9:29 a.m. - 2003-03-19
Tornadoes and Pansies
Seth is going to murder me, but I'm typing this as tornado sirens are going off. I have our tiny battery operated TV on, though, and it appears that it is not definately a tornado, just a "tornadic storm". It is also several miles away, near the Space And Rocket Museum. The Penis of Huntsville may be on it's way to Oz!!
Here it is strangely sunny, that clear sunshine that comes after a storm, so it's hard to take the sirens at all seriously. The TV weathermen are having a field day with their radar maps, though, as they usually do in severe weather.
"There's the dark blue area near Highway 72, that's where the winds are spinning!! There's the lighter blue area which is where there is some really heavy rain! There's the yellow areas near Oakwood which is where we see the hook rotation!! What we're really looking for is an orange area, which means run like Hell!!"
Good Lord, it's worse than the colour codes for terrorist alerts.
Ok, the sirens just went off. Evidently all is safe for rabbits, cats and bats. Sorry Seth.
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We had this bad weather all last night. I kept waking up and hearing terrible wind and rain. Rain that sounded like someone was aiming a garden hose at the window.
I don't think it was the weather that woke me up. I have been waking up at various times of the night since Ty passed away. He used to wake me up for attention at 3 and again at 5:30, and I guess I'm just waking up out of sad habit.
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In defiance of the general war mongering that is going on in our government now, I'm posting these pictures of what's going on in the yard. Sort of a "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" type gesture.
I'm desperately wanting a digital camera! Squashing them in the scanner just doesn't give the right effect! The red-orange blossom is from the quince bush, which has rewarded my ax murderess attack of this fall with a bevy of blooms.
Check out the grape hyacinth. Grape hyacinths are a weed here, but I planted a few last year anyway. They remind me of my childhood, because my mom planted lots of them.
I planted strawberries yesterday, too. More and more as this war heats up I feel like staging an act of quiet rebellion against the bland complacency of suburban culture, and that rebellion is taking place in my yard. Instead of a chemically induced green lawn, I want fruit trees and vegetable gardens and beautiful flowers. Something to show people an alternative to their narrow little worlds.
Seth's dad has lived in the Czech Republic for many, many years, since long before the Velvet Revolution. A few years ago he wrote his memoirs, which I was lucky enough to get to read. In them he talked about how he didn't have to make any big statements about how wonderful American Democracy was, he didn't have to try to make converts. Just his presense and the fact that he got treated differently because he was an American made people think about the possibilities for changing the government.
I've always remembered that, and I think it's one of my "big philosophies" of life. Just by being a quiet wacko with a beautiful and ecological garden maybe I can push a few people beyond their normal suburban "Let's use DDT on our boring, half dead lawns" sort of lives.
Hey, it won't stop the war in Iraq. But it might improve the ecology of North Alabama.
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