Daily Archives: August 11, 2014

Cinema and Television

Ashes to Ashes

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Lughnasa                                                                  Lughnasa Moon

Mary recommended that Kate and I watch Life on Mars and then Ashes to Ashes. These are BBC programs, linked with Life on Mars first and Ashes to Ashes second. All told there are five seasons of 8 programs a season. This is an unusual television experience, a high-minded drama with police procedurals as the episode’s main action driver, but with a long delayed rationale, made clearer only in the final minutes of the very last episode. This is exceptional television and worth following through to the end.

BBC makes a lot of excellent shows, but this is the best of the batch that I’ve seen.

I should add that Kate basically figured out the end. Smart gal.

 

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, The Move

Memory Train Passing

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Lughnasa                                                                     Lughnasa Moon

The garden study packing, nearly done, came to a halt due to a need for some more packing supplies that won’t arrive until Wednesday. But it’s close to empty. By packing up the garden bookshelf tomorrow, I’ll be able to finish that whole area when the new plastic file holders come.

That means Wednesday the biggest push of the project will get underway. The culling and packing of the study itself. In some ways it may go quicker than the garden study, but there are many more books involved. There will not be though, in here, the picture I found today of my two and half-year old self trying to crawl while my mother and a post-polio rehab specialist looked on. My neck is on the floor, curved up at angle.  I’m looking up at the photographer. Brought a pang of empathy for that little guy, long dissolved into the man, but still present.

Nor will there be the hot picture of Kate taken beside the Siah Armajani bridge between Loring Park and the Walker Sculpture Garden. Or the polariods of Mary and Dad, of our house on E. Monroe Street and the one on Canal. Each of these stopped me and I had to wait for the memory train to pass before I could cross the intersection and get back to work.

Also, I packed in a red tape box, sell, my copies of three volumes of St. John of the Cross. To anyone else they would be have been old books, fat paperbacks that cost $1.65. To me though they were the touching gift of a fellow philosophy student at Wabash College, a senior, who saw something in me and wanted to share his passion. Yet now 40 years removed, even that connection no longer made me want them.

They were not the only decisions like that. Books, for me, often entrain memories in just the same way a photograph or a travel souvenir does. That makes these choices hard sometimes and feelings slow the process down. Taking a year makes a lot of sense.

 

 

Garden, Weather +Climate

Goldilocks and the Family Garden

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Lughnasa                                                         Lughnasa Moon

There’s a Goldilocks’ quality to gardening. Not too much, not too little, but just right. The Goldilocks’ formula applies to water, soil additions, number of plants and temperature. The gardener can control soil additions and the number of plants with relative ease, confident in her adviser’s soil tests and their recommendations for additives. Likewise, though the temptation may be too either over plant or under plant, get more vegetables per square foot or give the plants room to grow, a wise gardener develops a feel for how the beets perform in her garden, carrots, tomatoes and spaces accordingly.

The temperature, especially in northern or high altitude climes, might need some control though here at Artemis Hives and Gardens we’ve not added hooped plastic over our beds to extend the growing season, either early or late. Plants can be started inside to counter the prevailing outside temperatures of late winter and early spring. But, for the most part, we’ve accepted the temperature that the sun and the clouds and the zigzagging jet stream have given us.

We can, and do, add water during periods lacking rain, but we cannot adjust the water that comes from rain. This year we’ve had too much. A sticky fungus has attacked the peppers and the raspberries, a not uncommon result of too much water. Each year brings some challenge, this year it’s too much rain and that’s the one element we can do little about. We need not too much water, not too little water, but just the right amount.