Ruthie, Ruthie, How does your garden grow? - Scrabble Night at the Giant

I made sure I read Dan and Sarah nursery rhymes. Sarah, in fact, still has the Mother Goose book, or did, until the smoke damage in her Bklyn apartment did away with many of her favorite things.

Scott was outside a couple of hours planting our crops and also putting chicken wire around the four-year-old peach tree that has never yielded a single peach.

Correction:

  "Night raid!" he calls to the hundred or so squirrels in his territory.

"Sharpen your teeth!

"When it's dark enough to see the stars, we'll assault the chicken wire, break in and eat everything.

"In the morning, when he comes home from work, slinging his backpack, look innocent. Take sly glances at his face. His mustache will tremble in rage."

Aerial view: On left is tree surrounded by chicken wire, extreme left, mulberry tree, which dozens of birds are flocking to.

Peach is about 2.5 inches long and fuzzy!

Laden down with mulberries.

Scott said while he was putting in the fencing, the birds were dropping these onto the top of his cap.

 Decided to arrange the hubcaps Terry Pointer brought over.

Every day you've gotta water the garden, esp in this heat.

The pink petunia is doing very well, as is the pink poppy.

Hubcaps circle the 'spent' dwarf lilac.

The face of the iris.

As mentioned earlier, I bought this about 10 yrs ago at Wankel's Nursery in Bensalem, now long gone.

The iris has a wonderful aroma.


Below are my beardless Iris which popped up overnight! My across-the-street-neighbor, the late Charlie Myers, was thinning out his iris, and I took the extras.

I planted them in many places - he had so many! - but these are the ones that survived, unlike Charlie. Sure do miss you, Charlie!

Hold on, lemme look out the front door and see if he's giving me a sign.

 
When Scott made his second trip to the Depot for more chicken wire, I went with him. On May 28, it's my sister Ellen's b day. I wanted to mail her a card with a gift inside.

In the past, I've mailed people tea bags. This time I bought four packets of seeds at the Depot and I wrote her a very nice card, which praises her.

She and Mom are into organic foods, so the seeds I got were Marfa Stewart organic

Sunflower
Beefsteak tomatoes
Basil
One more

Then when I drove off to give the mailman the card, I stopped at Luke's house to thank him for bringing me The Letter to the Editor about May is Older American's Month.

When he invited me in, I sat down on a b'ful reupholstered brocade sofa he and his late wife Joan had bought. She was only 60 when she died of cancer.

He showed me his mom's photo on the glass coffee table. She lived until 95.

Good genes, I said. He's gonna be 87. He only eats two meals a day - breakfast and supper.


Have you seen the signs for the June Fete? I asked him.

No, but now I probly will, he said in his southern drawl (NC)

"Me and my wife used to go there," he said.

Really! I didn't know it was that old.

I told him my bank is American Heritage Federal Credit Union, the Horsham branch. I did a lil test this morning. I had a CD for $2,000 come due. You have one week to decide what to do w/it.

Called the credit union and spoke to my buddy Daniel. How much interest, I asked him, did I make in one week.

Six cents, he said.

Anyway, when I told Luke that American Heritage was the credit union for - Wiki - The Budd Company was a 20th-century metal fabricator, a major supplier of body components to the automobile industry and a manufacturer of stainless steel passenger rail cars ....

he told me he used to work for its competitor, Heintz

if you got laid off by Budd, you went to work at Heintz... and vice versa.

88 degrees outside. Sposed to rain the morrow.

We're looking f/w to using our Rain Barrel.

Five people arrived at the Giant for Scrabble Night! I was ecstatic. Tried to post the photos that Ed and Heather emailed me, but Blog Post - the Great Google's Blogpost - could not post them.

Ed gave me a sheet of two-letter words, including

oe
ah
ab
ad

that I'll try to remember so I can clobber people two weeks from now.

A Brilliant Mind dead in a Car Crash Yesterday - My Letter to the Editor "Forever Young" published in the Intelligencer - How many meals can you stuff into one belly

John Forbes Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994, died yesterday when a taxi he was in crashed into guard rails on the Jersey Turnpike. His driver lost control of the car and killed Nash, 86, and his wife, Alicia, 82. 

They were likely not wearing seat belts and were ejected from their car and pronounced dead on the scene.


Here's Nash when he graduated from Princeton in 1950.

From the Times:

Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. 

A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”

Dr. Nash’s theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision making. Dr. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

***

Just gobbled down this salad b/c my sugar was low - 44.

My buddy Luke Sanders dropped off this Letter to the Editor. I was happy it made the Sunday Intel as that's the largest circulation.

FOREVER YOUNG THE MOTTO FOR OLDER AMERICANS' MONTH

May is Older Americans’ Month. No one my age — this is the last year I’ll be in my sixties — can believe how fast the time goes by. Especially not my 92-year-old mother. “Forever young” is my motto. My friend, Freda Samuels of Warrington, just completed her memoir. No one would ever know this darling, white-haired woman will be 90 next year. Freda and I are two of a kind. When I visit, her husband, Bernie, cooks the most wonderful meals: salmon, spinach salad and almonds for dessert.

I exercise by walking around the block in my hilly neighborhood with my boyfriend, Scott, waving at the neighbors. I spend loads of time gardening and gazing at the flowers I’ve planted, the ones the deer haven’t munched on. Have you ever seen a variegated yellow snap dragon? Or a pink Italian heather? The hummingbirds love them. I watch the dainty darlings from my living room window.

“High” on life is an attitude I cultivate. I remind this to the members of New Directions (www.newdirectionssupport.org), my support group for people and families affected by depression and bipolar disorder. Join us for one of our Sunday walks. And bring your picnic lunch. Can’t wait to walk through Fort Washington State Park. The lush green trees will cascade overhead, and hawks will dive after live prey. Afterward, we’ll eat in a picnic grove, watch maple seedlings spiral by, and Ada Moss Fleisher will share her homemade brownies with us. Chocolate is healthy, after all.

Ruth Z. Deming
Willow Grove

**

Gotta water my garden every day. My gorgeous pink geraniums from Barb Toohey have disappeared. Either rabbits, squirrels or deer.

Here are some dreadful photos of my night garden

Below are my PURPLE IRIS that I just saw for the first time. I bought them at the now-defunct Wankel's Nursery when I worked as a therapist at the now-defunct Bristol-Bensalem Human Services.

 Here are some impatiens that were waiting patiently for me to plant in the ground, next to the hasta.

Am guessing that these are the most popular flowers planted around here in the summer. A virus last year did them in.

My first activity today was meeting my friends at Fort Washington State Park.  I was an hour late b/c I got lost, terribly lost.

 Brett got his Che hat when he was in Cuba. He's fun to walk with b/c he asks a lot of questions. For example, I said that something was nondescript.

What dyou mean by that? he asked.

Well, I said, it's utterly ordinary, you don't remember it.

I told Brett, who's a Deadhead, that I watched the Netflix original documentary "The Other One" about Bob Weir.

Great flick! Brett has probly watched it by now.

 Jonathan, at table, ate this incredibly healthy salad. He also had two huge bottles of something to drink. One was orange and said it replaces the sodium and water you lose when you're exercising.

Uh, er, why not just drink water? Oh! Because you like the flavor. I see. I see.

Steve and Harriet. I noticed at table what a caring wife she is. They have a g'daughter Charlotte in Pittsburgh.

There were no trash cans at the state park.

Why, we wondered.

Steve ended up throwing away all our trash in the men's room. At least there were baffrooms. 

 I thanked Renu for organizing our walk.

My feet were hot in my pink diabetes socks and sneakers, not to mention long pants that my 92-yo mom with arthritic fingers hemmed.

Ruthie, what does a pig say?

Oink oink.

Good job, Ruthie.

We spotted two widdle piggies ... one was your regular pink color, the other a shiny black.

I wonder, said Brett, if they know they're gonna be somebody's dinner. Read the E B White book "Charlotte's Web."

I said this reminds me of a home for the mentally ill.

Why, asked Brett the asker.

Reminds me of the Vikas Home in Ambler, I said, and wondered if we were in Ambler. We were actually in Flourtown. I'd visited Vikas on behalf of a private therapy client I had been seeing for five years.

She ended up living with her therapist Rosie and Rosie's husband.


Then I drove home w/o any problem and took a little nap on my couch.

At four I went over to Dan and Nicole's for my next food orgy.

I took home the leftover hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

Their friend Sara brought her home made Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, which she heated up and served with home made vanilla ice cream.

Words cannot describe how scrumptious it was. (Allen Heller tells me I use the word 'delicious' too often.)

   I got to hang out with all these amazing kids:

Kenny a red head who lives on Guernsey Road - I told him guernsey is a kind of cow

Hunter who lives in Elkins Park and has a 4-mo bro named Jackson.

I pushed them on the swings, along with Grace and Max, my grands.

Claudia lives right around the corner from Dan. To help her remember the name of my grandkids, I said,
What's the name of the place where Elvis lived?

And harder was, "What kind of coffee is good to the last drop?"

Claude and I talked for about an hour in her glorious back yard. Her husband Barry is a talented gardener.

Barry told me that a couple of eagles were contemplating building a nest in his tall conifer but decided against it. They didn't have access to the kind of food needed for their offspring.

Behind him is his packysandra garden.

 You know my nail polish fetish.

Barry had BBQ'd an entire chicken he bought at Trader Joe's. Cooked it in olive oil and salt and pepper.

Claudia and I agreed that the prepared food at Whole Foods is terrible.

Brett wanted to know what Adirondack Chairs are. When Claudia and I sat on them, our heads were bent way backward.

Claudia, a cabaret-style singer, is one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. She uses different voices.

We should write a play together, I suggested.

I gave Claudia and Grace a NYC High Line magnet.

  When I goggled this, mine own blog post came up.

Grace liked the Apple one.

I'll end this with two new poems I brought to Saturday's Writing Group.





READING ON THE FRONT PORCH 

“A Treasury of Great Poems”
reads the cover of a book
I have purchased at the library sale
the cover creased like the cheeks
of an old Chinaman

Many of the poets are alive
in this book from 1964:
ee cummings  W H Auden and Stephen
Spencer, their delight in the world
not yet stilled by the vanishing
of the light.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a
convert to the Catholic faith
has written “Glory be to God
for Dappled Things”
I must agree as
shadows of shirt-waist-white clouds
polka dot my naked feet
and legs.

From the front
step, I watch a determined
wasp sift with elongated
prongs the detritus
sent by the winds and
settled in the huge green
basket of the green hosta leaf.
A tasty meal awaits
this hungry fellow.

I wonder at the minds of
the poets and the wasp.
Precious, all of us,
in the mind of the Almighty.


THE INTOXICANT VANILLA

A ginger tea I’ve selected from the shelf
thrills me not
so without remorse
I pull the Penzeys Pure Vanilla
from the lazy susan
take a whiff and
remember.

Seven years have passed
since she brought it home.
Her Penzeys at New York's
Grand Central is gone. My
bottle only half full has
plenty of this intoxicant
from Madagascar where
dark-skinned men
slave to get the
aroma just right.

She wore that pink dress
I love when she brought it
home, slamming the screen
door on the back porch as
she walked home from the train.

Such as little thing
fragile as a butterfly
carrying a straw basket
and taking over the kitchen
the moment she gets inside.


“You spent this much?” I cry
reading the 14.99 atop the bottle.
“Oh Mom! It’s worth it!” she says
removing the unsalted butter,
the heavy whipped cream and a
bottle of peach brandy “we’ll
put in the cake.”

When it's cooling on the table
she runs barefoot in the back yard
and picks some wild red roses
and lays them along the sides.

Finished new short story but am afraid to read it! - What should I eat?

These are the Hall Brothers - cough cought - who live on a nearby street. I accidentally called it Limekiln Pike but it's more like Limestone Road.

I was desperate to find someone to trim the shrubs in the back yard. I'd driven all over the neighborhood looking for Mailman Ken and discovered his truck on Division Avenue.

But where was Ken?

Two kids were mowing a lawn across the street.

Holy cow! Sure enough, they were for sale. I gave em my name and phone number and they actually called me.

Today when I ran after Mailman Ken, he said to me "I have a new title for your short story."

Yeah, I said, watching him chewing gum.

"Stalking Mailman Ken."

Not very nice, of course, but I know I brighten up his day. I put him in my newest short story "The Last Lawn Party" which I finished before I went to Scott's for our nap.

We watched a lousy movie called A Little Romance with Sir Laurence Olivier playing a pickpocket. I've gotta read how it ends. Sally Kellerman played a very nasty American. The story was set in Paris and Italy.

It received rave reviews. 

Emailed Alan Kerr, editorial page editor of The Intell, asking if I could write a Letter to the Editor about "May is Older American's Month," per an online email I got from Sen Stewart Greenleaf, and Fran Hazam of MHASP. 

Alan said he'd be out of the office next week but would make sure his replacement received it, so I quick-wrote it as I wanted Alan to get it.

Didn't take long to write and I read it to Freda Samuels, whose name I used in the piece.

When I bounced downstairs in my pink diabetic socks, shorts and tank top, I said to myself, I'm so happy. Why am I happy?

B/c I was writing!

I also believe GARLIC makes me happy. Minced garlic I add to my morning eggs.

The goal was to leave home at 2:15 for the Free Friday Movie at the Huntingdon Valley Library.

 
The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch who played Paul Turing, one of the inventors of the Enigma, the code that cracked the Nazis messages and allegedly lessened WW Two by two years. 

Now that was a fine movie. I had drunk a lot of coffee while writing my short story.... you know that huge $5 Starbucks bottle I showed you earlier.

I'd adulterated with lots of water and ice, but drank and drank.... I like to drink while writing.... and listened to Brahms and Fleetwood Mac (too much talking) and during the last five minutes of the film, I was nodding off.

Ruthie! If you don't keep your eyes open, you won't know how it ends.

In the nice weather, I like to sit on my red couch in the living room with the door open. And listen to WXPN.

Morning host Mikaela Mijoun - sp? -  is leaving. She'll go back to the West Coast. Are they firing her or is it her choice?



Last nite, Charlie Rose did a wrap-up of David Letterman's THIRTY-THREE YEARS on television. Here's his wife Regina - is that correct - and his famous son Harry, who my sister Donna told me about.

Any ideas what I should eat?

Popcorn... I can't control myself.

An egg with garlic?

Hmmm, I might overdose with happiness.