Catching Up

Some recent pictures from here and there:

Avocado trees moved inside for the winter . . .

along with pineapple plants:

I run humidifiers in the house during the winter to keep the humidity levels up. This one has a thermostat so it cycles on and off creating a great environment for the plants. This mist is so fine that it doesn't get things damp unless it runs for a couple hours or more:

The largest aloe vera has sent up a single tall bloom stalk, something I've never seen before:

The winter broccoli is producing beautifully—the leaves take a hit when it gets down in the 20's at night, but the heads remain firm:

Tools of the earth: garden tools hanging on the outside of Daniel and Jennifer's garden shed.

Everybody got cashmere scarves for Christmas. (Daniel was especially excited.)

Ellen decided hers would make a good head-wrap for Granddaddy. (Shades of the 'Sixties.)

Ellen and Arianna did a couple duets on their recorders:

Caught the low winter light streaming through the living room windows. The secretary in the corner was the "control center" in my parents' home—where Daddy sat to pay bills; where Mama filed away her annual calendars filled in with scribbled notes of daily happenings; where I found my English maternal grandfather's leather-bound diary he kept as he walked and sang his way from Kentucky to New Orleans to win a bet that he could start with nothing in his pocket and arrive in New Orleans fed and clothed—which he apparently did. (The diary stopped somewhere near Marion, Alabama where he was distracted by a young school teacher named Fleming Cocke—whom he married in New Orleans. So I presume he made it, fed as well as wed.) The secretary shelves are filled with books not deserving of dust, the desk holds a growing collection of family pictures. The old family pictures at the lower right fill the wooden trunk that my paternal great-grandfather brought with him when he made the voyage from Holland to America to begin a new life in the land of opportunity, settling in Pella, Iowa. The picture on the wall above them—an aerial shot of the Old City of Jerusalem which I visited in 1982; found the photo rolled up in a dusty shop in the Old City; brought it home in-hand and it survived the next 20+ years until I could get it framed. Not all the corners in my world are worth contemplating, but this one is (for me).