BURGESS SEED & PLANT CO. CATALOG

Sitting here thumbing through the Burgess Seed & Plant Co. Catalog I can only assume that the Garden of Eden must have looked very similar to the smorgasboard of earthy delights I have been gazing upon and lusting after with unmitigated longing.  Is it wrong to be turned on by what I see on these glossy pages?  Surely my eyes are taking the same path as those of a man perusing a girly magazine.  Back and forth, up and down my eyes wander like a child in a toy store at Christmas.  The desire to order large quantities of everything I see is almost overwhelming. Just the thought of seeing Hardy English Lavender flanked by the Burgess Half Price Vegetable Sampler brings a feeling of calm and accomplishment to me.  Just thinking of the curiosity my friends would display over my lovely Honeyberries, Seaberries, and Grand Duke Kohlrabi brings a smile to my face.  Why I could grow my own Luffa's and give them as gifts!  My Watermelon Radishes would bring them to the table and what could a banana shaped Cantaloupe possibly be other than an outright show stopper?  Yes, I could have it all. My very own Garden of Eden to wander through and ponder through every month of the year, all year long.  There's only one thing stopping me from doing just that.  I'm a Natural Born Killer in the plant world. If Horticulturists had their own Post Offices my picture would be up in every last one of them. I have failed at every attempt I've been given to nurture, to cultivate, to perpetuate any type of life form that keep their tiny feet buried under the dirt. I'm like the Hannibal Lecter of the plant world because if I could actually grow a garden then just like him, I would be having an old friend for dinner.

I've been everywhere, man, I've been everywhere............Almost

I just did that Travel map on Facebook, where it lets you stick a push pin on the map to indicate all the places you've been to.  Honestly, by the time I stopped, (I say stopped because I know I'm not finished, it's just my mind has chosen not to release all it's data to me), I was happily amazed.  Some people spend an entire life never going any where and never seeing anything but due to my "carousing" nature I've managed to rack up the miles from coast to coast it seems.  I have to give credit where credit is due however.  Had it not been for the people that have come in and gone out of my life I would be one of those people I mentioned earlier.

Al was the person who went with me to Arkansas the first time when I was 18.  So I guess I can thank him for my love affair with the State.

Then Terry took me out to California for his four year stint in the Air Force.  I hated where we lived but I loved San Francisco and Lake Tahoe.  What do I remember most about San Francisco? It wasn't how beautiful the lights are on the bay at night, or how good the seafood was on Fisherman's Wharf, oh no, it was the waiter that took my hand and kissed it and told me how beautiful I was in a somewhat foreign accent.  Under normal circumstances I would have most certainly agreed with him as I was still young and still had it "going on," per say; but at this point I was heavily engaged in the human whale aspect of my first pregnancy, and his words fell like precious diamonds on my ears.  I floated out of that restaurant on Pier 49 swollen ankles and all, and it did help to erase the memory of my  husbands words from the recent past when I had tripped and fallen and rather than running to my aid he spent his time laughing like a hyena because he said I looked like a Water Buffalo that had been shot down on the Serengeti Plain. Anyway, a nice man ran over and hauled me up in to a standing position and he too kissed my hand after inquiring about my welfare.  Apparently God had posted an invisible sign on my forehead during my pregnancy that read, ''Kiss her hand, Kiss her hand."  I'd never experienced that expression from men before that time, nor since.  It worked to make me feel better, and I encourage any man who might read this to try it sometime.

It was Johnny who took me to Fort Walton Beach, he had friends that moved there.  We went there to visit for Thanksgiving.  I had never seen sand so white, or water so blue.  Just taking a moment here to mention how small the world is......... I took Terry's word (Yes, the laughing hyena Terry's word) for fact when he told me years before that the Sand Flea had the best seafood in Fort Walton Beach, since he had worked there as kid.  Wrong, it sucked.  It rained, too.  So I stood on the beach in the rain admiring the sand and surf of Fort Walton Beach, Florida.  It was still beautiful to me.

Buddy came along and he and I did a repeat of my Arkansas days with Al.  I was much older but still Arkansas held the same appeal for me.  He and I were fortunate enough to be able to travel with my aunt and her husband on the biggest vacation excursion I had ever experienced.  Unfortunately for my uncle, our journey was to be overshadowed with the fact that his mother was in the hospital dying in Alabama and so we traveled there first so that he could see her for perhaps the last time, no one knew for sure. I never knew that there were mountains in Alabama or how beautiful a state it was until I experienced it.  Sad, reluctant goodbyes and we began our journey to New York.  We had planned on doing Maine also but it was obvious after a while that my uncle really wanted to be closer to home and with Buddy was being such a maniac off and on he was making the trip really uncomfortable for everyone.  The Statue of Liberty was much bigger in person and the New York skyline just as impressive in person as it always is when they show it on TV.  This was August and I honestly believed that New York in August was like March in Texas. WRONG!  Hell sets up shop in both states in August. Standing on the ground staring up at Lady Liberty's lovely face only momentarily gave us the desire to travel her well trodden steps to the top, and we were told that we could go inside and go up if we wanted to; but it was 120 degrees inside.We didn't, but some nutbutts did. They were probably all from the middle east, because I don't know of any other group of people who could have withstood that kind of heat while climbing stairs.  Buddy threw such a fit at Yankee Stadium because they wouldn't let us go in I thought he'd need to be tranquilized. I honestly thought he was going to try to kill the security guard when the guy said we couldn't go in because the game was almost over. As people began filing out of the stadium, Buddy screamed, "Fuck New York!" at the upper most top of his lungs.  I was embarrassed to be there until some old guy walked passed and said, "Son, I say that every morning when I wake up."   I guess New Yorkers don't find foul language as offensive as we gentile southerners do. Cooperstown is an amazing town where every living baseball fan should go, the dead ones too perhaps.  Niagra Falls is awesome. Take the tour.  Pay the money and take the tour, it's so worth it.  I ate my very first blooming onion up there in Buffalo, New York. Plus we lucked out and got to go up to the top of the Minolta tower and watch a massive fireworks display that we didn't even know about until our tour guy told us to come back that night and go up there. It was incredible, standing there on the Canadian side celebrating the Canadian Civic Holiday. We almost ran over a Bobby on our way there, a Bobby is a Canadian policeman on a bicycle.  We just didn't see him riding up along the driver side of the van when my uncle decided to change lanes.  YIKES! Could have been trouble but he just yelled out, "You almost cut me off!!!" We kept going, didn't want to miss the fireworks.   Buddy is gone now, he killed himself and he never got to go inside Yankee Stadium but I buried him in his ball cap  cause they did win the World Series the year he died.

If it weren't for Clay I would have never gone down to south Texas.  No desire there, other than for him.  He has a sister in Eckert, CO and we took a family style vacation up there.  He with his daughter, me with mine.  We toured Carlsbad Caverns, visited Roswell, crossed Royal Gorge in the tram, and spent one night in Breckenridge.  Ah, Breckenridge, it was beautiful.  Such a quaint town, I would love to go again one day when the snow is on the ground, that's the best time.  Huge homes just sit there, lonely and abandoned, partially obscured by trees.  You find yourself wondering who lives there as you travel past but when you inquire about it the hired help in the village is quick to let you know that nobody lives there, rich people just buy them and seldom ever come to stay.  The people that work in Breckenridge don't even live there because they can't afford it. There's something wrong about that. Those white Birch trees you see in those photos done by 'Ansel Adams look just like that.  Colorado certainly has it's moments, but for the most part it's majesty is cold, hard, and unyielding. Fast forward, still traveling with Clay and Memphis was like swallowing a shot of the smoothest whiskey there is, it has a bite but it leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.  Beale Street is like the French Quarter.  The atmosphere is much the same.  Thick.  It feels like when you try to walk down the street your pushing your way through the ghosts of the past that still live there.  When you sit somewhere, there's a heaviness that hangs on and around you like someone is leaning on your shoulders.  It's hard to breath but you just don't care because it's somehow comforting to be there. Maybe it's just the dirtiness of it all, the dirtiness left behind from the lives and stories that have played themselves out there.  A simple reminder that something had indeed come before and it was to powerful to just give up and go.  Few places I've been too have that kind of allure but I'm sure all the one's that do are near some type of waterway, and music has been a big part of it's heritage.  If those aren't ghosts hanging in the air, it must just be the blues.

It's not just the places themselves that stand out, but the actions of the people involved in those trips that make them what they were.  Places that should have been such a delight to visit are left with tainted memories because someone with you acted like an asshole and other places that held no special appeal as a prime destination end up being leaving you with the best memories of all.  I want more of those trips, and my Travel map is far from full.

Living in The Real World

It seems to be getting harder and harder to live in the world today, real or imagined. Politics are so out of hand and out of control we should be frightened by them but we let the blow hards in Washington and in our neighborhoods and social networks tell us what THEY think we ought to believe. Many don't even question, we just raise our invisible rebel flags and let them fly. Others just agree while pulling their money closer to them, cradling it in their arms in an attempt to protect it from who they consider undeserving. Still others spend time circulating flaccid emails about Obama, many of which only stand to show their own ignorance. I would rather not send any and have people wonder about my intelligence, than to send them and take away any doubt. We are all entitled to our own feelings when it comes to politics, religion, and numerous other touchy subjects out there, but is it really right of us to try and cram those beliefs down everyone's throat? I think not, but I am just one.