Day 120 (last post)

Last day of April, last day of blog.  I know I said a year, then I said six months, but once you have decided to give up on something it is rather pointless to continue, and I couldn't bear to think of another two months, so four months it is, 120 days it was.

There are so many things I would rather be doing with this time, usually about two hours a day.  I could be playing the piano, reading, painting, improving my french, writing something which might one day be actually published.  So.

A rainy wet day, filled with enthusiasm:

The middle school production of Seussical the Musical - brilliant!

My little 7th-graders bringing goodies and selling them at the bake sale for the Elephants - great verve and salesmanship!

My 12th-graders who are finished school until examinations, but came for the two-hour afternoon class yesterday and today, and promised to see me again on Friday - admirable!

Standing painting for my three-hour evening class tonight - delightful! (exhausting but delightful)

My beautiful tired son after his evening class coming up to find me on the 5th floor, lifting my heart with his big, tall hug - priceless!

So although I no longer have a keen interest in continuing this blog, I am still filled with enthusiasm for much of my everyday life.  Enthusiasm literally means having "a god within", and mine tends towards finding the beautiful, celebrating the good.

May you all be filled with enthusiasm, and do wonderful things!

And so.... goodnight!  Go well and safely.

Day 119

A wonderful passionate argument arose between two grade 9 kids in the Art room.  All about what constitutes hate speech, why people should have a right to say things out loud, but some things should not be shouted in a public place, hating the speech but defending the right to it, heated faces putting their points across, looking deep into one another's eyes, totally focused. And even more thought-provoking because one is a Muslim girl and the other a Jewish boy.  It got really fiery and there were almost tears, and then it calmed down, they calmed themselves down, well, the girl was the soothing influence, and slowly, steadily, they both got down from their high horses and realised that they were on the same side, the side of sense, the voice of reason. 

And this is the great thing about my school, the diversity of cultures, of faiths, of opinions, of languages.  And I truly believe that being a part of this school and studying within these curricula (French and IB) makes for students who think, who question. Of course it is not a perfect place and there are still silly fights and people who do not get on, and the occasional bully, but generally it is an amazing little place.

I have recently read American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which tells the story of a man called Shadow and his encounters with a wide number of gods, all brought over by people who came to America from all over the world, the immigrants who made this country.  So there are the old gods, the Norse gods, and Anubis and Thoth who run a funeral parlour, and leprechauns who get drunk and pluck gold coins out of the air.  There are pixies and fairies and all manner of gods, large and small.  They are all at odds with the new gods, Media and the Technical Boy and various others.

Anubis

Thoth, with Am-met.

It has made me wonder which gods I brought with me to America. 

Perhaps the old gods of my beloved mountains of Cape Town are here with me, their granite faces gazing out on to my meadow as they sit there on the large rocks, contemplating the different terrain.    And the god of Kalk Bay, the stern god of the place where I learned to swim, who is in all likelihood from Malaysia originally, haunts my Good Harbor Beach.  Also the tree-nymphs of the jacaranda and silver-oak of 10 Forest Drive, and the loquat and the pecan-nut tree of 16 Cross Street, suddenly find themselves going into suspended animation as they cling to the trunks of birch and white pine to survive the cold winter snows of Massachusetts.

And here on the mat in front of the fire, almost visible at times, are all my cats, Jenny-any-dot, Little Fat Cat, Grizzabella, Gracie, Mungo Jerry, Rumpleteaser, Clement, Quinn, Wilberforce, and little old Lily, who have joined Bast,  stretched out in bliss.  And lying in the kitchen and under the dining room table with Sarama are all the dogs, Timmy, Gwynn, Sacha, Mishkin, Liza, Luca, Jemima, Skye and Mad Molly Malone, all keeping watch over us here in this strange new land, this America.

Sarama, Vedic goddess of intuition and dogs

Egyptian statue of Bast, the cat-goddess.

Day 118

Ran/walked 3.5km through the greening grass, my path becoming clear again.

"To be fully human is to be wild. Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It’s the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home." ― Victoria Erickson

I went to a funeral yesterday, a memorial service for the husband of my friend and colleague.  Funerals are such sad occasions, because you imagine yourself in the position of the bereaved, or you are the bereaved, and life will never be the same, someone has suffered this terrible, unimaginable loss, and grief fills your throat.

And because everyone is feeling similar things, a kind of sad cloud develops, under which everyone is enveloped in melancholy, and tears which most people usually keep at bay, are freed to run down cheeks, and noses are blown or wiped with a sleeve. 

I think it is true that a lot of sex is had after attending a funeral.  My friend Maureen said that her last child was conceived right after her father's funeral, because her husband was doing his best to cheer her up.  I think it is also that urge, the most primal, most alive thing you can do, after having stared right in the face of the man with the sickle.

I have been loving these webcams streaming the little lives of the barn owl and the osprey.  Barn owls have these beautiful little heart-shaped faces, and apparently human beings are fascinated with them because they have large heads like us, and these big expressive eyes which look forward, and a beak structure which resembles a nose. 

The male barn owl spends most of his day away from his mate, and she seems fairly content and drowsy all day, but in the evenings she calls to him and he always comes flying down, landing, then waddling into the nesting box, to immediately leap up on her and copulate, after which they sometimes preen one another, and then he flies off to bring her a mouse or two.  She leaves the nest very briefly every now and then, then flies back in, once more rearranges the eggs, and carefully, delicately, settles her soft downy undercarriage over them. 

Male preening with female sitting on eggs in background

Lighter smaller male leaps on larger, darker female

male about to fly off to catch supper

Barn owls are dependent on farming which brings about a large rodent population, and are considered endangered in various parts of the world due to the use of pesticides.  Since 2002, a group of farmers in Israel and Jordan have been using barn owls for pest control instead of poison, in a wonderful project called the Barn Owl Project. 

one seventeen

Every year the MFA organizes a three-day exhibition called Art In Bloom.  Various garden clubs arrive at the museum and are given a random work of art to interpret with flowers.  With tiny little greeneries and blossoms breaking out all over the Boston outside the museum, these fully-fledged flower arrangements inside the hallowed halls are shockingly beautiful each year.  My first American friend Mary and I have an annual date to meet on this momentous occasion and walk around identifying flowers, oohing and ahhing and talking and laughing and having a grand meal in the middle of it all.  And just having a generally wonderful time together, as we always do. 

Here are some images from today, covering Natural and man-made:

piece illustrating Torah finials behind.

Egypt

interpretation of pot with ox-heads.

Rosy cheeks.

round forms

The sweetest work of art I saw, with flowers.

my favourite pic from today.

Day 116

I am changing my resolution to six months, half a year instead of a year.  A year is too long.  This blog takes away time from the other pursuits of my free time, like my piano, and painting, and reading, and other important life ambitions and everyday delights.

I hate to give up on things, I like to think I am someone with staying power, that person my parents taught me to be, long long ago.  But it is not anyone else I am giving up on, just my own silly resolution, and it is for good reasons, for the right reasons. 

So I am excited that I now only have 67 days left. I have still made it a round number, or if not a round number, a slice of time that means that I half-fulfilled the resolution, and I can be happy with that. 

Since arriving home from a day of helping friends move apartments, of heavy lifting and up and down stairs and lifts and through the labyrinthine corridors of the old Mill buildings in Lowell, I have been semi-glued to the webcams of my two little brooding females.  The osprey around the corner, and the barn owl far away in Texas, both incubating their eggs.  The barn owl with a clutch of five, and Ethel now has four!  I have noticed that they spend quite a lot of time dozing, and I suppose that they are also subject to those broody hormones pregnant women experience, the kind that numb your brain somewhat, that pull you a little further into yourself and the nurturing task your body is accomplishing.

They get up and preen themselves, exercise a little, then carefully, ever so carefully, they sort the eggs, move them about a little so that they each get a turn in the middle, and then gently lower themselves, their warm downy chests and tummies, on to the precious clutch.  It is a wonderful sight to behold.  

I have recently discovered this amazing singer, Fatoumata Diawara, and love both her singing and her music videos, so refreshingly different from the raunchy music videos of so many American songs these days, which all seem to feature barely-dressed women moving in extremely suggestive ways, and fully-dressed men pretending to be pimps.

She was born in Cote d'Ivoire to Malian parents, the same year as my daughter Jess, and, as a headstrong twelve-year old, was sent to be raised by an aunt, which is a very common practice in that society.  In fact she didn't see her parents for ten years!  Her aunt was an actress and one director cast Fatou in a couple of movies, and as a result she became quite famous.  Her family wanted her to settle down and marry and she was forced to give up the idea of acting and made a public statement to that effect.

But in 2002, after being offered a part in a show by Royal de Luxe, and having being refused permission to accept the offer by her family, (a single woman is like a minor in that society), she ran away, hopped on a plane, closely pursued by the police who had been alerted by her family's accusation of kidnapping. 

While touring all over the world with the Royal de Luxe company, someone discovered her singing backstage, encouraged her and, after teaching herself guitar, she has become almost exclusively a singer.  Her songs are about subjects like women's rights, relationships, the state of the world.

Fatou

Day 115

3.386 km, a little further every day.  Cool in the forest, warm in the sunny meadow, stumbled on a large black wing and then various other feathery bits, but no bones or head that I could identify.  I thought maybe a crow, although they seem too clever to be caught, but there are little tiny brown edges to the end of each feather on the wing, and I don't think crows have that, so I have no idea what poor bird it was which met its violent end on my running path. 

Another bird which has returned is the red-winged blackbird, a dark bird with a flash of red and yellow epaulettes on each shoulder.  They have a strange call, ending with a sort of screech. And females are completely different, resembling large chipping sparrows. 

female red-winged blackbird

male red-winged blackbird

Technology is so incredible in so many ways.  On the one hand I loathe the fact that no matter what I search for, if I am searching images there will be a naked woman showing me her bum or something that somehow got on to the page.  Last night when I looked for an image for "All Cows Eat Grass", the spaces in the bass clef, sure enough, there was a naked girl, in amongst all the musical notes and the actual cows eating grass. 

On the other hand, I have found a barn owl webcam in Texas, where a female is sitting on five eggs!  So I have another incredible "show" to keep track of, along with my osprey.  (Apparently, I have the porn industry to thank for just about every video invention, including webcams, so thank you, pornography, although you have my very pure and passionate hatred for all your women-degrading nastiness.)

Years and years ago, in the 90's, Tim was testing out chatrooms for the computer science department at Rhodes, when these were just starting out, and  a young Dutch woman contacted him and began flirting outrageously, and then sent him a topless picture of herself, saying it was "'n bietjie pikant"!  And when Emma, who was a teenager, tried the new webcam Tim was given, men just trained the camera on their penises.  What in the world prompts this desire to immediately want to show strangers their private bits and pieces? The human race has some very weird predilections.

Day one hundred and fourteen

A lovely blustery walk on the crazy empty beach, cold wind slicing through us, as my friend and I walked, arms linked, after a long lazy lunch in Gloucester.

wind manifested as sand

This morning I was lying in bed watching the delirious wind gust and blow into the room, fashioning the curtain into a horizontal billow at times parallel with the ceiling.  Then I noticed the shimmering area where the water of the birdbath on the deck is reflected on the ceiling, which is often very pretty to watch.  As I contemplated this phenomenon, I noticed how a strong gust of wind augmented and blurred the light.  I have no idea of the physics of this refraction, but I made a little movie of the experience.

My piano teacher suggested I write about the dragon piano teacher of my formative years, as therapy, in the hopes that it will free my sight-reading block.

When I was eight years old my best friend began piano lessons with a teacher who also taught her two older brothers.  Our families being so close, I too was duly enrolled with  Mrs Douglas, who lived in a little house almost halfway between our two houses, so all the children could happily walk to and from their lessons.  Except that my walk was never happy, but a foot-dragging, sore-stomached death-march, every Tuesday afternoon.

I think my friend and her brothers were more musical than I was, or they were tougher, or she liked them better, or their mother made certain that their nails were always neatly trimmed.  As far as I know they all did fine with her, but I did not fare as well.

Firstly, my nails seemed to grow at an alarming rate.  Mrs Douglas shouted at me every week because my nails made clicking sounds on the keys, and it seemed that they did that even if I had just had them cut!  (I was unable to cut my own nails as nail-clippers had not yet made it to South Africa, or if they had,  definitely not to our house, so although I could easily cut the nails of my left hand with the little nail scissors, my left hand behaved in a distinctly spastic manner when I attempted to do the same to my right hand nails.)

One day the dragon just grabbed me, pulling me on to her lap, where she proceeded to snip off my nails herself, with such little care that several of my fingers lost their tips too.  I remember leaving little bloody smudges on the keys, mingled with salty tears too, but she didn't seem to mind any of that.  At least there was no confounded CLICKING! 

Secondly, I never learned to sight-read.  So I dutifully learned all the letters of the notes, and about crotchets and quavers and semi-quavers and breves, etc..

All Cows Eat Grass, the spaces of the bass clef.

 What is it with all the good boys?  Don't good girls deserve fun too? (It was fun, not fruit, the way we learnt it.)

Perhaps I was so intimidated by Mrs Douglas that I memorized all the pieces very quickly and therefore didn't have to read, or I was so traumatized by having my fingers mangled that I just blocked out the usual process in which "every good boy deserves fun" gradually becomes "egbdf" and then imperceptibly becomes a note you see as you read all the notes along the bar.  This development is similar to how accomplished readers read the word "bed" without sounding out each letter, B... E....D, without even realising that the word is composed of these familiar letters, recognising instead the shape of the word, their eyes flying along to the next word almost before their brains comprehend the word "bed".

And thirdly, I am a failed composer.  I was so excited by the fact that these squiggles on the page made music when you played them on the piano that I wrote several little songs on the blank staff paper which I was given on which to do my homework.  I used quavers and minims and even dotted notes.  And there were words that I sang to go along with the music as I played.  I proudly presented my best composition, "A Queer Little Song", at my next lesson, only to have it pulled to pieces, almost literally, by the grumpy old Mrs Douglas.  Thinking back to this, I was doing brilliantly, actually using what I was learning, and she destroyed all that creativity and enthusiasm.  I never composed another song.

Having come back to the piano after forty years, I am in love with Chopin, with my beautiful Kawai piano, with the delight of rediscovering my fingers' ability to bring forth melody, emotion, passion.

But I still can't sightread well.  I spend long frustrating moments going through "all cows eat grass" in my head to get to "g", or counting down the lines to get to the bottom "b" of the bass clef.  I still have an excellent memory and so once I know a piece it is in my head and my fingers, and the music on the page means almost nothing to me, I can barely find my place if  I get lost in my head.  It is quite bizarre, because I am so willing to learn, so frantic to learn, but my old brain just refuses to improve. 

113

I ran again this morning, under a beautiful alto-cumulus sky, before the rain came over in a grey sheet.  3.26km of hard slog, heavy breathing, putting one foot in front of the other up the hills, willing myself not to stop.  And then on the flat, running like the wind over the last half a kilometer, like a horse with its head turned for home.

Sky with meadow

The pond was beautiful, twinkling with little peepers and the music of cardinals and tufted titmouses. It is a secluded secret place near the meadow, providing life to tadpoles, dragon-flies, turles, and a myriad others who live in and on the water, and to all who drink from there, including my tiny, and numerous, bees. 

Sky with pond.

There is pollen to be had and new little nubs on all the ferns.  Tiny spears of Canadian Mayflower are protruding through the leaf-cover.  And much courting and feathery display, from tiny goldfinches to great big gleaming Mr Tom the turkey. 

Tonight another painting from my Wednesday night course:

Sky with nude.

cent douze

2.303km run, and I'm back into it, running through the new morning, all green and golden and birdsong-filled.  My familiar, my meadow, up heartbreak hill, pausing in my mind for the grey rabbit-fur against the green grass, that was death a couple of days or nights ago. But I am still alive, and my old legs take me in an easy leap over the fallen tree across the path, no one chasing me, except the One with the sickle, but he's still pretty far away, I hope.

A few years ago I accompanied Tim and another couple for a weekend "Down-East" which is a common term for the coast of Maine, and comes from the sailors who used to sail from Boston to Maine, which was east of Boston, and they would sail down-wind, hence "Down East".  We travelled to the little town of Damariscotta Mills, where the annual alewife migration provides a feast for Ospreys and photographers.

Tim took some incredible pictures of these fantastic hunters, including this beauty:

Notice how they turn the fish face first so that the dangling prey is still aero-dynamic.

 I was fascinated by the fish-ladders and took many images of fish leaping up through the wonderful fish-ladders and the incredibly strong currents of the rapids. 

There is an osprey couple nesting in the little reservation around the corner from us, with a web-cam trained on them so that you can watch all the daily events of the nest.  Ospreys love building nests on platforms near the water, so the park managers decided to build a platform with a camera directed at it, and this is the fourth year this couple, Allyn and Ethel, have returned.

I discovered them last year and watched them avidly, rejoicing in the three eggs they laid, watching Allyn bring fish for the sitting female to tear apart in her very bloody fashion, sympathizing with Ethel hunkering down disconsolately in the rain, and then being so excited when one of the eggs hatched, and keeping track of this one little scrawny chick.

And then, disaster!  One Sunday I clicked on the osprey-cam and the nest was empty!  The little chick had only been twelve days old, still a funny-looking pink scrawny little thing, and they think that a Great Horned Owl took it.  Apparently those are the only birds brave enough to deal with Osprey parents.  I was devastated, as, I expect, were many thousands of other viewers of the webcam.

So I have been watching Ethel, who has now laid three eggs again, and is sitting proudly atop them.  According to calculations, in about 35 days the first egg should begin to hatch.  Oh, I have such hopes for them, these beautiful birds.

Ethel with two eggs.  She laid the third one yesterday. 

I am always attracted to animals which mate for life, being the romantic that I am, and Ospreys are one of those birds, like swans and puffins (Puffins can fly at a speed of 55 miles an hour [88km]!  They flap their wings 400 times a minute!)

So here's to Allyn and Ethel's success at procreating this year!

111

A beautiful day, I sat in the sun at the pond and watched birds, after feeding the bees who appear to be thriving.  Then I went for a ramble through the meadows but didn't encounter my deer friends today.

111
In number theory, a perfect totient number is an integer that is equal to the sum of its iterated totients. (in number theory, Euler's totient or phi function, φ, is an arithmetic function that counts the totatives of n, that is, the positive integers less than or equal to n that are relatively prime to n.)  That is, we apply the totient function to a number n, apply it again to the resulting totient, and so on, until the number 1 is reached, and add together the resulting sequence of numbers; if the sum equals n, then n is a perfect totient number. Or to put it algebraically, if

where

is the iterated totient function and c is the integer such that

then n is a perfect totient number.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_%28number%29

So 111 is a perfect totient number.

It is also the unlucky number in cricket, called the Nelson by all cricketers, named after Horatio Nelson, who apparently lost an arm and an eye and a leg.  Although he didn't really lose a leg, so perhaps he lost something else in his nether regions.

The score of 111 is considered unlucky and it is believed that more people go out on that score than any other, although this has not been statistically proven.  David Shepherd, the famous British cricket umpire, used to stand on one leg at 111, to ward off the evil Nelson.

The amazing David Shepherd.

I read about an amazing match between South Africa and Australia on the 11th of November 2011, (11/11/11), and the time being 11.11am, so that the scoreboard read: 11:11 11/11/11. At that exact moment in time, South Africa needed 111 runs to win, and almost the entire crowd at Newlands cricket ground and the umpire, Ian Gould, hopped about on one leg for that minute, to help South Africa go on and win the match!

Compost
In my childhood, my mum and dad always composted potato peelings and all other organics.  My mother would peel potatoes or butternuts, or cut the ends off green beans, or shell peas, always over a single page of a newspaper, and then wrap everything up neatly and this would all be buried, the newspaper decomposing alongside the waste.  Subsequently there was a little covered bin which was regularly emptied by my dad, usually dug into the ground and then gone back to at a later date and used in his garden.  When they moved into their little retirement home he had a big vegetable garden in which he grew amazing vegetables of all kinds which he would give away to everyone, always having a surplus because of his green thumb. 

I have had a vegetable garden for much of my adult life, and even when I haven't, have always felt compelled to compost all our food waste.  Here in America, there are nocturnal 'critters' who sort through your compost for edible delicacies, and who like to spread everything out over a wide area in the process. 

In 2009, San Francisco became the first municipality to pass an ordinance making it mandatory for everyone living there to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfill trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs.  The city has a goal of zero waste.  Would that all other cities would follow suit. 

When we lived at our beloved 16 Cross Street and the boys were just little things of three or so, Tim was working in the garden with them, burying all the compost from the big bin.  When Tim had put everything in the big hole he covered it up with soil again, and then led the little boys in a stomping dance all over the earth which needed to be tamped down by their little feet and his big feet.  They were singing and stomping to beat the band when I came out to see where they were, and suddenly Matthew bent and picked up something up out of all that fertile earth, had a good look at it and then turned to me and said, "Look mom, I found something like a woman!"  It was a little forked stick, looking a bit like this:

Amazing, this little boy had a vision of the archetypal woman somewhere in his collective unconscious. Why did he immediately identify it as a woman and not a man?

Perhaps we can hark back to ancient Venus figurines, because for about 30 000 years before Christianity, the earth mother goddess featured prominently in many religions all over the world.

Stylized “Venus” figurines carved in ivory, Aurignacian-Gravettian (c. 24,800 bce), from Dolní Věstonice, Mikulov, Moravia, Czech Republic; in the Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic. Height (left) 8.3 cm and (right) 8.6 cm.

Lady of Villers-Carbonnel comes from northern France and is believed to be over 6,000 years old. The 21 cm figurine was made from local clay and was found in five or six of fragments amongst the ruins of a neolithic kiln.

It was the sweetest thing, really, and we all remember it, this darling little tow-headed boy looking up with such wonder, his first discovery of a lifelong fascination, the allure of the feminine.

Day One ten (110)

Happy Easter/Ishtar!  Happy happy Sex and Fertility Day!  Eggs and Bunnies rule!

I took my ghost-dog Molly for a little sobering walk after arriving home slightly tipsy from a wonderful delicious Easter dinner with Angelina and her family!

It is funny how we always say to children, "Wow, but you are getting so tall!" as if we don't really expect that to happen, as though it is a big surprise that children actually grow.  But still, it is somehow miraculous that this tiny little gorgeous thing, held by a much younger Matthew too, in a photograph taken exactly four years ago to the day,

has grown into this beautiful tall four year-old of today.

Such a bright little bundle of energy, such a little enchantress!

Angelina and her lovely mum.

There is a little deer trio whose territory is very close to my house, I think, as I often encounter the three of them together.  Today one gave me a little show.  She was as curious as I was, and stood for a long time contemplating me before turning and giving a dramatic acrobatic leap and away!

A little blurred but what athleticism!

All the little spring buds and blossoms and leaves are slowly emerging, out of the cold of last week, and the bees have released their queens, so there will be eggs and new babies soon, and workers toiling the happy meadow which will produce Celandine and Milkweed and Butter-and-Eggs and Evening Primrose, amongst others, for their sensual delight. 

sunset and spider-web

Robin and nest shape.

"And the seasons, they go round and round...."

109

I think there should be a celebration for couples who have been together for 20 years.  It could be called a wedidit celebration.  A celebration of not giving up, of staying together through all the huge ups and downs of life, no matter what they are, like recovering from a miscarriage, suffering the death of someone close, the unbelievable miraculous experience of having a baby, sleepless nights after the birth of said baby, sexual inequities, illness, the deep connections of sensual ecstasy, money troubles, sharing the love of a growing family, affairs that break someone's heart, dealing with teachers at parent/teacher conferences, holidays, arguments, snot en trane, belly-laughs, little kindnesses, small cruelties, fulfillment of dreams, slashing of hopes. 

All their friends could put on their most outrageously colourful clothes, and come to the celebration bringing a bottle and a plate of food, a song or a dance or a work of art to give, and the couple could say a few words in public, a declaration of their love, of their independence and their dependence. And afterwards all the friends would clean the house for the wedidit couple, and in the morning they would get into their little car and go on a little trip for a few days, an "aftermoon".

Thinking that the spring was actually here, I took out the erythrina last weekend, and was going to take all the large trees out but got tired halfway through.  So my poor erythrina, which is now about 10 feet high, grown from a lucky bean I found in a bottle which came with our furniture all those years ago, has given up its ambitious verdant new-leafed appearance after the snow which fell overnight on Tuesday!

Lucky beans, which have blood-clotting properties.

I came out to find the poor plant, not only covered in snow, but also flat on the ground across the path, having been blown over by the frigid wind.  So I picked it up as tenderly as I could, with frozen hands, getting jabbed by the hooked prickles which grow on the trunk of the tree.  Ungratefully, it proceeded to shower me with all the snow collected in its still fluttering leaves!  Most of which went straight down the back of my unsuspecting neck and did not put me in a good frame of mind for the long day ahead of me.

Hooked thorns on the trunk of the erythrina lysistemon

But all is forgiven, because this is one of my babies, a little part of South Africa which has grown in a foreign country just as my boys did, into a tall young beautiful presence, with thorns to fend off evil and soft spots of gentleness. 

The little boys in South Africa with their friends Alex and Phillie!