Carolina trumpet that has a very different, lacy leaf configuration.

The blossoms appear by the hundreds and fall in equal numbers.  Romero cleans up the spent blossoms once a week, but there is always a carpet of them again the next time he comes.  Sometimes, I’m tempted to tell him to leave them.  But, I know that nobody else would appreciate the look of a few inches of dead blossoms covering everything.  When I look down at the fallen ones, I am always struck by the varied palette of hues, shades and tones.

I have no idea where this little bird bath came from, but it collects Boy’s stuff and blossoms!  No birds bathe there.  Maybe because I forget the water?

The Carolina Trumpet is a moody girl.  Her blossoms are a soft pink color in early evening and brighter coral in the mid-day sun.  They change appearance with the changing light.   She  actually looks as of she’s drawing up within herself under the blazing sun.  When it is evening again, she relaxes and spreads herself to take in the moisture and enjoy the coolness of the night.   By morning, she is happily swaying her blossom-laden arms to offer a nectar breakfast to the waiting bees.  Do you see the lone bee in the photograph?

I suppose I should apologize for boring you once again with my trumpets.  I cannot resist, however.  You will just have to forgive me.  I hope you enjoyed the pictures.  I wish each one of you could sit with me for coffee on the porch in the early morning and see her dressed in her lovely blossoms!

Beautiful Boomie Bol

Here is Beautiful Boomie

(Boomie is the girl)

Here is Boomie’s Poem

Cover Me

Peel away every façade
Pull apart all the pretenses
Let the built up glass walls
Come crashing to the ground
Along with the insecurities
Fears
Hypocrisies and
Deceits

Peel me apart slowly
But surely
Let the façade be gone

Then
Spread your arms of love
Like wings over me
And
Cover me

Cover me in your truth
Cover me in your love

Here is Boomie’s Gift To Me

Boomie stuck her little toe into the WordPress Water back in February, I think.  She was not at all sure that anybody would like what she had to say.  By June, she had so many awards that she must have been considering a fire sale.  Instead, she started faithfully passing  them along to others in true Boomie sharing fashion.   She says she is timid.  She is a timid tigress.  She is passionate about everything.  She yearns for a future world in which cruelty, hatred, bigotry, hunger, loneliness, fear are replaced by kindness, love, acceptance, full bellies and serene souls.   Boomie is a dreamer, a poet, a philosopher.  She is Beautiful Boomiebol.   And I thank her for sharing this award with me.

Seven Things About Me

If there were seven things about me that I haven’t already blabbed off, I cannot imagine what they are.  You’ve been in my garden, in my kitchen, in my cupboards, in my shower, in my lingerie drawer, in my bookcase, in my car, in my garage, and you’ve gone to my old house.  You’ve met my family and my companion pets and you’ve seen all of us when we were young.  If you are interested in my lab work, I get it next week.  I’ll ask for a copy of the report and share it too.   Leave a request at the bottom.  If there were one characteristic that I could change about myself, I’d take the advice of a colorful old country lawyer who told me once, when I was young and about to save the world, “Sit down and shut up!”

Passing along the One Lovely Blog Award

How does an old woman who is memory-impaired, vision-impaired, hearing-impaired, and often judgement-impaired, go about choosing lovely blogs?  Well, she does what any old woman would do.  She squints and follows her finger down the pages of blogs that the WP Dashboard says she follows.  Yeah, after four or five months, she found the sucker.   If I’m using up too many award coupons, I have more squirreled away.  Yes, some of you gave them to me.   I was touched and I swore to myself that I would honor you by passing them along.  That was before I got distracted and the initial misty-eyed response wore off.   I apologize for my rudeness.  I am not ungrateful.  However, you guys all feel like my children, and I sometimes treat my children badly.  I love all of you anyway for accepting me into your lives and your hearts.  May God bless each of you in a special way that no blog award from me could ever compare.

Nia

Soma

Charlene

Madhu

Rosy

Elisa

Gail

Lady D

Colline

White Lady

Susan

Lemony

Jonel

Cornelia

Amy

And a few lovely guys too!

Pablo

Scott

Maurice

Shimon

Michael

Mike

Joseph

I love you all!  :-)

Lumix And The Diva

(The story of the little Lumix LX5′s troubles with The Diva)

…And it was such a lovely day in the neighborhood until Little Lumix showed up.

Uh Oh.  Here she comes again!   I’ll pretend I don’t see her.

Mr. Nikon is so tall and handsome with his black hood.  He’s a real gentleman.  Keeps a polite distance always respecting a girl’s modesty.  Besides, we’ve been together for years.  That little shrimp is downright annoying.  Who does she think she is … always poking around sticking her nose right up in a lady’s face?   It’s disgraceful, I tell you!

I said, BE GONE!

Not to worry, Che to the rescue.  He is far more forgiving and greets Little Lumix with a big hug and a  friendly nibble.  Actually, he finds her retractable nose  most fascinating!

Now, Little Lumix Girl,  don’t that jest make you wanna’ dip ye hat in the creek!

My Friend

RITA

Rita is the inspiration for the title of this blog.  I thought I should finally credit her.  After all, if your byline is based on the life of a character, you ought to say a little something about her, don’t you think?  I don’t have many followers who are parrot keepers.  The reason I know that is because nobody asks questions about her.  If you aren’t a parrot keeper, you probably think parrots are just messy birds who sometimes entertain us by parroting what we say or performing silly tricks for our amusement.

 This is the earliest picture I have of Rita and me.  I am sharing it although it is a bad photo of both of us, because it illustrates Rita’s general attitude.  I was amused that she was suspicious of the camera in anybody’s hands except mine.   Her wariness of people persists to this day.

We had an unusual snowfall in the winter of 2004.   Even Rita liked it.  She ate the snow and loved the snow cream that Miss Sarah and I made.

I suppose I should start at the beginning for those of you who don’t already know.  Our life together started when our paths crossed in a local feed store in the spring of 2003.  Rita was in a crate in the middle level of a wall filled with crates of parrots of various species.  I knew nothing of parrots.  As I walked by the stack of crates, I heard a loud call pierce the general din of parrot chatter.    Ariba!  I would learn much later the meaning of that Spanish word:  UP!  It is the first command  a parrot learns.  He is asked to step up onto a hand or a stick perch as an absolute requirement for his care and safety.   In that fateful moment, I simply thought it  was cute.  I turned back and spoke to the friend who would become my alter ego.  She tilted her head and listened with curious eyes.  I told her she could come home with me.  And she did.

When I got home with Rita, I had no idea what to do.  She was frightened.  I did all the wrong things so she bit chunks out of my arms and hands  in self defense.  Eventually, I read enough about parrot behavior to understand what I was doing wrong in this budding relationship.   I apologized and started over.  Parrots have long memories.  Finally, we came to an agreement and I was accepted.  Parrots demand mutual respect in their relationships.   Absent that, somebody is gonna’ get hurt.  Much the way of  people too.  Parrots want desperately to understand what you want of them.  If you make it clear, they are happy to oblige.

After we made our peace, Rita began to discover what I wanted her to do, and I began to understand what she was saying to me with her body language, her tone of voice, her calls and her expressions.  Parrots understand human behavior and emotion.  They are sentient, empathetic creatures.   Living with a parrot is comparable to living with a child.  Or so they say.  Uncontrolled, a parrot would be impossible to keep.  Rita spent the first years of her life on her six-by-eight-foot Java Tree behind the sofa in the living room.  She could see everything that happened all day in the house.  She played, ate, napped and walked back and forth from her tree to the sofa.  On nice days, she played on her open-top cages on the open porch.   She sometimes became bored and walked back into the house if she saw the open door.   She belonged and she knew it.  She takes her bath in the shower in the winter and on her porch tree in the summer.  She loves the water and acts really silly.  She tells herself she’s a “pretty girl” the entire time!

Rita spends her days on her Java Tree or on her play stand beside my desk.  Sometimes, when she is in a bad mood, she fusses and stays in her cage.   She lets me know what she wants by calling out:  ”Come here, Granny!’ or “Want a cracker!”.   I always respond.  Sometimes she just wants to talk.  We call back and forth from wherever I am.  She dog whistles and I respond, “Pretty Girl, Rita!  Then we go through the repertoire of everything she knows how to say.   If the phone rings, she answers.  If I call the dogs, she calls them too.  Amazons can be moody, but Rita rarely exhibits that behavior although her species is one of the most difficult to handle of the hookbills.   I think parrots who don’t have enough human interaction become depressed and difficult.

This out-of-focus photograph is the result of my trying to get Rita to be still for a closeup of scratching her under the chin.  Since she has seen the full-frame Nikon for years, she pays no attention to it, but  the little Lumix is somehow offensive to her.   When I reached out my hand, she wanted to bite n’ play as I call it.  She can feel the crunch of the cartilege and ligaments in the joints and she loves it.  She doesn’t bite hard, of course.   I finally clamped down on her beak and held her head with the other finger in an effort to make her be still.  Of course, it didn’t work.

Rita shares meals with me.  I bring  doggie bags home from restaurants for her too.  She eats anything I eat with the exception of onions, avocado, cabbage and other foods that are toxic to parrots.  They don’t automatically eat foods that they don’t recognize.  You have to show them that you eat the food.  Then, they will eat it too.  Parrots can’t smell food.  They taste it to determine if they like it.  I tried eating parrot pellets,  making all kinds of yummy noises, but Rita didn’t buy it.  Sigh…  :-)

She loves steamed broccoli that is still crunchy.  China Inn broccoli is her favorite!  I always bring a piece home to her.   I think she’s telling me it’s delicious here.

Rita sleeps and sometimes rests in her large cage in the living room.  Paul Draper made it.  He lives in a rural area of New York.  He is a wonderful craftsman, designer, and fabricator.  He also made Che’s cage.  His cages are comparable in price to retail market cages.   I highly recommend him.  (The black rope perch is from the original over-spray on the cage.)

My husband died in July 2009.  He was confined to a hospital bed for a couple of weeks before he died.  We installed it in the living room where Rita’s cage is located.  The phenomenal thing about it all was that Rita didn’t say a word during that time.  She sat quietly in her cage and watched.  She didn’t call out or demand a cookie.  Sometimes, I remembered to take her out to the porch, but if I failed to take her, she didn’t complain.  During all of the nursing traffic, late hours, and confusion, she never called out her usual “Ariba” when strangers came and went.  That was entirely remarkable.  If I had any doubt about the ability of my friend to understand, I no longer could have doubted her.  She knew.  She had called Pops for years when she wanted something.  Now, she knew he was dying.  I have no doubt about that.  She still calls him sometimes.  I often think she knows something about him that I don’t understand.  She is my loyal friend and companion.  Yes, I suppose I am the kind of woman who keeps a parrot, after all.

Favorite

More Fans

Everybody knows how fan palms fascinate me by their mysterious play with light.

The fans are different colors depending on the light.

On a cloudy day, they are subdued and almost pail when the light strikes them.  There is always something to see through the fans!

During the afternoons after the sun goes down behind their fence, they shine.

The leaves look entirely different on the same tree depending on where the sunlight strikes them!

At one place, there were three fans lined up side by side.  The Three Sisters.

Some of the fans stand erectly while others bend with their huge fans.

Sometimes, when I look at the photographs on the media card, I think they don’t look real.  It is a fact that photographs do not mirror reality.  They are more precise than the real thing and they deceive.   In the photographs, we do not see exactly what we saw through the lens … ours or the camera’s.  The human eye looks at a roof line and sees a soft line.  The camera sees a hard line.  Often, I like a softer focus better.  I like my world in softer focus too.

Myrtle, The Stripper

Myrtle The Stripper

Stage Name:  Nachez White

A Portrait

~Act I~

~Act II~

~Act III~

~Act IV~

THE END

CREDITS

Screenplay by Mensa Girl