I love this flower, it is considered a noxious weed by some, but is actually good for tomato plants when grown nearby, also beneficial to lettuce. There is usually a little red centre to the umbrel, and this is where Queen Anne pricked her finger while making lace.
It reminds me of my mother, who learned to make lace when she was in her 70's! She just set her mind to something and then did it. For her 80th birthday we gave her a computer and she learned how to use email so that she could better communicate with us in America, and with others all over the world! She was an extremely intelligent woman, who should have been a doctor or someone amazing like that. Queen Joan.
We only have just one life, and what does one do with it? I think that women often don't reach their full potential because they are weathered down like rocks at the shore, by pregnancy and childbirth, the raising of children and the keeping of the home.
Women spend so much time doing housework, which is the most ridiculously boring occupation. Even babies can be really tedious, when you have to watch them constantly, cater to their many needs of being kept dry and full-tummied. And all you long to do is read a book! I mean, I loved all my babies, but they are trying when you have them full-time! I remember when the boys were tiny, I seemed to be a kind of cow, just producing liters and liters of milk, feeding them and changing them and hoping that they would sleep long enough, at the same time, for me to have 20 minutes to myself! And how lovely it was when the girls came home from school, I would long for them, and overwhelm them with talking, hugs, attention. They were capable of intelligent conversation, of doing things for themselves.
I think the washing machine is the greatest invention ever, and so much of obstetric and domestic life in the Western world is easier due to technology, so I am glad that I am a woman living here in the 20th and 21st centuries, in that respect, but I am sad that we live in an era where we are killing the earth, causing mass extinctions, raping the ocean floor for oil, stomping away from the natural world in our quest for more. More things, more possessions, more ways of escaping from the tedium of life in video games, virtual reality, drugs, the 3-minute sound-bite or video.
Perhaps there will be another transformative turnaround, which is in the nature of humankind, towards a more spiritual connection with the earth, towards solar and wind energy, gardening, growing good food and not just corn, towards treating animals as sentient beings worthy of care and respect, towards quieter pursuits like reading, playing imaginary games, which all my children have done with wonderful creativity and abandon. (When the boys came to America they couldn't at first find anyone who played such games, but then they gravitated towards kindred spirits like Matt P. and instructed several other children of the neighbourhood in their inventive ways.)
Here is a quick little drawing I did of Nick sitting waiting his turn at the orthodontist this afternoon, huge hands holding the magazine, this long-limbed child of mine.
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