Sunday poem and pictures

I had a hard time finding a poem about irises but I eventually found this one. It's interesting but I'm not sure what it means.

The Irises
by Mark Irwin

The irises were so beautiful I had trouble
leaving. One day, one day it will be lonely
when people go. I wanted to linger a bit
longer among irises. Some white, some purple,
some pale blue. What can one say among
irises. One's speech grows dumb as they touch
the air. I wanted to linger a bit longer
among irises. The moment moves. Are you
ready? I think the body's a mansion
with two doors, one luminescent and open,
one dark and closed. I wanted to linger
a bit longer among irises. I felt something
opening into the room among our tangled
arms. One day, one day it will be lonely. Petals,
paper doors, walls, clouds. I wanted to,
you wanted to. That your desire may spill
into eternity, an impatience whose lingering is all.

Here are some pics of our Oregon wild irises which are just now starting to bloom. The first four pics are of the Douglas iris, our most common wild iris. I'm not sure of the names of the others yet as I have just started to study our native irises.

Winston Churchill

I wrote this late last night after I saw a comment by Dee, Little Miss Chatterbox, on my previous post about ugly people. She wrote:

Winston Churchill looks pretty crabby in a lot of his pics and he was a great man. How does that factor in?

Coincidentally she posted the following Churchill quotes on her blog yesterday:

"All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."

"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."

"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else."

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

"One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half."

"We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job."

Yes, Winnie does look crabby in most of his pics. He was a very serious man who did not take his responsibilities lightly. He lived through some of the most terrible times this world has ever seen.

He was for most of his life a lone voice crying in the wilderness about the dangers first of Nazism and then later communism. Of course he was worn down and melancholy. But, to me, he was still one of the most beautiful people who ever lived. His beauty is there in his twinkling eyes, his stubborn chin and his stoical "stiff upper lip."

Churchill was born in 1874 to a comfortable but not very wealthy family. His mother was American and that made him sympathetic to the USA. He was regarded as a bit of a dunce and did not complete high school but went to military college instead and then served in one capacity or the other in three wars.

In 1899 he went to South Africa as a war correspondent during the Boer War. He was captured by the Boers and made a prisoner of war but made a daring escape. His story of his escape made him famous and he entered politics in Britain as a member of the Conservative Party.

However his sympathy for the Boers (whom he had come to admire while in captivity) led him to join the Liberal party in 1904. As a Liberal, he helped to negotiate an end to the Boer War and participated in the creation of the welfare state, which introduced state health insurance, the minimum wage, and imposed a limit on work hours.

When World War One broke out in 1914, he joined the Royal Navy. He took full responsibility for the failed Dardanelles campaign and resigned his commission. He also thought that it was the end of his political career so, in 1916, he joined the army, but soon after that he was recalled by the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who made him the Secretary of War.

After the end of WWl, he went back into politics as a Liberal but in 1922 he lost his seat in Parliament. In 1924 he joined the Conservative party and served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer until 1929. Then he gave up politics and spent the next ten years painting (he was a gifted artist) and writing several books.

He was the first person to see how dangerous Hitler was and began to predict an impending war. He was unable to sway the appeasement government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Churchill knew that British involvement in World War II was inevitable so he returned to the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1940 he became the Prime Minister and remained in this position for the next five years.

The German occupation of France, Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler, and the official neutrality of the United States meant that Britain became solely responsible for waging war against Hitler. When Germany launched an aerial bombing campaign, the Battle of Britain, Churchill’s stubbornness and tenacity became a symbol of the “never say die attitude” of the British people. He was the British Bulldog.

Many of the photos of Churchill are from this time and yes, he did look crabby, as Dee says, but he never gave up hope and flashed the V for Victory sign and a big smile wherever he went. Eventually FDR came to Britain's help but not until Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked Russia.

Churchill had to deal with Uncle Joe but he despised and distrusted Stalin. He held his nose and worked to create the "Grand Alliance" comprised of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, and through this coalition, was instrumental in the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile back in Britain there was a new mood and the Conservative Party was seen as the party of the privileged rich by an increasingly socialist population. Just before the war ended, Churchill was ousted as Prime Minister when the Liberal Party won the general elections of 1945.

For the next six years, Churchill remained in private life, working on his autobiography, a history of World War II, and his painting. Nevertheless he remained an influential character in England, warning about the spread of communism and the coming Cold War.

I was too young to notice when he was re-elected as Prime Minister in 1951 at the age of 77 or when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 or when he resigned as PM in 1955. But I do remember that he remained as a Member of Parliament until 1964.

When I was about 13 or so in 1960, one of our reading assignments was Churchill's story of his capture by the Boers and his escape. I can remember not quite being able to imagine the grumpy old fart that I knew as a daring young war correspondent.

Churchill died at the age of 90 (in spite of the fact that he drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney) on 24 January 1965. By that time, I was well aware of him and of how great a man he had been.

In spite of suffering from dark melancholia most of his life, Winnie was a jovial and playful man in public, famous for flirting with beautiful women but he never cheated on his darling Clementine to whom he was married for 57 years.

Here are some non-crabby pics of Winnie for Dee. And I'll end this with another Churchill quote from Dee's blog:

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

Churchill in military college.













Winnie during the Boer War in South Africa where he is adored by the Boers to this day.















With his fiancee, Clementine, just before they married in 1908.



















Winnie in the Royal Navy at the beginning of World War 1.



















Winnie flirting with Red Cross nurses.



















Welcoming Canadian PM MacKenzie to 10 Downing Street in 1941.















At the Teheran Conference with Stalin and FDR.













At the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Truman.















Sir Winston Churchill on the occasion of his receiving a Knighthood in the Order of the Garter.


















My favorite photo of Winnie as I remembered him in the twilight of his life. This is what I call true beauty. You can see years of suffering in his face but he is glowing with a deep inner joy and love that comes from a life of devotion to something nobler than the ego.



















Winnie flashing his famous V for Victory sign. In the bottom right he has turned his hand around which is the British equivalent of the rude American raised middle finger - Up Yours!

Sunday poem and pictures

The White Birds

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)


I WOULD that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea:
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can pass by and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that never may die.

A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose,
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam—I and you.

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more:
Soon far from the rose and the lily, the fret of the flames, would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea.

Here are some pics of the seafoam tree, holodiscus discolor, which is also know as oceanspray, creambush or ironwood (because the wood is so hard and was used by the natives for making tools.) It is a native of the Northwest.

I had never seen one until I moved here and, as soon as I saw a picture of one in my native plant book, I wanted one. I hunted in every nursery within a fifty mile radius but could not find one. I was not sure what they looked like when not in flower so I did not realize that we already had two. The next May when they flowered, I found them growing wild on the edge of our forest behind the woodshed.

It's a deciduous shrub that normally grows to 7 feet but can be 10 feet tall. The flower clusters, which are edible, are cream colored and fragrant from May through July. It has a strong perfume that is very sweet and pleasant from a distance of about 20 feet but, up close, it smells like old newspapers. When the flowers fade, they still hang on and look like dirty windblown seafoam clinging to the tree.

The top pic is of Digby running towards me framed by the seafoam flowers. The bottom pic is the way the flowers will look in August when they begin to die and turn brown.

Meanwhile down on Chickenback Mountain Farm

This is a week old bantam chick - about the size of a thumb. We now have seven new chick survivors out of a total of ten. One froze to death in a late frost; one was beheaded by vicious terrorist Leghorn hens and another weak one died shortly after birth.



















Me doing time behind bars in the chicken-run babysitting the pullets.















I spent the day sitting in the chicken-run today keeping an eye on the 13 six week old pullets which I had bussed over to the main run from their nursery for a day trip. I'm not going to force intergration but they did need to see what life is like in the real "chicken eat chicken" world. Apart from the fact that the Leghorn hens are nasty vicious bitches and wanted to kill the pullets, it was mostly a success as long as I was there to maintain a semblance of law and order. Then I made the mistake of leaving the three eldest chicks in the main run while we had dinner. After dinner Chas heard them screaming for their lives and rushed in to find the three pullets cowering in a corner with slashed combs and blood all over the nesting boxes. So, we pulled them out and let them sleep with the bantams as they have been doing.

We know exactly who the killers are, Cecil the Rhode Island Red rooster and Alphie and Bettie the two Leghorn hens. These three chickens were given to us by our born-again Christian neighbors who belive that dinosaurs still roam the earth. Now I know why they believe that because these chickens that they gave us ARE dinosaurs - worse than Tyrannosaurus Rex, cold-blooded killers. We don't raise our chickens to be Phariseeic thugs or nasty Mahomedanazis ready to stone sinners to death at the drop of a feather. So I pronounced a death sentence on the three dinosaurs tonight. In fact I was ready to kill them right there and then but it was not practical as we had not sharpened the axe and it was getting dark anyway. But they will all be beheaded, plucked and frozen by this time tomorrow. Well, I might not freeze all three. I think I'll roast Cecil with potatoes and serve him for dinner tomorrow night with gravy and broccolli. Nothing like freshly butchered chicken.

For more Tales from Chickenback Mountain, read Chas' Farm report:

The second chick we named "Joy", because she was a little bundle of joy, hopping up and down, extremely cute (all baby chicks are cute, but Bantam chicks even more so, because they are so tiny). Here is a photo of Joy, with her new sister, "Blondie". Joy is the one with the black makeup around her eyes, like Britney Spears. Blondie is the plain old ordinary one:



Unfortunately, not long after this photo was taken, little Joy "Britney Spears" Chickie Chick was beheaded by Alphie and Bettie, the two Leghorn hens on the other side of the partition in the coop. Andy had lined the bottom of the partition with chickenwire to keep any chicks from getting through, but apparently, Bantam chicks, being so small, can manage to do so. I only discovered she had gotten through when I saw Bettie chasing Alphie around the chicken run, trying to snatch the decapitated little body of Joy out of Alphie's mouth.

Chickens are barbaric savages! Such behavior is hardly endearing, although I don't doubt that it probably qualifies them to have their own seat at the U.N.

The rest of Chas' Farm Report is here.

Brokeback Mountain

There really used to be queer cowboys in California and Oregon. There was a shortage of women and men did "shack up" together and, like all predominantly male environments, the Wild West attracted more than it's fair share of queers. Also the West did not have quite the same societal taboos as the East. Even the Forty-Niners accepted "shacking up." Homosexuality between unmarried men in the West was euphemistically known as “mutual solace” in the 19th century.

In his book, "Queer Cowboys," Chris Packard quotes Badger C. Clark's 1917 poem, "The Lost Pardner:"

We loved each other in the way men do
And never spoke about it, Al and me,
But we both knowed, and knowin' it so true
Was more than any woman's kiss could be.
We knowed – and if the way was smooth or rough,
The weather shine or pour,
While I had him the rest seemed good enough –
But he ain't here no more!

There has even been a movie hinting at gay cowboys before: Howard Hawks' 1948 classic "Red River," featuring John Ireland as a tough guy with the effeminate name of Cherry Valance. In the movie, Cherry makes a pass at a cowboy played by Montgomery Clift (whose real-life homosexuality was barely concealed by the studio system) by admiring his gun and comparing women to Swiss watches. "You ever had a (suggestive pause) Swiss watch?" Cherry asks with a lascivious smile. The film also includes a scene with Clift doing a mocking dance with the ultimate cowboy icon, John Wayne.

Anyway, the premise of "Brokeback" wasn't anything that I had not heard of before and I did not expect to learn anything new or be amazed and awed. I was just expecting some entertainment when we watched this movie last night and the scenery is beautiful - it's filmed in Alberta.

The director, Ang Lee, is competent. I'd seen two of Lee's movies before - "Sense and Sensibility" and "Hulk." I enjoyed the former but it's hard to make a really bad movie out of a brilliantly written story. Even a badly made movie based on Jane Austen will be carried by her witty dialogue and satirical observations of the human condition. "Hulk" was entertaining and didn't disappointment me as much as it disappointed the fans of the TV series on which it was based. I don't expect much from comic book stories.

The story of "Brokeback" is good and it's realistic. It was written by Annie Proulx (who wrote also "Shipping News" and I did enjoy the movie based on that book.) It's a story that happened in small towns everywhere before the era of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll changed the world forever. I saw tales like this unfold when I was a teen and lived with similar sufferings of my own. Even now, I know of predicaments out here in the sticks where men get married and lead double lives.

I really wanted to like this movie because I was so looking forward to being controversial by writing a rave review of it and shocking all my conservative Christian readers - but I didn't like it.

In the interestes of full disclosure, let me say right up front that I really don't like any of the current batch of Hollywood actors not only because they're leftist halfwits but because they can't act - mostly they can't speak properly. None of them enunciate well. They all mumble and I need subtitles to understand what they're saying. And not one of them has a decent voice. They either squawk or squeak. I guess it is no longer fashionable to have a beautiful bass-baritone voice like Gregory Peck. I realize that declaming one's lines like Laurence Olivier is no longer necessary (thank goodness) now that we have mikes and over-dubbing but is it really necessary for the actors to mumble their lines behind their hands or into each others armpits? You can still make the acting seem natural without speaking like sloppy drunks.

Maybe I'm just getting too old to watch movies anymore. I'm convinced that the sound is engineered for a generation of deaf people who lip-read the dialogue. Anyway, I'm saying this because, right from the start, the movie annoyed me because of the mumbling and that may have made me irritable and unreceptive to it.

No, what was most annoying was the usual Hollywood phoniness and inauthenticity. Instead of just telling a good story straightforwardly, it was obvious that the Hollywood lefties were trying to push a message and the whole thing just came off fake. It was also obvious that the director and the actors knew nothing about rural life. It's a hard and simple life and rural folk are unpretentious, blunt and often coarse. Maybe they thought mumbling was a good way to show coarseness.

Ten minutes into the movie, one of the guys has just loaded his rifle and is about to slip it into his saddle-holster when the other guy bumps him - you know, horsing around. Sorry, no sane person horses around with someone who is holding a loaded gun. Then there's another scene where they're supposedly sorting out sheep and start dragging them backwards around the pasture. It was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I was puzzled as to what the point of the scene was. I guess the director thought, "I better make these pansies look manly and show that they're strong enough to drag sheep." The fact is, he didn't have to - the guys were obviously tough and virile. Maybe it was a secret joke about "the love that dare not bleat it's name."

Okay, I'll stop there and just sum it up with three words: phony, phony, phony. Three thumbs down from Chas, Andy and me.

Update, May 21st: We talked about the movie last night and decided that we probably would have enjoyed it if there had not been so much hype about it beforehand. It actually was a low-budget movie and, if I had watched it without expectations, I may have enjoyed it - IF the actors hadn't mumbled and the sheep had been prettier.

I pick my battles carefully

There were conservative critics of Bush even before his re-election but they knew that, even if Bush was not a real conservative, at least he took the WOT seriously unlike the alternative. It was also obvious that Bush was a more honest and decent man than Kerry. So conservatives re-elected him.

Then, last year, I started noticing increased criticism of Bush by conservatives. Even I was disappointed with his failure to curb Congressional spending and his own big-spending ways but I didn't carp because I don't expect perfection in a human being let alone a politician who has to do a constant balancing act. Not even my favorite Prez, Reagan, got everything right.

I even shocked some people by saying that Bush was not a real conservative. There was some discussion as to which recent Republican President was a real conservative. Reagan seemed to be the benchmark. At the time I pointed out that Reagan was an anomaly. The GOP establishment certainly didn't like him at first. He even called himself a "libertarian."

This led me to a discussion of all Republican Presidents and what was the definition of conservative. I pointed out that not too many Republicans were conservative in the way that it has come to be defined since Reagan - small government, low taxes, states rights. Lincoln certainly didn't fit the bill. Teddy Roosevelt called himself a Progressive. Eisenhower was the first to push for "Civil Rights" and send troops to the South to enforce it. Nixon was also a big-government guy. I concluded that Republicans were on the whole not conservative as it is understood nowadays.

None of this bothers me because I am first and foremost a Republican. My admiration and loyalty to the GOP goes back a long way; back to before I even came to the USA. My grandfather, Gustavus Adolphus Joubert, admired Teddy Roosevelt and adored Abraham Lincoln. He named his only son, my uncle, Abraham Lincoln Joubert. So I grew up with Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, as one of my main heroes closely followed by Teddy Roosevelt. When Eisenhower became President, I found another hero. By the time Nixon became President, I was long past hero-worship and found him terribly flawed. Still I admired his stubbornness and could not condemn him outright as so many of my generation did. Then came Reagan, who was President when I became a US citizen. To this day I treasure my form letter from him congratulating me on being naturalized. So yes, I am an extremely partisan Republican who believes firmly in Reagan's 11th commandment, "Thou shalt not criticize another Republican."


A couple of months ago I had a public falling out with someone who calls himself a "conservative" and who is a member of "Blogs for Bush." He started relentlessly bashing Bush and eventually fessed up that he was not a Republican but an independent who wanted a third party. Now, to me, anyone who calls for a third party is either unrealistic about American politics or is a shill for the Democrats because third parties are a for-sure way to hand elections to the Democrats.

In the months since then, more and more conservative bloggers started to criticize Bush. The illegal alien problem has finally shown how big a split there is in the GOP. That's fine by me but, when Republicans start calling for boycotting elections and handing Congress over to the Democrats, I draw the line. This is what I called "throwing a tantrum" - you know the way spoilt brats will squeal, "I won't play the game if I can't get my own way."

I know that conservatives never really were happy with Bush from the start but I think some are now using the immigration issue as an excuse to finally say what they really thought about Bush all along: "He's not a real conservative."

I've known that all along and it doesn't bother me for several reasons: both parties in the USA are "big tent" parties. In Europe and Canada they would be split into many parties. There are plenty of things I don't like about the GOP. My ideal GOP would be one which adhered to Reagan's libertarian (actually classical liberal Whig like our Founders) philosophy but I'm content with a party that puts business before welfarism.

The GOP has been the party of big business since Lincoln first split from the Whigs and is to this day the party of the plutocracy. That suits me fine. I think like a businessman. I trust other businessmen. I trust capitalism. It isn't perfect but the alternative is anathema to me. Egalitarianism and socialism isn't natural to the human race. It must always be enforced by totalitarian governments. Capitalism is the only system that allows for individual freedom. Anything else is not freedom.

Yes, I agree with Bush on the immigration problem. Bush is dealing with it like a businessman. I do understand that a Mexican invasion could destroy our Republic if it is allowed to continue uncontrolled but, to me, our own home-grown socialists are more dangerous than the Mexicans. We can absorb controlled immigration and insist on assimilation if we can shut the commies up and tell them to stuff their multiculturalism. Some people are going to fight the immigration battle but I'll keep fighting the fight I've been fighting for 40 years - against western commies. They're our most dangerous enemies - not Mexicans or even Muslims.

I also know that Bush and the plutocrats have seen the future and it probably isn't what any of us want. The future is brown and it is probably a lot more socialist than any of us would like. Bush thinks like all modern plutocrats do - globally. He is also dealing with this issue the way his rich cronies want. They want cheap labor both here and abroad. They can build their factories in India and China but how do they staff their service industries here? With cheap imported labor.

Some people think that we do not have to import cheap labor to do jobs that Americans won't do if we paid decent wages. Maybe a few Americans will line up to get paid $20 an hour to pick lettuce but are we willing to pay $10 for a head of lettuce and $50 for a plate of food in a restaurant? I still doubt that most Americans would consider picking lettuce from what I've seen. They prefer having meetings to doing heavy lifting.

And yes, we could automate agriculture but not the service industry which now employs more migrants than agriculture which is already largely automated. I don't know too many Americans who would like to wash dishes or clean hotel rooms for the rest of their lives.

I'll end by saying that, like Bush, I'm a Republican and a businessman first, and a conservative second. To be a businessman, you must adapt or die. We are not going to be able to turn back the clock to some imagined conservative Utopia. Whites are in the minority. Most of the world's population is brown. Conservative whites are in the minority even among whites. Most whites in the west are liberals/socialists.

I pick my battles carefully and my battle is against the rising tide of socialism/communism. I'll stick to defending the American Revolution and our Constituion. It's already been eroded considerably and will be eroded even more but I hope that I can try to educate youngsters into understanding freedom and individual sovereignty. I'll die contented if I've inspired just one other person to keep our American dream alive.

Tony Snow's ostomy

On his first day in front of the cameras today, Snow talked about the cancer that he had last year. He said,"It was the best thing that ever happened to me." I know what he means - sickness and misfortune can be a blessing in disguise.

When Snow's appointment as WH Press Secretary was first announced, I decided to Google him. I knew that he had had colon cancer and wondered if he had a colostomy or ileostomy. So I typed in "Tony Snow colostomy" and found a bunch of commie crap about wanting "to see his head and his colostomy bag explode while he dodged questions about Chimpy Bushitler." That simply confirmed for me that my decision never to read rubbish like "Daily Kos" was the right thing to do. (Sorry I don't do links to commie crap.)

Anyway, from the little sane stuff that I found, I could not be sure whether Snow had a colostomy or an ileostomy which is much more drastic and difficult to live with. A colostomy is not that much trouble but an ileostomy can be quite disabling. I hope that Snow does not have an ileostomy. It's hard enough to function with a colostomy. I know because I had a colostomy for two years.

I don't usually talk about health problems. I got that from my mother. If ever anyone started to moan about their health, my mom would snap, "Don't give me an organ recital." But I'm going to tell you this story because it will show why I admire Tony Snow. (I'm warning you that there's an organ recital and a gross pic ahead.)

For ten years I had "stomach problems." I went to dozens of doctors. (I was in the "health" business and lucky enough to have excellent medical insurance.) They stuck tubes down my gullet and took pics and biopsies. They put me on ulcer drugs and antibiotics and took about 4 gallons of blood for "tests." I kept telling the docs that there was something wrong "further down" not just in my stomach.

When I pointed to where the pain was, they would say, "That's your bladder and men don't get bladder infections." Okay, I knew that already. I pretty much gave up and decided that all the docs were probably going to misdiagnose my symptoms. I set out to educate myself through the internet and by asking lots of questions. One doc did a stool test and found that I had an African parasite. So I did the research and found that ALL white South Africans have it but it's harmless to whites and yet kills Africans.

I'd had quite a few "African" diseases as a kid and wondered if it was a symptom of bilharzia (which, like malaria, infests you for the rest of your life.) I'd had bilharzia as a kid. Bilharzia is a blood-fluke which is a primary parasite of river snails. Yep, we swam in rivers not knowing till it was too late. Humans are its secondary host and it gets into the bladder and kidneys and makes you pee blood. It's not curable and most people die of it and, if you don't die of it, it can raise its ugly head years later.

Then I left pharmacy and opened my restaurant, lost my insurance and stopped going to doctors. A friend turned me onto geranium oil. That finally fixed my "stomach problems" but, about five years later, I woke up one morning with a terrible pain in my bladder - or so I thought. For two days I did nothing thinking that it would go away like most recurrences of bilharzia. By that time I was not thinking straight or I would have realized that I had peritonitis which had nearly killed me 25 years before when my appendix burst. All I knew was that I had to get to the emergency room pronto.

It turned out that I had been suffering from diverticulitis for decades and had finally burst a diverticulum (a hernia-like pocket in the intestines.) Diverticulitis is usually genetic and I probably inherited from my maternal grandfather. The doc told me that he would have to remove part of my colon and that I had a 50-50 chance of surviving and that he would have to do a bowel resection and colostomy. By this time the pain was so acute that I didn't care if he took my heart out and replaced it with a toilet-plunger so I said, "Okay, whatever."

It took me a couple of days after the emergency surgery to realize that I had a plastic bag stuck to a hole in my belly that collected my poop. At first it was a nightmare. It took months to get used to the grossness of pooping out of a hole in my abdomen into a plastic bag and then a few more months to become practical and learn how to prevent leaks and just deal with it.

It did make me a lot more sympathetic to people with disabilities. Up until then I had been a bit callous and uncaring about sick people. I also learned that people could live with disabilities and still enjoy life. It made me a bit more humble and compassionate. I did a website of practical tips and jokes about colostomies and met a bunch of other brave and funny people from all over the world. It was a blessing in disguise.

I was fortunate in that I only had my sigmoid colon removed and, two years later, the colostomy could be removed and the two parts of the colon stitched back together again. Apart from some horrible scars from chest to groin and a weird hollow where the hole in my guts had been - and the blow to my vanity - it's like it almost never happened. Well, it was ten years ago.

Now, Tony Snow may have a colostomy but he may also have an ileostomy. With the latter, the entire colon is removed and the ileum (small intestine) is pulled through a hole in your guts. With a colostomy, the poop is almost fully formed but, with an ileostomy, the poop is still liquid and full of acids and bile and eats away at the skin surrounding the ostomy. I wouodn't wish it on my worst enemy - not even Ted Kennedy.

I hope Snow does not have an ileostomy but, even if he just has a colostomy, I still admire him for taking such a high-profile job because, as everyone who has had a colostomy knows, you just never can be sure if you've glued the bag on right and it might just come lose and leak (or pour - it happened to me once) poop everywhere.

Tony Snow still looks like he is not completely well - a bit pale and tired. He probably had decent disability insurance and could have stopped working and hung around feeling sorry for himself but he didn't - well any sane person will tell you that that's not the way to go. But, he got off his bum and went to work and I feel like he's MY spokesman. He's smart and funny and sincere and wasn't ashamed of crying in public today and he was even kind to that silly cow, Whatshername, whose major disability isn't the fact that she's uglier than a pitbull but that she's colder and nastier than a commie rattlesnake.

Picture shows how the sigmoid colon is sliced out and the colon pulled through a hole in the abdomen.

Poem and pictures for Mother's Day

[Dedicated to my mother, Neva, who taught me to garden and inspired my faith in a God of love. The first pic is of her when she was 28 soon before I was born. The second pic is of her playing Fairy Godmother for the kids at her last Christmas before she died at the age of 81.]



































Songs for My Mother

By Anna Hempstead Branch

One

HER HANDS

MY mother’s hands are cool and fair,
They can do anything.
Delicate mercies hide them there
Like flowers in the spring.

When I was small and could not sleep,
She used to come to me,
And with my cheek upon her hand
How sure my rest would be.

For everything she ever touched
Of beautiful or fine,
Their memories living in her hands
Would warm that sleep of mine.

Her hands remember how they played
One time in meadow streams,—
And all the flickering song and shade
Of water took my dreams.

Swift through her haunted fingers pass
Memories of garden things;—
I dipped my face in flowers and grass
And sounds of hidden wings.

One time she touched the cloud that kissed
Brown pastures bleak and far;—
I leaned my cheek into a mist
And thought I was a star.

All this was very long ago
And I am grown; but yet
The hand that lured my slumber so
I never can forget.

For still when drowsiness comes on
It seems so soft and cool,
Shaped happily beneath my cheek,
Hollow and beautiful.

Two

HER WORDS

My mother has the prettiest tricks
Of words and words and words.
Her talk comes out as smooth and sleek
As breasts of singing birds.

She shapes her speech all silver fine
Because she loves it so.
And her own eyes begin to shine
To hear her stories grow.

And if she goes to make a call
Or out to take a walk
We leave our work when she returns
And run to hear her talk.

We had not dreamed these things were so
Of sorrow and of mirth.
Her speech is as a thousand eyes
Through which we see the earth.

God wove a web of loveliness,
Of clouds and stars and birds,
But made not any thing at all
So beautiful as words.

They shine around our simple earth
With golden shadowings,
And every common thing they touch
Is exquisite with wings.

There’s nothing poor and nothing small
But is made fair with them.
They are the hands of living faith
That touch the garment’s hem.

They are as fair as bloom or air,
They shine like any star,
And I am rich who learned from her
How beautiful they are.

The Protea was my mother's favorite flower. It is named after Proteus, the sea god who could change his shape at will, because of the huge variety of shapes and sizes that the species has. (As I mentioned before, Suikerbos is the Afrikaans name for Protea. It literally means sugarbush in English and refers to the fact that the flowers are sticky with nectar.)

The are 114 types of proteas in sub-equatorial Africa. 82 come from South Africa and most of the remaining 32 are from Botswana and Zimbabwe. There are similar flowers in Australia called banksia and a related species in Chile called the fire-flower. King Proteas (the first pic) are now grown commercially for cut flowers (they last in vases for weeks) in California and Hawaii. We used to grow them in San Francisco but it is too cool and humid in southwest Oregon for them. They like to be very dry.

Here are some pics of Proteas. Theyre' big and pretty and worth looking at full size.

Sugarbush

Tomorrow I am going to post pics of Proteas for Mother's Day as they were my mom's favorite flower. Suikerbos is the Afrikaans name for Protea. It literally means sugarbush in English and refers to the fact that the flowers are sticky with nectar.

Suikerbos is also the name of an Afrikaans folk song. Afrikaans was my first language - my native tongue - and I grew up singing Afrikaans folk songs. "Suikerbos" has a play on words. In Afrikaans it can mean sweetheart or it can allude to a more intimate kind of "sugarbush." Yes, the Afrikaners are pretty down to earth folks in spite of being Bible-thumping Calvinists. Here are the original words in Afrikaans:

Suikerbos ek wil jou he
Wat sal jou mamma daar van se?
Dan loop ons so onder deur die maan
Ek en my Suikerbossie saam

Sy kan nie kos kook nie
Haar kos is rou
Sy kan nie tee maak nie
Haar tee is flou
Sy kan nie brood bak nie
Dis als verbrou
Tog wag ek Suikerbossie net vir jou.

Here's my literal (non-poetic) translation of the Afrikaans words:

Sugarbush, I want you.
What will you mother say?
Then let us walk under the moon;
me with my Sugarbush.

She can't cook food;
her food is raw.
She can't make tea;
her tea is weak.
She can't bake bread;
it ferments.
But still I wait for you, my Sugarbush.

This old Afrikaans song inspired the South African composer, Josef Marais, to write an English version, "Sugarbush." Marais did not translate the Afrikaans song literally but he did use the exact same tune as the original Afrikaans folk song. It was recorded by Doris Day & Frankie Laine in 1952 and sold over a million copies.

Here are some of the lyrics to Josef Marais' English version:"

Oh, Sugarbush, I love you so
I will never let you go
So, don't you let your mother know
Sugarbush, I love you so

Sugarbush, what can I do
Mother's not so pleased with you
Promise me you will be true
And I'll come along with you.

Yeah, I know - who cares? I do. I think it's amazing that a really silly old song from my white trash Afrikaner relatives should have sold more than a million records just because it was sung in English by Doris Day.

Here is a picture of a South African Sugarbird sitting on a Protea. It's a big pic and it's pretty and it's worth clicking on to enlarge. The Sugarbird fills the same niche in nature as our hummingbirds do - as a nectar-drinker.

Chickens are reincarnated terrorists

Everyone knows that dead Mahomedanazi terrorists don't go to heaven and get 72 virgins but are actually reincarnated as barnyard animals. The bigwigs become pigs and the dumb suicide bombers become chickens. Well, maybe I'm wrong but my chickens sure act like reincarnated Muslim killers.

When the bantam hen, Turandot, started getting broody and refusing to get off her eggs when we went to collect them, we decided to let her hatch the chicks and let nature take it's course. Unfortunately nature is merciless and our first grandchicken, Fluffy, froze to death when we had an unexpected late frost. It was sad but at least you knew that she would be reincarnated as a Muslim and get a chance to become fully human as long as she became a Christian and didn't blow anybody up.

Then another chick was born and again we decided to let nature take its course. Grandchicken Number Two was such a bundle of joy, bouncing up and down on her unhatched brothers and sisters and peeping like Britney Spears on a bungie-cord, that we called her Joy. Well, Joy lasted for two whole days before she wandered off, climbed through the chicken-wire fence (yes, bantam chicks are small enough to get through chicken-wire) into the "big fowl" side of the hen-house.

Chas arrived too late to save Joy. Alfie and Betty, the hens from hell, had beheaded Joy and were tossing the little body to each other like a volley-ball. Alfie and Betty are our most vicious hens (probably reincarnations of those nasty Palestinian women who blow themselves up at bus-stops in Tel Aviv) but they also happen to be our best laying hens (they each lay an egg everyday even in winter) so we let them eat Joy after they had torn her into two equal parts.

Anyway, when grandchickens number three and four arrived, we decided to NOT let nature take its bloody course and moved them to an incubator in the guest room where they are cosy and comfy and safe from their dreadful cannibal aunties. I've named them Turandit and Turandat in honor of their mommy.

You know, whenever, somebody says to me, "How can you bear to kill and eat your chickens? It's so cruel. Don't animals have the right to be treated kindly?" - I say:

"When animals stop killing and eating each other and start treating each other kindly, I'll stop eating and killing them. When animals start recognizing each others' rights to life, liberty and happiness, then I'll grant them animal rights too."

Now, the three Gabor sisters, Eva, Zsa Zsa and Magda, are brooding so I guess we'll be eating a lot of adorable little bantams this summer. If Turandit and Turandat turn out to be roosters, they'll be the first to be laid to rest on a bed of roast potatoes and gravy.

Sunday pictures and poem

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?

by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Well, rough winds sure do shake our darling buds of May. We've had a high pressure system sitting to the northwest of us in the Gulf of Alaska for the past week - which is the usual weather pattern for May on the West Coast. The rising temperatures in the California deserts create a thermal low pressure system to the southeast, so a cold northwest wind from Alaska sweeps in off the icy Pacific Ocean at 30mph with gusts up to 40mph. Eventhough the sun is shining and the temperature is 60 degrees, it feels like 30 and, because of the clear skies, there are frosts at night.

Last Thursday the high pressure dome began to break and the temperature shot up to 82 degrees. When it's 80 degrees along the coast that means that it's ten degrees higher inland and the heat rises creating a thermal low pressure system in inland Oregon. As soon as that happens the ocean fog is sucked in. For that reason, we seldom have more than three days of heat along the coast. The fog is so thick that it blankets out the sun and daytime temperatures go down into the 50s and 60s. The fog is our natural air-conditioning. It also keeps the heat in at night and the frosts disappear.

Today the high pressure dome finally broke apart completely and allowed a low pressure moisture-filled wave to form off the coast and we are expecting rain for the next two days - no fishing today but it's perfect gardening weather, cool, overcast and almost windless - thank goodness because the apple, plum, apricot, pear and cherry trees are covered in blossoms. I learned my lesson last year and will cover the trees with netting as soon as the fruit appears otherwise the jays will eat the lot.

Last week I posted pics of lilacs (syringa.) This week the pics are of Ceanothus - commonly known as California lilac which grows wild on the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Vancouver. There are about ten wild forms and many more hybrids have been developed. Like real lilac (syringa) it has flowers ranging from pale blue through lavender to purple as well as pink and white. Unlike syringa, they have little to no perfume - at least for humans - the bees and butterflies seem to smell something and they are drawn to ceanothus in swarms.

Some ceanothus are small shrubs and others are large bushes up to 15 feet tall and 30 feet wide. I have planted five in the past three years. Like most West Coast native plants they do not need or like to be watered in summer as they have a a symbiotic parasite attached to their roots which filters water out of the almost dry soil. If they are watered, the symbiote rots and kills the plant.