Last November was a perfect time to change my routine at the Naples Botanical Garden and pay a visit the butterfly house. The morning temperatures had remained hot and there weren’t many people because the “season” hadn’t started. No one was there when I arrived so I was able to use my tripod. The rule is no tripods because of […]
A flowering vine has to be a knockout if it is growing by the ponds containing water lilies at a botanical garden. When I walked up the small hill to the upper ponds I didn’t even notice these flowers. It was only after I sat for a while on the cement ledge containing the soil from which it grew, oblivious […]
There was some excitement at the Naples Botanical Garden yesterday about this beautiful lotus, Victoria. Unfortunately the excitement was shared by only a few people at 8:30 because it is at it’s blooming prime in early morning. By 11:00 when people were coming in greater numbers, this bloom was closing. This is one plant with thick stalks going to this […]
We frequently laugh with our friends, Lynn and Gary, because every time they talk about somewhere they went or something they did, they disagree about details. We laugh that they went on different vacations together. Maybe we laugh because Jim and I see ourselves in the mirror they are holding up. We have always been very close, enjoying doing things together. Someone in our past complained that we were too close, we spent too much time together. Fifty-nine years doesn’t feel like too much togetherness because now we fear that we don’t have enough years left. Its not that we have big goals like starting a new family or building new careers. No, we just hope we have a few more years for camping in the Upper Peninsula, working in the flower beds on warm Spring days, eating eggs and pecan pancakes at the counter at Blueberries, and running over to the grocery for some milk and carrots. We want more time for laughing with family and friends, or talking, just the two of us. I’ve noticed that our conversations, as we are doing and going, are lit by little jolts of memory, flashbacks to earlier experiences. Flashbacks of things our children said or did, vacations we took, people we knew during all those growing-up-together years, things we both remember, usually. What differs are the details. He remembers my father telling about Grandpa building his house and I remember being […]
In that first December of our married life, fifty-four years ago, we bundled up warm and set out on a quest for the perfect Christmas tree. A tree that would become a part of our life story that we were writing together, in one voice. It must be that our “one voice” has diverged over the years because our current […]
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