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

Trying

This partially opened pumpkin blossom reminds me of a witch's hand, grasping at something with her skinny, wrinkled fingers, her long, sharp nails. What is she trying to hold on to? I imagine the shoulder of a child in the dark woods, lost and afraid. I see time, fleeing so swiftly as it does in our aging years, the witchy hand attempting to hold on to it, to stop it from escaping entirely. 

Here's what else I see- I see myself on a bad day, attempting to fold in on myself, to protect myself from whatever the hell it is I think I need protection from. I can see the way I try to present as dangerous and sharp when really, I am just afraid. Or maybe sad. Or perhaps tired. 

Then again I see that flower simply as a sign we need rain. 
I don't know. 
The older I get, the more I know that I do not know much. Not much at all. 

I spent some time in the garden today. There's very little to pick except for Tabasco peppers which are still growing like crazy. The bush is getting close to being as tall as I am and it reminds me of a Christmas tree whose lights are almost but not quite, lined up neatly. 

Their tiny blooms keep their heads down, quite literally, not raising them to the sun but facing the ground, as if they are too shy to show their faces. 
I held this one up to take its picture. 

It was good for me to just be in the garden. To slow down and look carefully enough to see those tiny flowers, to stand in front of the basil and concentrate on the constant blur of bees, darting from bloom to bloom, stopping barely long enough to capture the images with my eyes, much less my camera.

I am not good at that. Not the iPhone's fault, my own inability to coordinate eyes and hands. 

It looked like something had been dragged through the ground where the peas had been planted, the mulch disturbed in what were almost ruts. I asked Glen to go and look and see what he thought and he said it was an armadillo, looking for worms under that mulch. 
Aha. Of course. Armadillos are like tanks, heavy and clumsy, uncaring about leaving the signs of their snuffling and digging. 
Have you ever seen one? They are prehistoric looking. Here's a picture of one that I grabbed off the internet. 

Armored mammals. They nurse their young. That cannot be easy. They are not pretty and they can do a lot of damage. They, like so many things around here, are invasive, having traveled from South America to here over the course of many, many years. I am not sure about this but I think and believe that their main threat is cars. The odds of seeing a dead armadillo on the road are about five hundred times greater than seeing one waddling around the yard. I made up that fact but again, I believe it's true. They sleep mostly in the daytime in the burrows they make. Around here they are often referred to as "possums on the half-shell." 
Until around 12,000 years ago, there were armadillos the size of Volkswagens. I think I would die if I saw one that big. 

I seriously did not set out here to write about armadillos. 

Anyway, I'm glad I spent that time in the garden. It soothed me. 

It was the day to water the porch plants and so I did that. I've mentioned the fact that I need to get some of my plants into bigger pots and since Mr. Moon wasn't here to help me with the giant pots on the swing porch, I did a hermit crab shell swap sort of thing with plants and pots instead of crabs and shells. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's an explanation. As applies to hermit crabs, not plants but same idea. 

I have posted this video at least two other times but hey! It's extremely cool. 

I had four plants I wanted to transplant into roomier pots and that involved a fairly complex process which was hot and tiring and not easy.
I pulled a very dead-looking plant out of a pot on the front porch and because I don't like to give up on a plant without giving it every chance in the world to come back, I planted it directly into the dirt of the kitchen bed, thus freeing up the pot which is an extremely heavy pot and so I had to use the garden cart to haul it and to get the cart where it needed to be for me to put the pot in it I had to trim some sego (murder) palm fronds and so that was a little process. Then I dug out a hydrangea I've had in a pot under the wisteria arbor for years which is just barely making it and has certainly never bloomed there. And of course I replanted that with the other hydrangea and watered all of them. So I had two pots at that point. 

I transplanted a sage plant into a pot that already had oregano in it because...why not? 
Three pots. As for the fourth- I took out a giant begonia rootling that wasn't doing much at all and stuck it in with another giant begonia which is...giant. 
 
And so I finally accomplished what I'd set out to do. 

The Cuban oregano I bought last week. 

My pineapple plant which I started from a pineapple top that had been in a too-small pot that then got broken anyway. It looks about six times bigger now in that one. 

Part of the kalancho that had gotten way out of hand. Don't worry. It won't look like that for long. I cut the long stem into three separate pieces and stuck all the pieces in the dirt. I have a strong feeling all three stem parts will be standing to attention in a short while. 
And what went in the fourth pot? 
A very small piece of a jade plant that I've been keeping alive and not much more in the laundry room for way too long. It needed to get outside in more sun and now it is. 

I did what I could to improve my mood, to lift my spirits. I spent time in the garden, I got a lot of dirt under my fingernails. I planted, I trimmed, I watered. I made executive decisions about things like digging up pinecone lilies to make more room in the kitchen bed. I did not overthink my decision. Mainly because I have a million pinecone lilies.
I took the garbage to the dump. 
I discovered that crows do not care in the least for raisins. 
Oh well. More for me. 

I grieved Dolly Parton some more and did a lot of pondering on why she was so universally loved, how she got so much accomplished, and how she managed to seemingly perform at least once with every musician in the world with joy and respect and perfect make-up and nails.  
I wished for rain. We did not get any. 

I used my wrinkled fingers to grab onto what I could and at the same time, tried to release what I should. 

This is life. 

Love...Ms. Moon 

Remembering And Honoring The Past

It was "supposed" to rain here all day long and I was so looking forward to that. Not only because we need it so badly but because I envisioned myself feeling completely guilt-free in spending a leisurely day and Mr. Moon and I even made a little date for some possible rainy day foolin' around. 
Well, it has hardly rained at all but I have still managed to be completely unproductive with the notable exception of a few things and we had our date anyway, rain or no. 
So it's been lovely. 
But because I've done so little and I haven't even left the house except to feed the crows, I have taken no pictures and I have nothing to talk about, I decided to go back through some photos of Cozumel. The trip these photos were taken from came from the last week in December in 2018 and the first days of January in 2019. So, just about seven years ago. 
How can this be? 
The picture at top is of Ixchel, the Mayan goddess who general lore says was the goddess for whom Cozumel was sacred. She was a major goddess, worshipped as the deity of the moon, fertility, medicine, and weaving. Also midwifery. Again, so the story goes. A whole lot of information was lost when the fucking Spanish priests burned all the Mayan codices, which were books made of bark paper and which held not only religious history but also their mathematic and scientific discoveries, history of major eras, rulers, and wars, as well as royal lineages, their knowledge of astronomy, and their culture. Let us not forget the thousands of religious statues the Spaniard bastards destroyed. 
Because, you know- they wanted to convert the heathens to Catholicism. 
Fucking religion. 

I guess tonight is a sweary night. 
Sorry. Not sorry. 

Anyway, there is a lot of debate about what Ixchel's true historical meaning was and it's not certain that Cozumel was considered sacred to her but still, although her image is not seen nearly as much as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe's there, this statue is prominently displayed in a fountain on the main road which parallels the ocean in the main (only) town of San Miguel. 

And of course I love her. 

One of the cemeteries on the island.

This one is downtown in San Miguel and we generally visit it when we're there. The dead are interred in these little houses or shelters and on the Day of the Dead, flowers and food and drink and items representing the things those who are buried there loved.  

This one always makes me cry. It is the resting place of an American woman named Mary who moved to the island way before it ever became a tourist destination. She and her husband fell in love with the people and the life there and chose to make it their home until her death. 

And now her bones and her body will always be a part of the island she came to love and called home and there are parts of me which completely understands and if I'd not had children waiting for me to return home from the trips Glen and I took there, I might have chosen to do the same thing she did. 
The stone work around the arch is very typical for that area of Mexico. 

I think about this little girl more than you can imagine. 
That smile! Those eyes! 
She was in a highchair at lunch with what I presume were her mother and her tia, her aunt, and I flirted with her outrageously. I asked for permission to take her picture and was graciously given it. She's probably what? Ten years old now?
Oh, how I hope that she is as happy a being now as she was then. 

I have posted this picture more than once. This is my handsome husband at our New Year's Eve dinner. I swear to you- he has not changed an iota. 

And here I am. I am looking rather "come hither" here, aren't I? 
Well. I mean look at that margarita. 
And also- look at the man I was with. 

And okay, lastly...

I really don't think I need to say a word about this. 

I could (and probably should) write an entire book about what Cozumel has meant to me since our first visit in 1987. But for now, I am happy to play with some memories, to be grateful for those visits, to recognize how very different my life and possibly my marriage would have been without them. 
In Cozumel I was Maria Luna and that woman? 
Well. She was something else. 
Or someone else. And personally, I think that both Ixchel and the Virgin of Guadalupe filled up a part of my soul I didn't know was empty. They allowed me to be a woman I did not know existed within me. 
And oh, she could be glorious. 

Happy Friday, y'all. May it rain tomorrow. 

Love...Ms. Moon

Train, Train

I don't think I've ever posted a video of the train that runs in my back yard. And you can't really see the train in this video which I just made a few hours ago because it's summer and there is so much growth on the little strip of woods between our yard and the railroad track. 

However, if you turn your volume up to max, you will get an idea of what I hear several times a day. It's...well, it can be startling even now, twenty-two years after we moved here. I never hear it at night when we're in bed though. I sleep right through it. It's loud enough though for the house to shake a little, for windows to rattle. 
It's sort of crazy. 
What I didn't catch on the video is the added fun of the sound of the train horn as it approaches the crossing which is just a few yards past where our old barn is. And honey, that is LOUD! Sometimes Maurice and I jump when we hear it. I don't think you ever get used to that part. 

Today has been laid back. It's tried to rain several times over the course of the day and succeeded only for short periods of time with very little water involved. The first little storm came when I was working in the bed beside the library and kitchen on the west side of the house, pulling the never-ending deeply rooted monkey grass (lariope), many-bulbed crocosmia, and chenille plant that seems to just grow with some sort of ground-gripping ability that I doubt even science has yet to explain. It is slow and dirty and hot work. So I get a little bit done and then come back into the house to recover. I came in earlier than I would have due to the rain we were getting but by the time I'd cleaned up and changed into dry clothes, it had stopped raining and the sky was blue. 
Oh well. 
Mr. Moon, meanwhile, cut up what we've been calling "the tree" in the bed beside the fence which of course was a limb but a limb as big or bigger than many trees. He not only cut it up, he hauled it all to the burn pile. So that bed is now available for possible caladium preparation if I indeed do plant caladiums. 
We shall see. 

I did some ironing, mostly to give myself an excuse to watch more of "The Bear." It's funny how some of what started out seeming like minor characters are now some of my favorites. Their stories have been expanded, their parts have grown, and every one of them is blowing me away with their performances. 
This man, whose character name is Richie, played by Ebon Moss Bachrach, can communicate more with his face in two seconds than most actors could do in five pages of dialogue. 

He's brilliant. That's all there is to it. 
I remember once when I was in a short film made by a guy I knew, a director named Freddie Rabbath, and I was in a scene with a man who was actually an actor who taught me so much in less than one minute of reacting to one of my lines. He pulled me right into his face which revealed all of his emotions with such genuine belief it allowed me to give my own in return. He evoked mine with his. 
I'll never forget that. It was one moment of pure magic. 
I miss those days. 
Sigh. 
I am astonished/not astonished that Trump is calling for flags to fly at half-mast for Dolly for an entire week. Either he has absolutely no idea what she stood for and what she was trying to do in this world or else he is just playing the political card, realizing that everyone in the whole world loved her, and in showing some respect to her and honoring her, no matter how fake it might be, he'll be doing himself a major political favor. Possibly both of those things. 
Probably both of those things. I doubt he has the slightest clue as to why she was so loved. She was the opposite of everything he is and that's all there is to it. He's just too stupid to understand that. 

And that's enough from me tonight. 

Love...Ms. Moon

A Full Day

This is what I did in pottery today. Two and a half hours to paint the whole sort-of caladium white, as a base, and then to add those two colors of green. I do three coats of everything which is why it takes so much time. I believe I am going to add some red and some pink in there somewhere. Caladiums come in such a huge rainbow of colors and designs that it's hard to settle on a color scheme. 

Here are just a few of the different varieties you can buy bulbs for. 

I am so fascinated, looking at different images of them that I am now ready to plant my entire yard in caladiums. Wouldn't that be a glory?  
I am especially drawn to this one. 

Florida Cardinal is their name. And they are supposed to be very large. 
I am starting to think that perhaps caladiums are like so many things that suddenly become more interesting than you thought possible as you age and you wonder- where have these things been all my life? 
Like feeding crows. 
I believe I'll start doing some research on caladiums and see when the best time of year to plant them is. That should give me more impetus to clear out some of the beds I've been working on in such a desultory manner for so long so that I can put in some of these beauties. 

Pottery was fun today. I was not in a very light mood when Jessie and I got there but over the course of the class, I felt better and better. I talked to Lizzie and a few other people and painted on my platter. She is working on some of her whippets and a few cats and she is painstakingly painting them with Stroke and Coat too, so we sit there with our little brushes and our little paint bottles and we discuss everything from tonight's menu to what the kids and grandkids are up to, to politics, although we're not really supposed to do that, and a lot of other stuff. It's rather lovely. Gentleman Caller™did not make it in today which was disappointing. He's back to being a professor of constitutional law at the university which is his work. 
I took a picture of the one-ticket-per-square squares on the shelves where we set our pieces to be fired so you can get an idea of how this will go. 

These are some of Lizzie's cats (which she has just started doing) and a whippet. She makes them for people who actually have pets who look like the ones she's making. After they are fired they are precious. But to get a sense of size- well, that ticket is the size of your regular ticket that you'd get to go on rides at the fair. The pieces themselves are perhaps two and a half inches long? I'm not good at spatial stuff but that's what I'd guess. 

After class Lily met Jessie and me at Bumpa's, the sports bar we like because the food is sort of amazingly good. I finally remembered to take a picture of the salad I always get. 

That's seared sesame-encrusted ahi tuna on delicious salad items. It's hard to beat. 

Since we're talking about food (how surprising!) I'll show you my fourth (I think) attempt at the type of bread I'm trying to make. 

I am so getting there. I have to say this bread was delicious and had all the good fiber-y and protein-y things in it. Instead of cottage cheese in this batch, I used Greek yogurt. I think it worked better. We ate it with our soup last night and this morning I had a piece toasted with peanut butter. But back to the soup- do you remember me saying that I'd read the immature Seminole pumpkins can be picked and used like a summer squash? 
I tried it. 

It is the most tender vegetable you can imagine with a good, mild flavor. I think it would be amazing stir fried with other vegetables or just sauteed with onions. No need to peel it. I chopped this one up and added it to the soup. As I was serving that soup up last night I told Glen that the amazing thing was that there had never been another soup exactly like this one in the history of the universe and I think that's probably true. And it's true for many, many soups made at home with vegetables and proteins and herbs and flavorings that just happen to be hanging around and are all put together in whatever unique way the person making it creates their soup. 
Glen loved that idea but he also noted that because I hardly ever use a recipe for my soup, if he, say, asked for that same soup on his birthday, I wouldn't be able to recreate it. 
I told him that not only would I not be able to recreate it, I probably wouldn't remember making it. 
But it was pretty darn good soup. 

As a little bit of a lagniappe to last night's post, I have been amazed and yet not amazed at the outpouring of love and respect for Dolly Parton on social media. Not just from America, but from the world. So very many marginalized communities are coming forth to express why they loved this woman so much. She meant something different to all of us, I think, but everything she represented was beautiful. 

This really tore at my heart.

The Empire State Building, lit up with glittery pink in her honor. I can just hear her tinkly laugh of delight if she could see that. 
Dare I say that the Empire State Building was in drag? 

Yes. I do believe I do. 

Love...Ms. Moon

Just...No

I imagine it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone who is not from the United States, and probably most specifically the southern region of this country, to understand how we feel about Dolly Parton. And I do not pretend to understand or know how anyone else feels about her but it is safe to say she is beloved. 
I say "is" even though she went on today. Doesn't make any difference. She is beloved and probably will be for eternity, at least around these parts. 
You know what a sacrilegious unbeliever I am but I know how I feel about Dolly Parton and that is she is an angel. A real true holy angel who somehow got put on this earth to grace it with her voice, her songwriting, her benevolence, her kindness, her philanthropy, her tenderness, her spark, her energy, her tenderness, her sass, her laugh, her non-judgmental loving acceptance of people who so many "religious" people call sinners even though if anyone was religious, it was Dolly, her belief in goodness, in the power of reading, in her love of family, her style, her courage, her belief in the equality of women, and her goddamn fingernails. 
The woman has given away over 300 million books to children all over the world. Do I really need to say more than that? 
In my opinion she did more for the people of this world than Mother Teresa ever imagined could be done and by god, she did it wearing rhinestones and heels and outrageous wigs and a grin as big as the Grand Canyon, bosoms as big as bountiful and plentiful as her waist was tiny. And she never once denied having plastic surgery. She wasn't ashamed of it. 
I remember when I used to work at the Birth Center here and would do post partum counseling and would get to the part about how, on about the third day the milk would come in for the mama, I would describe the experience as like waking up to having Dolly Parton bosoms. 
And everyone knew what I meant. 
I think Dolly's breasts had to be that big because if anyone who ever lived represented being a bounteous goddess of nurturing and love more than she did, I do not know who it would be, even though she never had children of her own. 

And it's been just so hard today, having heard this news. I was having a difficult day already and then to hear that Dolly had died was just about too much. It's one of those situations where I feel like if I let myself really start crying, I ain't ever gonna stop. 
I just told my husband that it feels like all the goodness in this world is being taken from us while the evil prevails. 
"That's one way to look at it," he said. 
He's right. And I am the sort of person who does look at it that way. I don't think it's a purposeful thing on the part of a god or the universe or any of that crap, I just think it is what it is. 

I would love to post a video of Dolly but I can't even think of a song that could possibly represent who she was. She was country, she was pop, she was occasionally rock, she was bluegrass, she was...well, she was Dolly. She had a million hits. 

I feel like REM in "Losing My Religion."
Oh no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough.

And yet, I haven't even touched the surface of what this woman means, did, or represented. 
And so I guess I'll post this video which may be one of her most recognized songs. Whitney Houston did a beautiful cover of it but Dolly wrote it. Dolly did it best. And in this video, she tells the story of how it came to be. 

God, this is ridiculously sappy but dammit, Dolly, we will always love you. 
Thanks for stopping by here on your way around this universe. 

And here's a picture of May taken in Chattanooga, Tennessee in front of a mural on the building where Dolly and her husband Carl Dean were married back in 1966. 

I believe that sort of says everything I wanted to say. 

Love...Ms. Moon

In Which I Celebrate Michael, Find Another Baby Who Was Not A Bad Baby, Get To Visit With Two Of My Most Favorite People In The World, And Other Things.

I had lunch with these two beautiful people today. It's Michael's birthday and I really didn't plan on having his birthday lunch with him but due to a long series of events, I did. And I'm glad. I don't know about them but I sure had a lot of fun. We had a lot to catch up on. 
May and I had been trying to have lunch together for weeks. Her days off are Sunday and Monday and she and Michael, who both have stressful and demanding jobs, like to go out for Sunday brunch to relax and recoup and enjoy some time together. So Monday is the best day to meet up with her and we were going to go two Mondays ago but that was the day my phone was arriving and someone had to be here to sign for it and so we were going to go the Monday after that but dang it- I had a dentist appointment I'd forgotten about and so it was going to be THIS Monday, which was today of course, and Ta-Da! It was Michael's birthday. 
Michael, being a darling son-in-law and a kind gentleman swore that he would be fine with me coming to lunch with them and I hope he's not regretting that now. As I said, I had a really good time, anyway. 
There was one thing that was odd and that was our server. 
Bless her heart. 
She was young but a fine server. 
However. That woman had the biggest, most brilliantly white tooth-filled smile I have ever seen in my entire life. 
As in, after she took my drink order, I whispered to May and Michael, "She scares me."
I was getting Beetlejuice vibes. Like- this cannot be real. 
I'm not going to even identify the restaurant, much less her name which I honestly don't remember anyway. And as I said, she was a fine server and I tipped her almost as big as her smile which would not have been possible. 

When we were almost finished with our meals, we started hearing a baby. At first I thought the baby was crying but I soon realized that no, this baby was just talking. And on our way out, after I'd used the restroom, I absolutely had to go find the baby. My baby obsession is not easing up, y'all. 
I found the baby. She was sitting on her mother's lap and this child was screeching her thoughts and opinions and emotions with the lungs of an opera singer. I was going to just pass by the table but no. I could not. That baby was so damn cute and smooshie and gorgous I had to stop and I said, "I'm sorry but I had to find the baby." And then I told the mother and either her friend or her sister who was also in the booth about my baby obsession and how I'd had four babies myself and now have five grandchildren and the two women seemed delighted that someone who obviously had so much experience in cute babies thought THIS baby was special. 
And she was. 
The woman who was not the mother said, "She's part pterodactyl," and I agreed this must be true. The most charming pterodactyl you can imagine. She was five months old and in my deep wisdom I told them that this was the best age because they can sit up and talk (okay, sometimes it's pterodactyl language) and grin and really, what more do you need to do? 
They also hastened to add that she can roll over! Of course! 
She really was just about the perfect baby. And I did not ask if I could hold her. I did not grab her and run from the restaurant. I did not look at her and say, "You shall be mine!" No. I did none of those things. I just flirted with her for a few seconds and then with great force of will, dragged my crazy ass away. 

After May and Michael went their way and I went mine, I stopped at a plant nursery in hopes of finding late tomato plants to put in but they didn't have any. I got the okra seeds Mr. Moon has been wanting to plant, some artichoke seeds, and a Cuban oregano. 
That was an impulse buy. 
I've been wanting to try and plant artichokes for a long time and according to the seed packet, in mild climates (which I assume is what we have here, except in summer, of course) you can plant artichoke seeds in the fall and harvest in the spring. 
Say what? 
Man. I am so excited. I was tempted to buy all the lettuce and greens seeds I know I'll be wanting to plant very soon but I knew I still had some seeds left over from last fall and it would be the smart thing to check that out before I went on a seed-buying frenzy. 
Do you suppose this is somehow related to my baby obsession? 

Speaking of babies, here's what the arugula I planted a week ago looks like right now. 

And yes, I will be thinning them and using what I take out in salads because even at the infant stage, arugula has the punchy bitter taste that I find so delicious. 
From that small picture you can see why Mr. Moon likes to make the rows for me to plant in himself. 
Sigh.

The bee balm is purpling up. 

There are quite a few blossoms on it. 

The Seminole pumpkins are making enough pumpkins that I have no idea what we'll be doing with all of them. Giving some away, I guess. I doubt that all of the pumpkins now forming will grow to maturity. And by golly, I just did a little more research on these heirloom pumpkins and I am going to be harvesting that first pumpkin the vines produced tomorrow AND I am going to pick a few of the small, immature ones to cook like squash because I am reading that the pumpkins are good like this. Plus, picking them will encourage the growth of new ones. 
Well I'll be darned. You learn something new every day. 

And because it wouldn't be a complete post without a picture of Maurice, here we go. 

She's keeping an eye on me while I distribute the mealworms. 

And, okay. Here are some pictures of a cicada I found dead on the back porch. These bugs fascinate me. 

They definitely have some bulgy eyes, don't they? And they are large. Very, very large. But completely harmless and they make music. I love and respect them.

It's been a terrific day. 
Thank you, Michael for letting me share your birthday with you. I enjoyed it so much. Keep on with this living thing, okay? You are precious. 

Love...Mary