Flowering Vines

No killing frost yet, so my climbing vines are still flowering. I've been watching some big fat buds, hoping for another moonflower. Last evening before dark, two buds began to open, showing blue. Here are the two heavenly blues this morning.

The Love-in-a-Puff (can't find the packet and don't remember its scientific name) is a climbing vine with intricately-cut leaves, delicate white flowers, and pale green inflated pods the size of grapes. It's one of my favorites, though it's showy only to a close-up observer:

The translucency of the globes doesn't show up well. Maybe a late afternoon picture with the sun from the west will do this vine justice. I'll try later in the day.

Small Personal Tragedy Department

The ocean and the rain killed my camera, unless Ball Photo can work a miracle. There will be no pictures of boys in the ocean, nor can I document the gentrification of charming little Buckingham Ct. until I have a working camera. This is very sad, though on the larger scale it's piffle before the wind, it's a puff of dried sea foam scuttering down the beach.

The above is neither the beach nor Buckingham Ct., but rather a lovely house in the neighborhood that's for sale for $465,500. The ad calls it a "Mediterranean bungalow," but I'd call it Craftsman style. It's near some stucco Spanish-style houses, but there's nothing Mediterranean about this one.

Coming sometime: what's happening to Buckingham Court. Stay posted.

CHRISTO

IN KENILWORTH?

Saffron banners hanging from Christo's gates contrasted brilliantly with black, winter-bare trees in Central Park during a recent February. Late summer's grass in a nearby green swath, recently taken over by condo developers in my neighborhood, sets off the "Gates of Kenilworth" down the street a fewblocks from me. So far I haven't seen walkers, sightseers, photographers taking in our local color, but it won't be long. Maybe I should be posting to the newspaper's blog. Do they have letters to the Editor with photos?

SEPTEMBER SUNDAY

The coffee took some work, as the electric coffeemaker broke. In fact, this was a week of breaking. I broke a small bone in my right wrist during the rescue of a trapped hummingbird. My car's water pump broke and cost me a lot of money. Then the coffeemaker went berserk. But the bubbles at the top of the coffee in the French press are beautiful. You'd never see these inside the coffeemaker, no sireebob.

The sun cleared off the early fog and shone in on the table.

There are pale violet asters, white hydrangea, butterfly bush, Mina lobata, and pale yellow and deep orange nasturtium. The flowering vines (including the orange and yellow Mina lobata above) are coming into their own. There's cypress vine with mixed blossoms in pink, deep rose, and white; climbing Thunbergia with rich yellow-orange blossoms and medium green heart-shaped leaves; Love-in-a-Puff, with intricately lobate green leaves, tiny white flowers on stalks, and pale green balloons; climbing spinach, coming along slowly; morning glories, mostly deep purple, with one Heavenly Blue; and one more vine still a mystery. I'm hoping it's cardinal flower, wither red or yellow.

WE STILL [PRAY, PLAY, SPAY, READ, SURF]....


If you live around here, you know these bumper stickers, shiny red with white letters. The original ones said, simply, "WE STILL PRAY." We all knew right away that this bumper sticker indicated that the car contained good Christian, Bible-believing folks, who don't hold with all this modern confusion about life. It's simple: the Bible tells us so. And "WE" still pray, no matter what bizarre practices YOU might engage in. It always bothered me, though, that the implication was that unless you were in the red-sticker club, you most certainly did NOT pray. Clearly you were a secular humanist liberal who holds mankind in the highest regard and has no need or thought for any numinous quality to the universe, for any suggestion of a Mystery beyond what our senses perceive daily.

Then we started seeing variations of the message. The more irreverent ones declared "WE STILL SPAY," while book-lovers who frequent Malapropr's independent bookstore in downtown Asheville could declare simply "WE STILL READ." Let the passerby by on the street put that in his pipe and smoke it, anyway he cares. The message was not, "We don't pray," but simply, "We like to read." One who reads might well read the Holy Bible, or the Pentateuch, or the Qu'ran, or Nietzche, or Dorothy Day, or "Bread and Jam for Frances," or Dashiell Hammett. We might read Danielle Steele, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Book of Mormon or "Good Night Moon." Whatever it is, we (those who still read) leave room for the imagination, for entertaining the thoughts of others, for the consolations of poetry and the satisfaction of a well-plotted mystery, for deep thought or for simple refreshment. But we do like to think and ponder the world as it lays itself out before us in all its splendid complexity.

So around here, this bumper sticker might be variously interpreted, but folks recognize it, as one part of a conversation in the public arena. But this summer I went up to New England, where my red sticker provoked only "Huh???" Apparently, the good folks in RI and Massachusetts aren't telling us whether they pray, or read, or spay, or at least they're not displaying this information ont heir cars' bumpers. Leave it to those reticent Yankees to keep us all guessing what it is they do. They're not wearing red stickers to proclaim their preferences to the world. Down here in the South, we let it all hang out -- on our bumpers.