Farm Day

Click on photos for larger views (especially if you want to see just how blue these eyes are)

my "great" great-niece Lydia decorating a stepping stone

Hezbollah and Israel and the UN were coming to a ceasefire agreement. But we weren't paying any attention.

It was a perfect day, and more than 30 of us (my side of the family) were on the farm, loving each other, playing, making stepping stones, painting birdhouses, playing badmitten, volleyball, ping pong, croquet and foursquare. We were eating, singing, sitting on hay bales around the bonfire, playing a drum or a guitar. We were talking about our lives and watching little ones pick queen anne's lace, clover and timothy grass. We were riding Don's tractor. We were riding Lesley's bike "Betty."

We were sitting in the "atelier" feeling the residual life started by chickens 100 years ago.

We laughed until we cried. We cried until we laughed. We hugged and hugged.

Some of us slept and woke up and did it all over again.


Lydia (in Don's t-shirt) painting a birdhouse

Some of us took pictures. I only took a few, and the only ones I'm happy with are these two of Lydia, my nephew Paul's daughter. Forgive me, the rest of you, for not posting your photos here, but they are not worthy of you. Ginnie, maybe you will have a post of Farm Day soon. The rest of you, please visit there for an upcoming post of our wonderful day/s. (Ginnie, my sister, is our unofficial official family photographer. And she is SO good!)

There's a new post at Paris Deconstructed.

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Fleur de lis

Another symbol: fleur de lis.

To some, it represents the beauties of France, and even New Orleans!

To some, it represents the Royalists at the time of the French Revolution. Yikes!

These are in Dublin. Go figure.

Click on the post title for wiki's rundown.

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Eagle: courage or aggression?

Lately I’ve felt uncomfortable with two symbols of our country: the eagle and the flag. The flag has come to represent patriotism, which often seems, from my perspective, to be blind patriotism.

The bald eagle, America’s national bird and symbol, has come to represent aggression. I see it there on the dollar bill or monuments and cringe at the truth behind it: the strength, grace and courage, yes, but also the arrows in that one talon. Even Benjamin Franklin was not in favor of the bald eagle as national bird (he favored the wild turkey) because of its not-so-gallant ways (lazy, takes prey from other birds who’ve done the work, cowardly, in his opinion). (photo found at http://www.military-graphics.com/)


image found at http://watch.pair.com/eagle.jpg

I was stunned in my wanderings around St. Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin, to come upon the eagle lectern, pictured below. What? A bird of prey as the support for the words of God? We were told the eagle was chosen as a symbol for the gospel being taken forth boldly to the world. Isn’t this the wrong message? Maybe in hindsight it works as we look back at history, but what happened to the dove as an intentional symbol of the Church's message?


image found at www.stpatricks-cathedral.org/south.htm


image found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluetit/83588404/in/set-276807/

But then I remembered eagle feathers being associated with healing in Native American tribes. In fact, eagles symbolize many different things, according to www.eagles.org.

Here is a list of characteristics www.eagles.org says are associated with the eagle:

• bravery/courage
• messenger of gods and goddesses
• strength
• life-threatening effects of environmental pollution, habitat loss, wildlife persecution, and man's clash with nature
• closest animal to the Creator
• highest pursuits
• power
• eagle medicine: power of the Spirit
• high ideals

Just shows the complexity of language and cultural symbols. How do you view the eagle, symbolically or otherwise?

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Wild blackberries

On the northwest edge of our little farm wild blackberries grow like crazy. More than we can eat and preserve, although Don keeps pushing us to give it a good farm try. This Saturday is "Farm Day," a reunion for my side of the family, so we're determined to harvest as many of these jewels as we can for topping ice cream.

I am daunted by them, I admit. Their thorny, arching canes love to grab skin and clothes. And, poison ivy often grows nearby.

But then, when you see that black fruit dangling, almost hidden by tangled grassy cover, something else grabs hold. You develop an expert delicate touch with fingertips tugging ripe berries off the stem. (Blackberries differ from raspberries in that the "receptacle" stays intact; raspberries are hollow, leaving the receptacle on the stem. Also, some blackberries are twice as big as raspberries.) It's tricky to pick them without being stuck with an invisible thorn from the stem. The challenge is intoxicating because the rewards are so delicious.



White flowers first turn into green berries, then red, then almost black (very dark purple actually), which are ripe for picking. Some of these red ones will be ripe by tomorrow. See the berry, below, that is half red, half purple?




The Web site embedded in the post title tells of an English folktale I've never heard (and being just returned from Ireland, I'm intrigued by folktales). It tells of the day the devil fell from heaven, October 11, into a thorny blackberry bush. He avenges the day every year by spitting on (or peeing on, depending on the version) the blackberry bushes, making the berries inedible from that day on. No worries, for our blackberries are long gone by October 11.

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Feverish city

poor, sick daughter with a fever

We knew it would be hot. We didn't know it would be hot enough to hit record highs in New York City: 41 celsius/105 Fahrenheit the morning we arrived, Wednesday. With the heat index it felt as high as 119 in some parts of the City.

Lesley was feeling sick that day, her first day off since moving to NYC in June (she works at a coffee shop in addition to her design internship). Maybe slowing down let the bug catch up? We took her to the doctor Friday, and she had strep. :( When we left this morning she was already recovering with the help of the Z antibiotic she got.

As sorry as we were to see her sick, we didn't mind not venturing out into the City on such blasted days as Wednesday and Thursday were. We just went far enough to buy food, the concrete radiating heat up into our faces as we snuck out to the vegetable and meat markets. (I found out you don't pay the man who cuts the meat. He gives you a slip, and while he cuts, you take the slip to the man behind the window and pay him, he stamps the slip, and you go back to the cutting man with your stamped slip to get your cut-up chicken.)



With a little TheraFlu in her, we enjoyed sitting in Lesley's cool air conditioned apartment catching up on each others' lives, watching movies ("Munich", "Something New," and "Delicatessen"), and cooking and eating.

We loved seeing the Astoria, Queens neighborhood where Lesley and her roommate Julie live. Above is a lady in Lesley's building making sure the cannas, begonias and hydrangeas wouldn't suffer.

Here's a view of the apartment building across the street from Lesley. Silly me, I didn't take a pic of Lesley's building, which is just as pretty! Friday night we sat on Lesley's balcony -- it was finally cool enough -- and watched the world go by.

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New York Region Braces for Triple-Digit Temperatures

Yay, for us, we are heading to NYC tomorrow until Saturday to be with our daughter, Lesley! This photo is Lesley on a loom weaving a gorgeous fabric at art school where she just graduated. Now we get to see her in her new environment.

Too bad for us the heat shows no sign of letting up, here or in NYC. The headline on the NYTimes reads like the title of this post. Here's the article. Mayor Bloomberg has removed fees for state beaches and city pools so folks can cool down. All over the Midwest and East coast there are cooling centers for the elderly and anyone who needs to keep cool. We need to conserve energy to prevent power outages.

I doubt there will be time for a blog post from NYC, and anyway, I'll save a little bit of energy by not turning on a computer. :

I'll talk with you when we're back. Love you all!

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Good-bye now, green country

It feels right that our last exploring day here (yesterday) was spent at Tara and Newgrange.

The photo, above, is me standing on a hay roll atop the Hill of Tara, looking over 3/4 of Ireland (on a clear day they say you can see that much of the country from this site).

On Tara, 142 kings of Ireland were crowned. There are Celtic mounds here dating back 5,000 years where castles were built millenia later, but are now gone.

Tara is where I feel a strong connection with the yew trees planted more recently in the churchyard. I felt them welcome me last year in a way I have never felt welcomed before or since.



At Newgrange, there is a burial/worship mound INTACT that is 5,000 years old. We squeezed inside to see the structure of rocks that curves up to the capstone. I still don't really understand what it means to be that old. My mind can't grasp it. It's older than the pyramids at Giza by 1,000 years. Older than Stonehenge by 1,000 years. The builders of this structure created a narrow opening to allow the sun to shine through it into the structure on the winter solstice every year (and about two days either side of it).


Newgrange; the narrow opening that lets in the light on Dec. 21 is just in the middle where the dark squares are; our students are gathered around the opening

These sites are viewed as sacred and connected to the spirit world by some.

I'm not sure what it is I feel there, but it is strong. I am in awe of people who lived in alignment with nature and its cycles.




Below are two man-made structures. One 5,000 years old: a carved rock at Newgrange. The next a few hundred years old: a door at Trinity College Dublin.






They are just human forms. Beautiful, inviting, full of understanding about their cultures, if we study them.

I don't have a problem with religions, also human constructs (in my humble opinion), as long as they do not divide and violate the Life in all things. They are ways to reach God, understand God, worship God. They are doors. Sometimes closed, unfortunately.

Jonathan Swift said, "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

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