Category Archives: Personal

Cinderella Hibiscus*

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A few years ago we had a hibiscus plant. Over the years it grew fairly large and Leah finally decided to get rid of it. I said we should just plant it outside and let it fend for itself. They aren’t cold hardy, but I figured if it survived, great, but if it didn’t, we were going to get rid of it anyway. So I planted it close to the west side of the house, and we pretty much forgot about it.

A winter passed, spring came, and what looked like a dead plant started to grow. And grow. Shoots shot. It grew more. Soon the branches were 10 feet long and brushing against the side of the house. I pruned it back, and it remained healthy. We waited for flowers but they never came. And then another winter came and all the leaves fell off.

Another winter passed, and it started growing again. Soon I had to prune more branches. I could have used them for buggy whips. We couldn’t believe how well it was doing. But still no flowers.

Eventually I decided it was too close to the house and I had to move it. By that time it was a major operation. I pruned it back severely, and ended up cutting a lot of roots just to get it out of the ground. I had to use my side-by-side four-wheeler to drag it up close to the road. I prepared a hole, rolled it in, backfilled, watered and, once again, left the hibiscus to fend for itself.

When summer came again, it lived. In fact, it thrived. It turned green and started growing those long branches again. But still no flowers. We couldn’t understand how our hibiscus could survive our far-too-cold winters and grow so well. We just shook our heads and wished it would bloom.

And then one day it turned into a mulberry tree.

It’s fruiting right now, and some of the berries are ripe. The fruit looks like stunted blackberries and, at least to me, has a flavor at least reminiscent of blackberry. Zeke, however, does not like mulberries as much as he likes blackberries.

Here is the original Cinderella hibiscus in its new life as a mulberry.

The Cinderella Hibiscus

The Cinderella Hibiscus

Here you can see some of the fruit.

mulberries on the tree

And one in my hand.

mulberry berry

I find it odd that the mulberry leaf can take different shapes. It was a diagnostic feature for me, at least until I actually saw the fruit. Here is a leaf with no lobes.

leaf1 Here is a leaf with a lobe on one side.

one side lobe leaf Here is a leaf with a lobe on both sides.

two side lobe leaf

This fact is probably not surprising or odd to someone who knows much about plant biology, but that does not include me. If I am allowed to choose the subject of my plant ramblings and am asked no questions, it might appear that I know what I’m talking about, but I don’t really.

 

* The name comes from something that happened back when I was in graduate school and often visited my friend Errol and his family at their home north of Atlanta. One summer we (or they, I don’t remember) sat on their front porch and ate a watermelon. As is the custom, the seeds were spit out into the front yard. After a while, a vine appeared. Then a green melon-shaped fruit appeared and started growing. Of course we thought it had to be a watermelon. But one weekend when I came to visit, the watermelon had turned into a pumpkin. After that, I called it the Cinderella watermelon.

A page turns

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I’m writing this on Sunday, which is my 64th birthday and the official date of my Social Security application. I think this means that I’m officially retired.

Leah and I didn’t do anything special for today. I didn’t put out a couple of pairs of pants and some shirts. I didn’t pack underwear and socks. I didn’t figure out which frozen dinners I would need. I didn’t put some cereal, skim milk and orange juice aside, or pick out some apples, or count out the cookies I would need for the coming week. I didn’t think about missile defense target models or optical signatures. I didn’t think about reports, and I didn’t think about meetings.

Instead I thought about how much more firewood I need to cut for next winter. I thought about completing the retaining wall on the uphill side of the walk I’m making around the house. I thought about replacing some boards on the deck, staining the deck, and redoing the handrails. I thought about replacing some more cracked tiles in the bathroom. I thought about whether we should complete the basement or let it remain partially finished. I thought about what we’ll do when we visit Savannah in a few weeks.

I have been effectively retired for a couple of months. Back in February on my last day in Huntsville, I finished up some work I needed to do, said ‘bye to a couple of people who happened to be in the office, and walked out the door. There was no going-away lunch or happy-retirement card. A couple of people I have known for a few years had said earlier they would miss me. The people I worked with for the last 28 years weren’t in the office, so there was no goodbye there. I did hear by email from one mentioning that I should come over for a retirement lunch some time, but that’s looking unlikely. She also emailed with some potential work I could do at home, but nothing about that lately either.

So that’s the way my work life ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

But I’m not a sentimental person, at least not about work. Maybe one day Leah and I will end up passing through Huntsville on a work day and we’ll eat lunch with some people. I’ll vote for Rosie’s or Sandoval’s. They serve good Mexican food.

Zeke and my knee

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Not quite a week ago I was taking the dogs for their last walk of the evening when Zeke saw, heard or smelled something (or thought or hoped he saw, heard or smelled something) in the woods behind the house. He took off. I tried to stop him, and he jerked me forward a couple of steps as I tried to brace with my right leg. I came down hard on that leg and a sharp pain stabbed through my knee. I fell and rolled over. I held my leg up to my chest and hoped that the pain wouldn’t last long.

Of course I had to let go of the leash, but Zeke made it only about 30 feet before the leash snagged on a tree. After the pain eased, I limped down to him, grabbed the loose skin on his neck and explained that he should not do that again.

He said nothing.

My right knee is still giving me problems. Not much right now, but enough that I need ibuprofen for it. If I take ibuprofen before bed, my knee feels better when I get up in the morning, but I have to take another dose before I walk the dogs. For a few days I had to take little baby steps when going downhill. I still have to be careful, but it’s improving. I wasn’t sure at the time, but it looks like it’s going to stop hurting eventually and I won’t need to start shopping for a new knee.

I should have been better prepared. Zeke had been staring out into the night from the sliding glass door in the living room. When we went out, he had his alert look: head up, ears up, tail up. It’s hard to get him out of that mode if he thinks there’s something out there, but I should have tried harder. Or, I could have just let him go when he took off and not tried to stop him.

He’s a good dog most of the time. He just needs a little tweaking in the obedience-in-the-face-of-critters-in-the-woods department.

Rings of my father

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, my father liked Southwestern jewelry, and that extended to rings. These are all the Indian rings we could find when we went through his and my mother’s stuff while preparing their house for sale.

turquoise rings

The ring on the left has mother of pearl. I’m not sure what the green stones are. The next to the right is turquoise. The next one on the right is a coral hummingbird design similar to the watch band design in the earlier post. The last ring is another turquoise design. I can remember my father wearing all of these.
We also found several other rings. Most, or all of these rings were souvenirs that he brought back from Germany after the end of World War II.

war rings My father never wore any of these war souvenirs.
I have no idea what the two on the left are. The second from the left looks like glass, but I don’t know. The third from the left is a lion head design, which apparently was a fairly popular design not necessarily associated with Nazis or the German army. It looks like it might have had a stone or jewel in the lion’s mouth.
The final ring, a totenkopf or death’s head ring, is definitely German military. The sides are decorated with oak leaves and the inscription “west wall.” In this case, the German and English are identical, referring to the German defense of their western front.
I usually associate the death’s head symbol with the German SS, but it was used earlier than the Nazi era, for other units in the WW II German military, and even in the modern US military (showing extraordinarily poor judgment in my view). Unfortunately, some people are attracted to the mystique of the German military that was promoted by Nazi propaganda. Here is a quote from a Web site selling Nazi and WW II German military memorabilia regarding a West Wall death’s head ring: “Here is a ring that can be worn without serious reproach from fools, yet, it bespeaks the valiant struggle of Germany’s best in the crusade that has come to be known as WWII.” You can never tell what sick and sickening thing you can end up finding if you Google something.
The one ring I can’t show is the ring my father wore the most. In fact, he wore it continuously from November 1943 until the day he died in 2000 – his wedding ring. Someone at Floyd Medical Center stole it after he died there.

(On the night I posted about my father’s watch bands, I would his two old Hamilton watches, including his old WW II Army watch. They have to be wound daily, but they’re still running now, although not keeping particularly accurate time.)

Xmas in April and Begonias, too.

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This is my mother’s Christmas cactus.  I inherited it when she died in 2008.  It always bloomed at Christmas.

christmascactus

Since I’ve had it it begins blooming around Thanksgiving through Christmas.  But this year it bloomed through Christmas and then stated blooming again.  Maybe it’s my mother’s spirit if you believe. It never bloomed for my mother.

I have always loved begonias.  They are so pretty to me. I’ve had this one a year or two. I love to watch them die back in the winter and then  begin growing in the spring.

begonia