Gingerbread

 

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: Ornate:

Cape May, New Jersey – one of my favorite places on earth – abounds in Victorian architecture and décor.
This first photo was taken from the porch where I stay every summer for one glorious week.

Here are some other gems:

 

The Angel of the Sea  B&B

 

 

Calendar photo: Kelly's Celtic Inn

 

 

Calendar photo: house on Hughes Street

 



Three houses on Beach Drive, taken from the beach by Kelly Phillips

 

 

 

The Abbey: House on Gurney Street

 

 

The Pink House

 

House at Christmas

 

Christmas lights

 

Pumpkin Time

 

 

 

 



The Stable of British Actors

The Stable of British Actors

Ever since I became enamoured of the Harry Potter series and then of the films, I have noticed the actors showing up in other venues.  For example, Robert Hardy, who played Cornelius Fudge

I then recognized in :

Inspector Lewis

the Inspector Lynley Mystery: Death in Holy Orders

Midsomer Murders

Inspector Morse

All Creatures Great and Small:  Siegfried Farnum

 

Then, of course, Emma Thompson, who played Sybil Trelawney

 

also starred in

the Merchant-Ivory film  Howard's End

Sense and Sensibility

Nanny McFee

Angels in America

Wit

The Remains of the Day

and many others

 

And, of course, Maggie Smith, who played Minerva McGonagall

 

has been so wonderful in Dowton Abbey as well as

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The First Wives' Club
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
and even Sister Act


But I'm recognizing some of the minor Potter players in many BBC mysteries, and they are the ones I refer to as the "Stable of British Actors" - versatile and wonderful character actors, such as

Lee Ingleby, who played Stan Shunpike

 

who I have recognized in :

 

the Inspector George Gently series

and as DI George Bennett in the series  "A Place of Execution"

and in  Agatha Christie's Marple

 

 

 

and Roger Lloyd-Pack, who played Barty Crouch, Sr.

 



who I have recognized in the Inspector Morse series.


I could go on, and I will, in another entry.

Barnacles

NoBloPoMo prompt for today:

What was your biggest fear as a child? Do you still have it today? If it went away, when did your feelings change?

 

I honestly don't remember having a biggest fear. When I was very small, I was afraid of three things:

1.     The barnacles on the trees in Everhart Park

My mother called them “Barnacles” but now I don’t think that is the correct term.  They didn’t look like the barnacles I saw on Google images; they looked like this one:

 

Many of them grew on the tall old trees in Everhart Part, the magical park down the street from our house.  I loved the park but was scared of the barnacles.

2.     Birds

 

I was also afraid of the birds who made so much noise in the bushes outside of our house in the morning.

 

3.     My Aunt Babe

 

 

She was the wife of my father’s brother. She had dancing eyes, a quick wit, and a very large, loud laugh.  It was the laugh that terrified me.

 

 

I grew out of all of these fears, and grew into more amorphous ones.

 

 

("fear" from kmfineart)

The Pity Party was not well-attended

Journey  by unknown artist  shineystarstalkingto me.blogspot.com

 

 

NaBloPoMo prompt for today:

 What is the most important lesson you learned as a child, and who taught it to you?

 

We were playing softball on the front lawn of the McDonough’s house one summer afternoon.

I was about nine.  I was up at bat.  I swung the bat hard  without checking ; the younger brother of my friend Maureen was right behind me, and I hit him in the head.

Other than a bruise, he turned out to be alright. I, on the other hand, kept beating myself up over the whole episode.  I was cringing with misery.

Maureen confronted me.  She jabbed her finger at me and declared: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”

It was as though she had doused me with cold water.

I WAS feeling sorry for myself; I indulged in that quite a bit, young as I was.

I’ve never forgotten that lesson, though it took me until after high school to let go of the reflex.

After all these years, I still catch myself at it , but I remember those words.

 

Vincent Van Gogh   Facing Eternity  ( he must have had trouble with it, too)

 

I remember this observation by D.H.Lawrence:

 

 

Last Planting Until Spring

This afternoon the temperature is 72 degrees.  I planted 3 Oriental Lily bulbs in one quadrant of the courtyard garden.

 

Here's what they will look like next summer:

 

 

That image will keep me going through the winter!

Earlier, in August and September, I planted all of these in various quadrants of the courtyard:

I'm remembering May Sarton's quote:

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, 

who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth,

 and without light nothing flowers.

One of these is not like the other two

Today's NaBloPoMo prompt: 

When you were a kid, did you want to have the same job or a different job than your parents when you grew up?

Never wanted to have the same job as either of my parents.

She was an RN

 

He was an auto mechanic and had his own gas station

 

 

I can't remember ever wanting to be anything but a teacher until I was in college, when I was so bored by the education course that I decided I wanted to be a copy writer for a magazine.

 

 

So I wound up as a teacher, then a teacher and a Catholic sister, and all the time, a poet.

 

 

The Coolest Job, or, the Most Cool Job

English teacher that I am, I had to correct the prompt for today from NaBloPoMo:

What did you think was the coolest job in the world when you were younger? Do you still feel that way now?

 

I honestly can't remember, other than the job of teacher, which was the job that always attracted me.

 

Here I am at my desk in 1972, teaching 7th grade English.

 

 

Now, after forty years of teaching, although I have loved my job, I find many other jobs more  "cool."

 

If I had known myself better, and known all the opportunities better, perhaps I would have chosen something else.

No point in doing the "if only" game.

 

However, I think one of the most cool jobs would be an ornithologist/naturalist - the kind that bands birds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another cool job would be a professional gardener.

 

 

I have come to love the BBC show  Rosemary and Thyme, not because it's a particularly good mystery series, but because of the gardens which are always the backdrop.  I watch it for the gardens.

 

 

I would never have said this forty years ago.

 

Goes to show you.

Treats and Indulgences

I've jumped into the fray with a commitment to posting daily during November.  It's sponsored by



Today's prompt is:

"Treats and indulgences can take many forms. Share yours with us!"

My list of indulgences has shrunk, due to a medical condition caused by radiation damage, the result of  ( successful) cancer treatment from six years ago.  I live on a low residue diet. This means I have bid farewell to my much loved Mexican food, Indian food, and Chinese food, as well as nuts , fresh vegetables, and fresh fruits.  The consequences of indulging in these are so dire that I don't mind abstaining from them.

The good news is that I can still eat much of the fattening treats I've always relished!

Last night I made Monkey Bread, which is much appreciated by myself and my sisters.

photo from Pillsbury

 

Easy to make , and sinfully delicious!

 

The fragrance of it as it is baking is more than most people can stand.

Sunday's Post on Monday

After that heading, I am reminded of a line in a Beatle's song...Sunday's got a hold on Monday... something like that...

Yesterday , a gorgeous Goldengrove day, was All Saints Day.  This is a short post with some evocative pictures for that day.

 

 

 

 

Kandinsky's vision of All Saints

 

 

and here's my irreverent poem on the subject:

 

Named after Saints

 

Holographic Holistic Hagiography

Sounds like Hag Geography.

The mapping of Hags around the world.

Hags I have known,

Hags I’ve only read about,

But this is Hagiography, photography that makes you say Gee!

Not hags, but saints, and those

Named after saints.

Monica, model of worrying mother,

Martin , patron of the torn cloak,

Rose, rubbing pimento into her perfect skin,

Anne- in Leonardo’s sketch, huge earth mother with legs like tree trunks,

Like the bed made out of the tree, the castle built around the bed in the Odyssey,

Saint Hopkins, reporting every sunset,

Saint Merton, still falling in love ,

Lucy, with her eyes on a platter,

Lucy with her eyes on the assembly line chocolates,

John the Baptist and Frank the Methodist

and Marlon the Method.

Who can tell the population of heaven?

 

 

 

 

 

Halloween Poems

found these on Tweetspeak Poetry:

Theme in Yellow
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o’-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
—Carl Sandburg

Some One
Some one came knocking

At my wee, small door;

Some one came knocking,

I’m sure—sure—sure;

I listened, I opened,

I looked to left and right,

But nought there was a-stirring

In the still dark night;

Only the busy beetle

Tap-tapping on the wall,

Only from the forest

The screech-owl’s call,

Only the cricket whistling

While the dewdrops fall,

So I know not who came knocking,

At all, at all, at all.
—Walter de la Mare

The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly
Once I loved a spider
When I was born a fly,
A velvet-footed spider
With a gown of rainbow-dye.
She ate my wings and gloated.
She bound me with a hair.
She drove me to her parlor
Above her winding stair.
To educate young spiders
She took me all apart.
My ghost came back to haunt her.
I saw her eat my heart.
—Vachel Lindsay

Continual Conversation with a Silent Man
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die —
The broken cartwheel on the hill.
As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,
Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,
Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky
And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear
In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.
— Wallace Stevens

and from Louise Gluck:
 

 

All Hallows

 

By   Louise Gluck

     

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

 

"All Hallows" by Louise Glück, from The First Four Books of Poems. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück. Used by the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, www.harpercollins.com.

 

Skin Cancer

I am paying for all those years of baking in the sun as a teenager and young woman.

Here I am in 1966, baking on the beach at Ocean City New Jersey:

Fifteen years ago, I had heavy-duty surgery to remove a deep-seated basal cell carcinoma on my nose. Since then, I've had several much more superficial removals on arms and legs.

You can see the scar on my forehead and the white circle on my nose, from this photo from 2002. I'm wearing my forehead on my nose.




However, this year another basal cell turned up on my face, on my right temple:

Yesterday, I had Mohs micrographic surgery to remove that basal cell.  There was a lot more of it underneath than there was on top, as evidenced by the stitches and the swelling:

 

I wrote a poem about the scar from the 2000 surgery:

 

Scar

Although the rain ran like a canal

in the creases of the windowsill,

more of it pouring in, filling every crevice

of the screen,

dripping down the lip’s ledge to the floor,

the woman welcomed the wet of it

to her house.

She said, There’s too much danger in the sun.

It’s lied to me for years, she said,

while it crept up and turned its key in my face.

 

In the Time of Burning Trees

tree outside my window today



On this glorious October day, I was able to retrieve the words of a favorite song from my memory.
I don't have the cassette tape anymore, and can't find any recording of it online, and the little group who recorded the album has disappeared into obscurity, but I never forgot the song.  It's not as good without the music, but all the same, here it is:

The Burning Tree

 

Group:   Different Shoes      Album Title:  One Size Feets All

 

Summer has gone

And the days growing cold

Far away honk some geese in their flight.

Here down below

We start thinking of snow

And the quiet of long winter nights.

And even though times will get harder

And the darkness can make you feel old

There’s a good harvest stored in the larder

And the tree’s now arrayed here in red orange and gold.

 

Refrain:

And I run through the leaves

In the cool Autumn breeze

Feeling warmed by the fire in me.

Though it’s said they don’t talk

I still learned a lot

In the light of the burning tree.

 

 

So many times

When I’m driving, I’m blind

Thinking something  that I’ve got to be

First in the line and my teeth start to grind

Like the cobblestones down by the sea

But yesterday morning at sunrise

Where the highway dips down to the sea,

The quiet of dawn was reflected

In the leaves of a tree

That was beckoning to me.

 

( refrain)

 

Here on the ground

I heard a voice with no sound

Saying this is the reason to be:

To make your own place

In the whole human race

And to find it will set your heart free

So even though times will get harder

And the darkness will make you feel old

There’s a good harvest stored in the larder

And the music you hear in the trees is your soul.

 

(refrain)

 

 

 

Photo: Burning Tree   from miriadna.com


 

On Being: Mary Catherine Bateson

October's bright blue weather... leaves just beginning to turn. The air is wonderfully crisp.

Another long gap... today I want to play with the words Anchor/Anger....Mystery/Misery/Ministry...

a student misread some word as "misery" and I'm trying to remember what it was.  Not sure , but possibly "Ministry."

I'm making my annual retreat here in Emmitsburg and should probably not be writing here, but it feels right, especially since I listened to the episode of ON BEING on NPR this morning.  It was aired last week, and featured a wonderful interview with Mary Catherine Bateson.

 

 

I read her book  Composing A Life  back in 1997 or 98, and it had a large impact on me.  This quote particularly stays with me:

 

"Because we are engaged in a day-by-day process

 of self-invention - not discovery,

for what we search for does not exist until we find it -

 both the past and the future are raw material,

 shaped and reshaped by each individual...

These are lives in flux,

 lives till indeterminate

 and subject to further discontinuities.

 This very quality

 protects me from the temptation

to interpret them as pilgrimages

to some fixed goal,

for there is no way to know

 which fragments of the past

 will prove to be relevant in the future.

Composing a life

 involves a continual reimagining of the future

 and reinterpretation of the past

 to give meaning to the present  (Bateson  280-30)."

 

 

 

 

Her interview this morning was very powerful for me to hear.

 

Until this morning, I hadn't known Bateson was the daughter of Gregory Bateson and the Samoa lady, anthropologist Margaret Mead.  They were atheists, but Bateson is a fallen away, then "returned in her sixties" Roman Catholic.

 

One of the things she says in this interview is about what she calls "Active Wisdom:"

"When you have the harvest of a life of learning and thinking and observing, and at the same time, you're still active... I have to ell you, it's wisdom on the hoof."

 

More on this tomorrow ( I hope)