Test from Outside

Finally cool enough to be outside, so I'm testing my mobile blogging ap.

More from the Garden

I'm not sure what the little squash/gourd is, another garden surprise.

It's hot enough today to melt the brain.

Here's a little quote from Cicero:
"If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need."

And, I might add for him, a better body guard.

Egghead Plants Eggplant

This is my first foray into growing an eggplant and I highly recommend it, especially if you're fond of purple. Thinking of eggplant conjures memories from my mandatory vegetarian days when a slab of eggplant fried on a griddle was the closest thing to a steak in my house. Despite having a not so extraordinary kid reaction to actually eating eggplant (fried, baked, or otherwise disguised), I still admired it as just a beautiful object. There are few naturally purple foods: plums, grapes, cabbage. . . and the eggplant, in its mature figure at the supermarket, has a seductive shape. But I had never seen one emerge from the remnants of the bloom. Adorable. A little baby in a bonnet. Take a look.

Society has a strange hostility toward the eggplant. Take this comment from Ursula le Guin: “I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.” Why not a Brussels sprout? 

Addendum to the Flood

Okay, so I wasn't completely right about my trunk being full of old school notes. While the trunk dried out in the carport, I filtered through the stacks of papers and, besides being reminded that I rewrote all my lecture notes, I found a notebook marked "engineering 4." Now I have periodically reshuffled these papers for the past thirty years and have always assumed that this little narrow-ruled notebook contained notes from the one engineering class I took in college (taught by a turdish man who would never looked at me when I came up to ask questions yet joked with any of the students with penises, so I abandoned the career plan to become a bridge designer that I had entertained in my freshman year.) So, because I had no fond memories of the class, I had never opened the notebook, until the other day. It turns out I must have thought so little of turd man and his instructions for drafting bolts that I never rewrote my lecture notes. Instead I used the notebook as a journal. It's mostly filled with silly debates with myself between two boys I simultaneously loved and hated, but it was also written during my I-think-I-can-write-country-songs phase. Not being a cowboy, I didn't write about beer and dogs. No, my subject matter drew from the life experiences of an egghead dorkette. Here's my favorite (note the one-word instruction in the top left corner):

Yes, I wrote love songs to my cat, to be sung "soulfully." And, in case you're wondering, I do not write songs for a living.

Flood of Memories

The other day the output hose on my washer jumped out of the drain pipe and flooded the laundry room/storage room/cat toilet. I assessed the damage without my glasses on and mopped up what I believed to be all the water. So today I'm cleaning the two cat boxes, wishing I could do this without my nose on, and I noticed that my old steamer trunk had water stains near the floor. Yes I store cherished memories right next to where my cats poop. After hauling the truck out from under boxes, I could tell it definitely had water damage.

Was this going to be like when termites ate my Kindergarten school pictures? Would I open the trunk to find my high school and college calculus tests ruined? Could I survive the loss? No, no, and I really hope so or my hoarding tendencies are worse than I thought.

Luckily during my last purge of contents I had had the foresight to line the trunk bottom with a plastic kitchen bag. The trunk was soggy, but I can still read the letter to my french pen pal I wrote for Mrs. Griswold in ninth grade (the draft, of course. I sent the letter to France, received a ball point pen and a very nice letter in return, all of which gave me an overwhelming sense of obligation to maintain this friendship, so I never wrote a thank you back and still carry a speck of guilt for my neglect).

The contents matter little in comparison to the trunk. I put things in it, because keeping it empty seems inefficient, but what I cherish is the trunk. It had been my father's when he was young. He took it to Europe on a trip he made with his grandfather. I think he was a teenager and any stories he tells about the trip always give him a smile and a twinkle in his eye. When  it became mine, when I was elevenish, I kept everything I owned in it while living in a kids commune (which was scary and weird and I can and eventually will write more on that experience). The trunk was like a rigid security blanket. From then on I have toted it with me wherever I have lived, changing the contents as I grow older. When my daughter was a toddler, she scribbled on the front with a permanent marker. Unfortunately, it is not her best artwork. She has skills that aren't represented on my trunk. As she enters high school, I try to find forgiveness. When I do, I know where to store it.

I used to pull the trunk out from time to time, but now I only open it hoping to throw something away. Or, like today, to access the damage. It's made of paper, which seems an odd choice for a steamer trunk, but I think it will survive the recent flood. It's drying in my carport, so I guess fate has offered me an opportunity to consider replying to my pen pal. Merci beaucoup Feit.

Here's something Ralph Waldo Emerson said about fate:
"Tout ce qui nous limite, nous l'appelons Destin"
"Whatever limits us we call Fate."