Sunday morning

It is beautiful, as befits Sunday. The temperature in my office is 69, up one degree from the time that I entered. Later, the weather forecast assures us, it will be hot. Right now I am wrapped in a fleece throw to ward off the chill!

Today the first reading is Sir 3:17-18, 28-29. I particularly like "What is too sublime for you, seek not, into things beyond your strength search not." The second reading is Ps 68:4-5, 6-7, 10-11 followed by the second reading from Heb 12:18-19, 22-24a, which contains the wonderful phrase "countless angels in festal gathering". Countless angels, countless, beyond counting, beyond imagining. I wish they could pause in their festal gathering long enough to push the low pressure down and the clouds and the fog back over us, who have been sweltering in the heat wave of this past week. Still countless angels. More than enough to go around. More than enough to help us in all of our needs. Countless angels, cherubim and seraphic and perhaps even more Archangels than the ones we know by name, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel. The Gospel reading for today is from Lk:14:1, 7-14. And those who are humbled shall be exalted. Hmmm. Not in this life surely.

The sunflowers, bedraggled by the heat, and full of seed have nearly completed their life-cycle. Fall is truly coming.

Sunflowers and Squirrels

The sunflowers continue to shine. Several have formed their petals snugly around the heads, which are heavy with seed. Now the squirrels are coming to investigate. It is so funny to watch them clamber around the flowers. One found a full, small pod and happily picked it apart, extracting the seeds in their shells, and then extracting the seeds from the shells. This provided my morning's entertainment. Of course, he/she did not clean up the resulting mess!

My dear friend L brought delicious nigella seed bread and applesauce that she made after a day of harvesting and pressing apples on a small family farm. We ate yogurt cheese and eggplant sauce and carrot sauce (which would spark up cottage cheese quite a bit, too)and she described the process of pressing the apple juice. I hope that she blogs about this, so that I can link to her blog.

Several ladies have come to my Mary Kay party and it is always fun to meet new people, to show my products and to see which things people choose for themselves. We have an extensive and beautiful product line of skin care products for men and women as well as truly lovely makeup.

Soon I hope to be able to take customers into my studio and use my Mama's beautiful antique vanity to demonstrate products. I think that this will be so much more fun than hauling everything to the dining room table.

It is a beautiful day and I am rejoicing that it is Sunday. The first reading for today Is 66:18-21. The responsorial psalm is Ps 117: 1, 2 and it contains the beautiful line, "For steadfast is his kindness toward us, and the fidelity of the LORD endures forever." This is a line worth meditating on all day. It is one that I will have to try to remember especially when I am in a cranky mood and wondering where God is in my life. Sometimes I feel that God has gone far away. The second reading is from Heb 12: 5-7, 11-13 and the Gospel is Lk 13:22-30.

Today is also the feast of St. Monica. I need St. Monica for her example for perseverance. For more about her see the blog Monastic Musings, which has a beautiful commentary on her.

http://edithosb.blogspot.com/

Saturday and Sunflowers

I am getting ready to have an open house tomorrow for my Mary Kay business. The dining room is clearer, the dishes are washed and the bears and dolls who used to live in the living room are now in the studio. More paper clutter has been thrown out and boxes have been removed. I pull the boxes while going backward part of the way until I get to the part of the house that is wide enough to turn the wheelchair around in and then I push with my feet. This whole process reminds me that I am old and out of shape. I am getting it done though, one push/pull, pull/push at a time.

I can see the sofa for the first time in over a year. There are too many books in this house and one of my jobs this week is going to be to figure out how to post some of them on Amazon. I have too many projects, too many ideas and even, for somebody my age, too many dreams.

Somehow this has been a depressing and tiring day instead of an energizing one. Each time that I have paused and looked out the back windows the sunflowers have glowed golden and cheered me on. Just a few moments ago the top most one was translucent with the setting sun back lighting and shining through her petals. They are like elephants, so big that they are endearing. When it was windy a little while ago, they seemed to be dancing.

I must return to my setting up and then post more tomorrow.

Happy Friday!

I can now see my living room again! Hip, Hip, Hooray! More to go, more to go. Parts of the house still look like disorganization reigns, but progress is being made. I am so glad. Decluttering takes more time and energy than accumulating the clutter did in the first place.

Soon I will be working in my new studio! I am determined to organize using containers that I already have on hand. New containers are simply expensive and can become clutter eventually in their own right. Better to reuse and recycle at home with baskets, certain boxes, plastic containers that I have set aside for this purpose.

The sunflowers are heavy and rounded with seeds. They definitely have a life cycle that mirrors ours. The weather is cooler today, so they look less bedraggled. I feel less bedraggled! Each day now the sun is rising a little later and setting a little earlier. My father used to track this progress in the newspaper on the page with the weather information. Now I follow the shortening days on the net, on the weather site. Unlike the newspaper, the computer pages don't have to be hauled outside to be recycled! In some ways though, I miss the newspaper and I miss having someone to share it with.

Only a few more days of August and then it really will be fall. The countdown to Christmas can begin anew. Let's make sure that Advent doesn't get lost in the shuffle this year!

Thursday

The sun has been setting behind the row of sunflowers as I have been at the computer. First the email that has built up while I have been doing other things away from the computer had my attention. Then loading my cafepress feed into Google Base took a few minutes and now I am finally attending to my blog post.

The sunflowers are almost as big as dinner plates and absolutely lovely. Now there are half a dozen where earlier there had only been one at a time. They are rushing to flower and go to seed before the weather turns cold, thus fulfilling their destiny. I have seen this in plants before. A kind of quiet humility that humans do not have.

These majestic plants are almost too big to be humble, but as the seed heads form the plant shrinks. The seed heads bend over and the whole plant reminds me of an old, old woman with osteoporosis. There is humility and waiting in it as time goes by. Waiting for fall, and waiting for the seeds to fall to the ground.

Today I have been looking at my own life, sorting, sorting and throwing out more paper. The boxes are becoming smaller and the stacks will shrink too. My friend L, (she of the sunflowers and apple galette) took away a pile of things to be donated and now my garage sighs with a bit of relief to echo that of the house.

Soon I will go and spend a few minutes in the big room just to admire how pretty it is and then go to bed and finish reading Water for Elephants. It is quite dark in just the short time that it has taken to write this. Fall is definitely coming soon.

Fall is coming

With less daylight in both the morning and the evening now and definitely chilly mornings it almost feels like Fall is early this year. Why not? All of the other seasons seemed to come early and we had an unusually cold winter, dry except for snow, which is so rare in the San Francisco Bay Area that it always makes the news--not just the weather report.

I wonder, are drought, or near drought years often colder than wetter winters? It would make sense, since much of our rain is tropical and the cloud layers themselves tend to warm the earth, like blankets.

The sunflowers are hurrying to bloom now. Even the trio that had been working to become the worlds tallest sunflowers are developing flower buds. Flower buds on a sunflower are almost a misnomer. They are huge. Everything about these flowers is oversize! I love to watch them turn to follow the sun and I also like the patterns their leaves make in shadows on my fence.

In the next few days, I will be printing cards from some of the photos of this summer's sunflowers.

TGIF

Thank goodness it's Friday! The week went by so fast. Today is the day, I hope, that the painting will be finished. Hurrah! Then I can finish sorting everything that went from the "big room" to the living room and have a crafting and sewing studio for the first time in my life. The sewing machine is already set up under the window on a table that used to hold an xt clone--the original household computer.

Yesterday, as M painted and I threw out old paper, I almost felt that I could hear the house sigh. It is returning to its original size, recovering its spaciousness and an accompanying sense of graciousness.

While all of this has been going on inside the sunflowers have been growing even taller outside. Watching them renews my sense of wonder. The oldest one is waning. As the flowers go to seed, the petals seem to grown longer and they sweep down from the flower, like eyelashes on closed eyes. They retain a charm, even though they are fading fast.

The roses are also blooming on my deck, although the big bushes in the ground refuse to bloom. Something about the dry winter and cooler than normal summer perhaps?

I came upon a wonderful article on rooting rose cuttings the other night. I will try to remember and post the link.

Happy Friday.

Tempus Fugit

How can it be August already? The first sunflower, the one that grew tallest first and bloomed with multiple flowers is shrinking. The flowers are drawing in and I assume going to seed. The younger ones continue to grow with one nearly as tall as the fence. More seedlings are growing in the ground along the planter box. These are the gift of filling the bird feeders with a mix that includes sunflower seeds.

Last year at this time one gigantic thistle occupied the same space that the sunflowers fill this summer. Two small offspring thistles have self-sown from last year, not at all the forest I expected as I watched clouds of thistle seeds blowing on the wind. Of course, the goldfinches found a feast from those thistle seeds, perching on the plant and tormenting the cat who sat under it, wishing them down to his space but never succeeding. They knew he could not climb the thorns.

Sunflowers and Painting

I never much liked sunflowers really, because I never much liked Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting of them. Now they march along my fence outside my office window and they are gorgeous. They have made me love them. So it is never too late to change!

Parts of my house are being painted by kind young friends and the light glows on the new color, clean and bright and fresh. What a superb difference it makes!

Attendant to the painting is the necessity to clean, to move things out of the way to make way for the painting to progress. Fortunately, the city in which I live has "on call pick-ups" for extra trash and now the race is on. Just how much stuff can I get ready and who will push it out for me?

So my posts may be a bit spotty over the next few days, not a good beginning for a blog, but a renewal of my life nonetheless.

Gold Finches and Sunflowers

I garden, as I do everything, with a great deal of help from my friends for as a disabled person I can enjoy the visual display of my garden, water the plants growing in pots and occasionally take pictures, but not the larger gardening tasks. Plants, planted in the ground where my wheel chair does not go depend, as I do, on the assistance of friends. Pruning would not get done at all without other willing hands (and strong backs.)

Last summer a friend hung bird feeders from tree branches that I can see from all my back windows. On Friday of last week these feeders were empty for people had been away on vacation. Two finches came and perched on the window ledge a foot or so away from where I was typing on my computer.

"No bird feeders there," they seemed to be saying as they looked all around my room. I assured them the feeders would soon be filled and wondered what my office looked like to a bird. First, the large being tapping on the strange machine, much as they peck for seed. Then everything, even the stuffed animals on the computer desk overwhelming larger than they are. What would rows of books look like to little birds? I laughed and was filled with joy.

That same morning I looked out at the sunflowers another friend planted in June. The summer's glory is reflected in their color. Yellow is not a color I have ever especially liked, but this color! It is so deep and glorious that it has made me love it. The sunflowers truly do "follow the sun" as their name implies. At different times of the day they point in different directions. The leaves are so big they could be used as dinner plates!