Gather 'Round, My Sweeties. It's Story Time

This is a Turk's Cap that Ellen Abbott sent me. Ellen and I have traded recipes and seeds and plant cuttings for quite awhile now. Although in some ways, Ellen and I are quite different, in others, we are much the same. I think the main difference is that she's an artist and spent her entire adult life as a working artist whereas I am, was... a lot of different stuff that didn't involve art although as I look back, I have always been a writer if by that you mean a person who writes. Also, she lives in Texas whereas I live in North Florida but there again, there are quite a few commonalities. We both live near the Gulf of Mexico, just on different sides, and our weather is much the same. So are the plants we can grow. 
And, by the way, I was born in El Paso, Texas. My father was in the Army I guess, and I was born in a quonset hut hospital, I do believe. In fact, I believe that particular hospital was an Air Force facility because there was something going around the Army hospital or perhaps there was another reason but the fact remains- I was born in Texas. 
I do not remember a thing about it. I think my parents moved when I was still a baby. My brother, who is two and a half years younger than I am, was born in Lebanon, Tennessee. I believe that had something to do with my father studying law but I can't swear it. Point being, I can hardly claim Texas as a big influence on me but I have always wondered if perhaps that didn't have something to do with my affinity for Mexico. 
So the Turk's Cap is part of the hibiscus, okra, Rose of Sharon, swamp mallow family. There are many more but those are a few. The flower looks very much like a hibiscus which never opens, but stays folded in on itself.

I grew up around Turk's Caps in Roseland where they were a popular and prolific yard plant. That variety though, had a longer bloom. It looked like this.

As a child, those things pissed me off. Why the hell wouldn't the flowers open? I was told by those who knew that opening was not the Turk's Cap way. 

But I love Ellen's Turk's Cap and this fall or winter I am going to take it out of its pot and plant it in the yard because I think it'll do just fine. It is a strong and hardy plant. 

I made what is probably a big mistake last week when I decided to cut the neck out of my beautiful "Is He Dead Yet?" shirt. I cannot stand a shirt that strangles me and that one did. I wanted to make a sort of decorative embroidered hem on the neckline that I'd cut and I am having one hell of a time with this project. I've never been an excellent embroider but not a really bad one either. 
I taught myself to do it with a small blue booklet I bought somewhere in Denver. I wanted to embroider a blue workshirt, as one does, for the boy back home who had broken my heart. So I sat on the floor of my dorm room and listened to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" (need I say more?) and I embroidered the hell out of that shirt and it was beautiful. 
This, I think, was my first major bout of depression. And although it sounds so funny, it really wasn't. I was eighteen, in a cold place with people who all seemed to be from New York which fascinated me but also made me feel like a bumbling, stumbling yee-haw from the south. They mocked my accent. They had all gone to prep school and I, bumpkin that I was, did not even know what a prep school was. 
"Do southerners really like watermelon?" they would ask. 
"Do southerners really like fried chicken?" they queried me. 
I got a tiny taste of what Black folks went through, still go through, but of course not the same. Not the same at all. 
I did give the shirt to that boyfriend and I am still rather shocked and very embarrassed to realize that he gave it to his new girlfriend. 
I swear to god. He did. 
Well. That was a story. 

Anyway, my needlework skills are diminishing by the moment. My hands go numb, especially the left one which is forever fucked due to breaking it by falling off a roof while trying to reroof a garage when I was seventeen with that same boyfriend. 
Sigh. 
And I look up different videos of stitches that would work for an interesting hem-trim and I'm just not capable of following them very well. These are just videos of people doing the stitches, not actually instructing you on how to do the stitches and y'all- my brain function is dimishing. That's all there is to it. 
So I thread my needle, which is an entire process in and of itself, and I attempt to copy the stitch I've decided to use and okay, it looks fine here and there but there are also places where it looks like an insane and inept four-year old took over and I just hate this. 
But it is what it is. 
So I worked on that for some time today, not even watching "The Bear" because that is too distracting, but sitting on the back porch where the light is very good and this is going to reach a point where I have to just say say, "Good enough!" 
I remember back in the eighties when ripped and cut t-shirts were all the thing and my friend Julianne and I would dye white t-shirts and then cut them up and tie them in very interesting and varied ways. We joked about starting a business, and calling it "Tough Titties." That was mainly because you couldn't really wear a bra with these creations of ours and also because we loved the phrase "tough titties" and I still do. Titties are why our species has survived and why we are called mammals. 

And there you go. 

I'm making a soup from the bones and what meat was left on them from the roast chicken I made last week. We had a meal of it just out of the oven and then another meal of chicken enchiladas made from some of the meat and tonight we're having the soup. I've made another loaf of bread, this one all about the protein with no real regard to the fiber. Greek yogurt and eggs, flour, yeast, and a little honey. Salt. Water. 
We shall return to our regularly scheduled baking very soon. But for now- what the hell? 

Spicebush Swallowtail if you believe google. 

Love...Ms. Moon