Some old friends have come back ...
Does anyone except me and my wife remember this thing?
I call it "Windscratcher" The upended rhododendron was a gift of the River during the 2004 Floods. The pointed stone I found while snorkeling in the Keys in 2004 and knew was perfect for the assignment and the "rope" is made of Oriental Bittersweet, which is everywhere. The point of the exercise is that the wind blows and the stone scratches designs in the sand. Here's a closer-upper view:
That color sand was all they had. Vomitous!
I also finished the New Ghost of Ethel Bledsoe (took 10 inches off the length of her dress) and much to my wife's consternation, hung her over the River down near the Meditation Garden. I think she is lovely: 
And this thing that I made while listening to the song "Conventional Wisdom" is back, as the suburbanite-special bushes the contractor used to hide the heat pump needed trimming again:
Why are we all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that's just so unconventional?
To help this mating pair of arches along, I have provided them with some "mood lighting" in the form of a solar lamp: 
A friend of mine, whom I have never actually met, forwards this shot of some stonework in Whittier, N.C., which is about 2 hours west of Asheville: 
That's some interesting stuff.
I think it's waycool and hope to take a tour someday. It's worth a two-hour drive -- with the right music on the radio.
I mowed the Avant Garden today in preparation for the AC-T plant exchange tomorrow at 14:30 (that's 2:30 p.m. to you and me) and right now it looks the best it has in a while, though I had a busy week at work and never got around to doing the two-years-worth-of-weeding-in-two-days. Ah well, maybe the Gardening Angels will show up.
Dave
Grandma would have liked her funeral. The procession was long, and cars all along the way pulled over and stopped, their drivers smiling compassionately. There were lots of flowers and casseroles -- and nine green bean dishes -- and relatives and memories. My aforementioned brother told a story about how Grandma had called him up crying and apologizing because three days earlier, he had stopped by hungry (unannounced, too) and she didn't have anything to feed him that day. That was her in a nutshell. As I went down the table marveling at the food, I wondered how many grieving families Mary Montine Ellington had cooked for in her 88 years. It was a big part of her raison d'etre, bless her. She's resting in peace.
On March 22, the day before the funeral, my little brother (Donald, 32) took me to his house in Macon to spend the night. We went some crazy backroads in his little VW with the music on loud and stopped by Juliette, Georgia, where the movie Fried Green Tomatoes was filmed. We drove across the ugly old Ocmulgee River and stumbled about a bit until this popped up: 
Better photo than stack.
I like the natural sepianess of the photo better than the stack itself, but usables were scarce.
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
That's a really sweet story about your Grandmother.
Nice blog!
Cheers,
Heather