Pecans Leaf Later

Spring, springing

Still, Possibly Not as Wrinkled as the Mature Auden

Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered

¿Verdad?

No sé.

The Vocabulary of the Heart

Six years after my dad died, three after my mom died, and this year, when my first two grandchildren are born, this resonates. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart.

Each time members of the tribe die, the self we were with them dies too, which is to say that the kind of words we spoke only to them, were only to them, and the kind they spoke only to us are spoken no longer. But if outwardly our language is thus impoverished, inwardly it is enriched because when members of the tribe die, the words they were are added to the vocabulary of the heart, where we have more than just ears for hearing them. And each time a member of the tribe is born, a new word comes into being, and nothing is ever the same again.

All Lined Up

Tomatoes started from seed in the garage in January (under lights) went into the beds today. Fertilized, planted, staked, mulched, and watered. Twenty-one plants, six varieties. The game’s afoot, Watson!

Julie Davis (Austin, TX)

Study - Hill Country in Summer

Ancient Times

Frederick Buechner remembers the summer of 1948 from his The Eyes of the Heart: a Memoir of the Lost and Found:

… he used to give far and away the most enchanted cocktail parties I had ever attended or have ever attended since, where he served endless martinis in frosted silver glasses and where, in the spring, petals from a flowering plum sometimes drifted in through his mullioned windows to lie on the floor like snow. Colleagues from the English department like R. P. Blackmur, Donald Stauffer, and John Berryman came from time to time, together with occasional undergraduates like myself, and there were also friends he had made in the town of Princeton including a handful of beautiful young women, one of whom I fell fathomlessly in love with and on the starlit summer night of my twenty-first birthday on the balcony of the St. Regis roof in New York proposed matrimony to because such was the world in those now almost unimaginable days there seemed no other thinkable way to consummate our relationship. She wore her hair in two short pigtails, wore ballet slippers on her feet, could squirt through a gap in her teeth with remarkable accuracy, and at the same time had the good sense to turn me down. How things would have turned out for both of us if she had decided otherwise I shudder to imagine, but if we had had children they would now be past fifty, and that is shuddersome enough.

Grateful

I planted 200 of these suckers last November, and am so glad to see them coming up. God grew ’em, not me. But I did participate in the project.

Hang On, There

WTF? Although non-citizens don’t enjoy full free-speech protections, they are entitled to due process.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. The administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas. Time.com

Not letting his wife (an American) or lawyer know where he is being held is especially chilling.