Month: April 2013

leaves of three (friday foto finder: leaf)

Here is a photo of a rather pretty native plant that is very common in my heavily wooded neighborhood. These shiny leaves show up late spring, often starting out red, and then developing into a lush bright green.

This plant is entirely evil.

In case you don’t recognize it, it is poison ivy: Leaves of three, let it be.

You know what’s even more evil than these leaves of three? The plant when it has no leaves. The vines stretch out over the ground, climb trees and rocks, and grow into bushes. And in the winter and very early spring, the woody stems and vines look pretty much like all the other leafless stems and vines that grow in the woods. But the leafless vines apparently have plenty of urushiol.

This is a photo I took last May on a walk in my neighborhood. This year, the poison ivy leaves are barely starting to bud. Three weeks ago, there probably weren’t any leaves on the stems that Phoebe must have touched while playing outside. She may well have washed her hands well with soap and water before she touched her face and rubbed her eyes, but urushiol doesn’t come off the skin with just soap and water.¹ Even if you use plenty of soap and scrub really hard. It was almost 3 years ago to the day that I learned this fact the hard way. And I really, really wish that we didn’t have to be reminded of this the hard way at this point in our lives.

This week’s friday foto finder is leaf. In general, I love leaves, and have posted plenty of photos of pretty fall leaves. (After all, I do live in New England.) Perhaps my choice of this less friendly leafy subject is somewhat a reflection of my toxic mood. Let’s face it, this has been a really bad month.² One good thing about the month is that it is almost over. With May coming up, I hope to be able to start fresh and turn over a new leaf.

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¹ You can use products specifically formulated to work on the oils, such as Tecnu, or liquid dish detergent.
² And by “really bad,” I have a large number of expletives in mind. You can fill in your favorites.

Spring renewal

First of all, thank you for your supportive words and thoughts on my post of a few days ago. Your comments, and the knowledge of your support, meant a lot to me. While the interceding days were far from what I would consider either restful or productive, I am feeling more like myself. I expect that it will take a long time to process the major events of the past few weeks. Perhaps I will have time to process some of my thoughts here, perhaps not.

In the meantime, I will do what I so often do: share a few unrelated photos.

Exactly a month ago, we welcomed the official start of Spring in the the northern hemisphere. However, in my own neck of the woods, Spring was heralded by snow. More snow. The crocuses I had seen beginning to emerge were buried. By the next day, the crocuses began to emerge through the snow. And within a few more days, the ground was (mostly) clear of snow, and the crocuses bloomed.

This photo was taken with my camera. For some reason, it has trouble with the particular hue of purple of the crocuses, and they appear bluer here than in real life. That sounds like a metaphor if ever there was one.

Here is a photo of those same crocuses, taken with my iPhone, looking more purple. (There is something wrong with the structure of that last sentence, but I have a headache, and can’t sort it out. Probably something to do with attachment ambiguity.)

I loved the sharp shadows cast by these little cobalt blue flowers in a neighbor’s yard. I do wish my iPhone had done better with the focus, here. My real camera could have done better with the focus set to manual, but I didn’t have it with me.

We have some very resilient periwinkle in our yard. It was here when we moved in. A few years ago, we had a landscape designer rework our front yard, and her plans included removing the periwinkle. I’m not sure exactly why, but I was happy to let her run with her vision. (I believe she was aiming to use native plants as much as possible, and vinca are not native to the US.) The periwinkle was removed and some new trees and shrubs were planted. Soon enough, though, the periwinkle came back up. But I was not unhappy to see it come back. I realized that I quite like its shiny green evergreen leaves, and its bright little purple flowers.

These are moss spore capsules, which shoot up in the spring, and will disappear soon.

More flowers, cheerful-looking narcissus, from the neighbor’s yard. (I was going to say they were cheerful, rather than cheerful-looking, but I don’t have any insight into their mood. For all I know, they could be quite grumpy.)

So, there you go. Cheery looking flowers.

I am weary

The past few weeks have knocked the wind out of me. I hardly know where to begin, there is so much to say. The biggest news, at least for my family, was that John’s father died. It was not unexpected. It was not fast. It was also not easy.

Just over 2 weeks ago, we got the call that John’s father was not expected to survive the night. As you might imagine, there was much travel, and rearranging of plans. John was able to travel to New York to be with his parents for his father’s last few days. I stayed home with the kids. Things were complicated by Theo having a fever one day, then getting pink eye the next, which meant missed school for him, missed work time for me, and more trauma than I would have expected dealing with the medication. (This was Theo’s first sick visit to the doctor, which itself was remarkable.) Phoebe managed to pick up her first case of poison ivy, a bad one, including welts on her face around both eyes. This led to a doctor’s trip and missed school for her, too. Then there was the funeral. Phoebe ended up missing a whole week of school. This week is her school vacation. And did I mention the stomach bug that hit Phoebe Sunday night?

These were the weeks that I was supposed to be working intensively to make a last push to try to finish my degree. Time is limited before my subject pool, the BU undergrads, is taken away by finals and the end of the term. I have now lost 2 full weeks of work time. The only day that was not taken up by sick kids or travel or memorial services and time with extended family was one that I spent shopping for something to wear to the funeral.

My days are eaten up. My energy is eaten up. My motivation and momentum for my research have all but left the building. I have been trying to push through, in the windows of time that open up here and there.

But next comes a terrorist attack in Boston, and the wind is knocked out of me again. I was not there, but I am shocked and grieving. 3 dead and over 170 injured in a blast at Copley Square, a place I know well. The news that one of the dead was a child of 8 hit hard. The news that another was a BU grad student hit hard again. The realization that my friends and family from far away might be worried about my family hit me again. We could have been there.

I am steady in times of crisis. Strong and reliable, I keep pushing through. I know that I have to keep going until the crisis time is over. But I am strained and drained. I am edgy and touchy. I am slipping.

This is not the worst crisis I can imagine. This is not even the worst crisis I or my family have lived through. I remind myself every day how lucky I am to have John and my children here with me, safe and (largely) healthy. My mother and my sister and her family are safe and well. I have financial stability, a home, and wonderful friends. I am very, very lucky. But I admit that I am tired, and I just wish I could have a few days to catch my breath. At this point, I’d settle for one.

The past tense, and other grammatical implications of death

One of the things that often strikes us, after someone’s death, is that we have to make a shift in how we speak of that person. It suddenly becomes an error to say “he loves popcorn.” Indpendent of the subject’s history of affinity for popcorn, there is that crossover point between loving popcorn, and having loved popcorn. Survivors undergo a transition where they find themselves using the wrong tense, and self-correcting. The realization that we have erred nags at our minds like the red ink marks of a high school English teacher urging consistency in an essay.

Then there is the loss of conjunction. For years, you go to visit Grammy and Grampa. The conjunction and serves to join two noun phrases [Grammy]NP and [Grampa]NP into a single noun phrase. That noun phrase can then serve in a variety of grammatical functions: subject, with nominative case ([Grammy and Grampa]NP called), or various object positions, with accusative (Let’s visit [Grammy and Grampa]NP), or genitive case (We need to remember to bring that book to [Grammy and Grampa]NP‘s house.) With the absence of one referent, the conjoined noun phrase loses both the conjunction and the second noun phrase. It is a simplification of structure that belies the complicated nature of the end of almost 6 decades of married life, a conjunction of law and love and life together that are only hinted at by the word and.

With this loss of the conjunction, too, comes a shift from the plural to the singular, which of course brings its own implications for subject-verb agreement. In the present tense, English requires a different verb inflection for most third person singular subjects than for plural ones. Grammy and Grampa love it when we visit must change to Grammy loves it when we visit, with the inflectional affix -s added to the verb to reflect that singularity. This, of course, reminds us once more that there is only one of the two members of that former conjoined phrase whose actions, affinities and attributes will, by and large, be discussed using the present tense.

We mustn’t forget, though, that we can hold onto the present tense, and even the future; A whole host of constructions are available to us by keeping Grampa in object positions. I miss Grampa. It’s okay to be sad about Grampa. We will hold onto Grampa’s memory.

stumped

Often when I have too much going on, I find myself stumped about what to say. More often than not, I turn to poking my head around in my photo library to find things to post. Happily, this weekend was a photo-heavy one. Among the activities of the weekend, we went for a post egg-hunt walk around the wilds of our backyard. Among the many and varied things of the tree and rock persuasion, I found this one stump, which I found completely enthralling. Viewed from above, you can see that it has distinct regions, showing varying degrees of rotting, different patterns of cracking, and as a variety of growths of moss and fungus.

I liked the shapes made by the rather heart-shaped black section, nestled up with the disc of moss-covered sectionl

When viewed from the side, the green mossy section looked like a scale model version of a grass-topped cliff.

I find the textures and patterns of the black and white fungus growing on the side to be very striking.

Still another section showed more cliffs and spires, this time rounded off a bit by the fungus.

I’m seriously considering going back and seeing if there were other interesting things going on with that stump that I missed.