August, in the middle of

orange butterfly purple flowers

orange blackberry lily

brown moth on bricks

orange heirloom tomatoes 

1970's orange wall phone 

orange butterfly

orange monarch butterfly 

woodpecker on choke cherry tree

small woodpecker

orange cock's comb

Manassas finches with orange beak

Well, this weekend is cool and clear like last! What a delight it is to have perfect weather inthe middle of  August. I am  just home from another trip to Manassas where mom and I went to get some fruits and vegetables at the farm market after probating Dad's will with the court and dropping off some tax records. Orange was everywhere and I am moved to post some things orange but also birds and butterflies not to mention some bees and a bouquet of lovely cock's comb in a vintage yellow McCoy vase that Keith bought in a second hand store recently while I was watching laundry spin in the dryers. This morning outside while I was writing I heard a sound and noticed a little woodpecker on the crusty old choke cherry tree. It didn't mind me at all, so I pulled out the camera to take a few zoom photos of him among the vines.  I suppose there are a lot of bugs under that dead English ivy vine clinging to the crusty bark. The dead leaves have been falling all summer, crunchy under foot. I really enjoyed looking at this woodpecker chipping away at the tree. The zoom photographs didn't turn out as detailed as I hoped but still it is a record and that was the only bird I saw in the yard this morning. I saw the monarch butterfly on the butterfly bush's purple blooms and caught it drinking nectar. While in Manassas I got a photo of a couple of the exotic finches my brother Dave gave to my parents a year or two ago. The brown one is a Spice Finch and the orange marked one is called a Zebra Finch and they have different songs they sing when ever inspired. Usually they sing when my cell phone rings.  Also in my camera I have a shot of the arrangement that Keith made from leftover orange cock's comb and some sort of yellow dried flowers from last year. His arrangements this week for his Ikebana blog have been very exciting, even exotic and you can go see them here >>>> SOGETSUDC. I haven't figured out which arragnement is my favorite yet. Earlier in the week I was happy to take Keith downtown to buy a new seamless back ground paper to put behind our still life photos. I think he has become a really good flower arrangement photographer. I began encouraging him to try back in 1999 to do his own. I was surprised to learn then he has been working with flowers for many years and didn't have a professional portfolio and the reason was mostly because he didn't know much about making studio photographs. I didn't either but I knew we could figure it out.  

I do still live photos of  my books and boxes. The worst part of it is figuring what arrangement looks best and how to light them. Then while I was in Manassas I decided to go downstairs and get a quick shot of the orange wall phone. It has been there since originally installed in the late 1960's or early 1970's I forget which. Dad installed that dark walnut paneling in his rooms and there was an orange shag carpet and this matching orange phone! The rotary dial still works and the cord is about 12-14 feet long. That was before cordless phones so when I was in high school I used to talk for hours on that phone and wander around the room twisting the cord and pulling it over obstacles. I found another 1970's tabletop phone with a rotary dial in a deep red last week at the antique store. This week my mother bought it for me as a birthday gift. It is now connected to my phone line with a jack splitter so I can use both: the wireless and the corded phone on the same phone line. When the power goes out due to storms in this part of North East Washington, and it did last week,  I have a hard wired line now I can use for some calls in the dark. I haven't photographed the red phone yet but it makes me smile and feel good to have a touch of the past around that still works. Technology has changed  so quickly a little touch of the past is a bit of reassurance that not everything is out dated. Another thing I saw on my way out the door this morning to write in the garden was a brown moth. It was in the corner of a window. I disturbed it causing it to fly off to the brick wall in the stairwell. Even brown is lovely next to pink and purple gray bricks which some people might call red. 

Well, I am sure I have written too much and loaded way too many photos for a normal well edited blog post.  I am seeing beauty everywhere all the time and photographing what I see is such fun that I would like to show you them all, but I can't.  I have so many photographs  I can't keep up and posting it is a real challenge. I am slowly loading some up on  Flickr.com to my new web gallery that Keith gave to me. I just added a slide show feature to this blog and it scrolls through all the pictures in the flicker gallery on my "orange explains it all" page.  Next perhaps I will develop a book of photos on some theme with one of the new web based book publishers. They print out books of anyone who wants to pay a new technology I want to try out!

 I love to hear your comments. Please drop over to the blog and look at the bottom of each post for the comments icon to share your thoughts or send me an email directly if that doesn't work. 

Narrows Virginia

Aunt Alice

Aunt Alice's townhouse

Grandma Nunley's Kitchen

Nunley home with flowering four o'clocks

nice green chair

coal buckets in the garage

magenta & red four o'clocks

view of the Narrow pass and Nunley house from Aunt Alices' back yard

yellow speckled four o'clocks

Narrows, Virginia is where my father's family lived when he was a teenager in the 1940s and where he took me and my sister Jenny to stay with his parents and our aunts and uncles for about 6 weeks each summer. Visiting last weekend for his funeral we got to spend a night in the old family house which remains little changed from my childhood. My Aunt Alice still owns the house as well as hers which is right next door. Aunt Alice also has a mountain house and some acres up in the back country where she prefers to spend her time nearer to nature and her mountain friends. I have fond memories of being there those summers we were left to be spoiled by Grand ma & pa Nunley and  Aunt Beth in Narrows, then also the fun of staying up at Aunt Alice & Uncle Kenny's mountain farm with ponies, turkeys, chickens, phesants and wild life! The diamond back rattle snakes I don't remember so fondly but we did meet with them now and then and I learned to watch my step very carefully. Hoot owls and mountain lions or wild cats cries at night made it kind of scary to get to sleep with all the windows open.  This is coal country in the deep Appalachian mountains but my family didn't work in coal mines, they all worked at a thread spinning factory which is still there today. I recall they were on shifts working day and night so we always had to be careful not to wake the sleepers. 7-11, 11-7 and 7-3 all around the clock. Food was always cooking for one meal or another in grandma's Kitchen. I remember fondly the delicious home made cakes she used to bake for my birthdays which were sometimes celebrated in Narrows. The town Narrows is across the New river which passes by just down the hill from this house. In one picture from Aunt Alice's town house you can see the mountains go up from the narrow pass that gives the town it's name. The Nunley Narrows home had a couple big gardens for food and various flowers grew all around to cheer up the place back when I was a kid. One that I recall being especially nice which has survived to this day is the lovely batch of four o'clocks that grow and reseed along the driveway on the side of the house. Jenny and I collected seeds and brought them home to plant many times. I have a front yard full of them now and Jenny in Texas says she has them year round in her climate but they only bloom part of the year. They open late in the day and stay open all night with a sweet perfume that draws moths who pollenate. This house used to be heated by a large coal burning furnace that was in the basement along with the wash machines and the coal storage bin and a lot of jars of canned foods from the big garden. It was part of the work they did each summer to can the fresh tomatoes and green beans and sometimes there were pickles and always some strawberry jam. We usually missed the fresh strawberries my grandfather grew from the garden but the jam was always there. I was very picky, I hated the seeds in strawberry jam so I used the excellent grape jelly Grandma made mostly for me. I did say I was spoiled, didn't I? She had a neighbor down the road who had some nice concord grapes on a vine that grew along her front porch. I don't know how Grandma managed to get a tub full of those grapes every summer to make grape jelly for me, but I sure am glad she did. I have a lot of fond memories as most of us do of our grand parents and childhood and I miss those days in some ways but I am glad now to be grown up and in control of my own life. I got one thing I wish I hadn't from those mountains a fear of driving on the curvy roads. I would love to go back and stay longer but I honestly get white knuckles when I have tried to drive over the mountains to grandmothers house. 

 

enchanting garden - dying dad

Today, I am home alone, thinking about my Dad and my garden. My father has been very ill for a long time but this past couple weeks he became profoundly ill with little hope of recovering a normal life. We have been attending him in the Emergency Room,  Critical Care Unit, then he improved a bit and was moved to Progressive Care Unit. We saw in the CCU he was very weak and needed several strong medications to keep his seizures under control and we had to make a choice. The hardest choice I have had to make since, caring for my lover George back in 1992 while he was stricken with AIDS paralized and in a coma with no hope of any recovery. The choice to stop treatments is a really painful one but I was the guy, whom George gave his permission to decide. I got the doctors to tell me what they knew, then I talked to his family and eventually after a lot of heart break I had to let him go. That is a bit like what we have had to do in support of my Mother for my Dad. He is now in a lovely Arlington hospice with a enchanting garden wrapped all around. I came home from Manaassas yesterday when they moved him from hospital to the hospice in Arlington to tend my garden and rest up. We don't know how long he will stay with us now but he seems to be growing weaker each day. I am about to go back to the hospice and sit with him and visit with my family who are gathered around beside our Dad.

I see that my collection of garden photos is growing each day. I wanted to post some favorites before I go. My father and mother both love flower gardens and I am grateful to them for encouraging me to play in the dirt and grow flowers.  Flowers have given me hope so many times when everything seemed darkest they bring light and relief to the heavy heart.