Flower Pots Quotes

He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it. . . " Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

At the end of the rainbow waited the pot of gold. But rainbows were made of faint and fragile gossamer-and gold weighed a ton-and since the world began, gold was the reason to do most anything.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

Then, like I wasn't thrown enough, Cal leaned down and picked up a potted African violet on the low table next to the sofa and brought it over to me. For a second, I wondered if this was his socially awkward way of trying to give me flowers.

A flower blooms best in a happy pot.

The heat of the summer transformed the green grass into long brown straw, only the weeds were green. Claire didn't mind, the weeds had pretty flowers. Unlike Tony's flowers, which had been sentenced to his yard, gardens, or clay pots, these flowers grew free wherever they wanted. Furthermore, weeds were survivors. When all else died, the weeds remained. Yes, Claire liked weeds.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

I wanted to say something brilliant. My God, Holmes, how did you know the zombie was hiding in the flower pot? But I couldn't lie.

In fact, the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge, and green, and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants.... Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt, or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it..." Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

She's a beautiful flower put in a pot and hidden in a closet. You can't keep her a little girl forever.

In a world of flowers grown in pots, I'd like you girls to thrive in the wild.

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

You talk of her mind being unsettled. How the devil could it be otherwise in her frightful isolation? And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity ! From pity and charity ! He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!

Lavender lilies all dotted with spots. Sun-yellow daffodils clustered in pots. Blue morning-glories climb trellises high. Powder-white asters like stars in the sky. Thick, pink peonies unfold in the sun. Winter adieu now that spring has begun.

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

At the end of the rainbow waited the pot of gold. But rainbows were made of faint and fragile gossamer—and gold weighed a ton—and since the world began, gold was the reason to do most anything.

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

Eventually the Woodsman spoke. ‘We all have our routines,’ he said softly. ‘But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.’ The Woodsman stood and showed David his axe. ‘See here,’ he said, pointing with his finger at the blade. Every morning, I make certain that me axe is clean and keen. I look to my house and check that its windows and doors remain secure. I tend to my land, disposing of weeds and ensuring that the soil is watered. I walk through the forest, clearing those paths that need to be kept open. Where trees have been damaged, I do my best to repair what has been harmed. these are my routines and I enjoy doing them well.’ He laid a hand gently on David’s shoulder, and David saw understanding in his face. ‘Rules and routines are good, but they must give you satisfaction. Can you truly say you gain that from touching and counting?’ David shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I get scared when I don’t do them. I’m afraid of what might happen.’ ‘Then find routines that allow you to feel secure when they are done. You told me that you have a new brother: look to him each morning. Look to your father, and your stepmother. Tend to the flowers in the garden, or in the pots upon the window sill. Seek others who are weaker than you are, and try to give them comfort where you can. Let these be your routines, and the rules that govern your life.

...be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

Amongst the flowers I am alone with my pot of wine drinking by myself; then lifting my cup I asked the moon to drink with me, its reflection and mine in the wine cup, just the three of us; then I sigh for the moon cannot drink, and my shadow goes emptily along with me never saying a word; with no other friends here, I can but use these two for company; in the time of happiness, I too must be happy with all around me; I sit and sing and it is as if the moon accompanies me; then if I dance, it is my shadow that dances along with me; while still not drunk, I am glad to make the moon and my shadow into friends, but then when I have drunk too much, we all part; yet these are friends I can always count on these who have no emotion whatsoever; I hope that one day we three will meet again, deep in the Milky Way.

But here’s my little trade secret that I put into every All Is Lost moment just for added spice, and it’s something that many hit movies have. I call it the whiff of death. I started to notice how many great movies use the All Is Lost point to kill someone. Obi Wan in Star Wars is the best example — what will Luke do now?? All Is Lost is the place where mentors go to die, presumably so their students can discover “they had it in them all along.” The mentor’s death clears the way to prove that. But what if you don’t have an Obi Wan character? What if death isn’t anywhere near your story? Doesn’t matter. At the All Is Lost moment, stick in something, anything that involves a death. It works every time. Whether it’s integral to the story or just something symbolic, hint at something dead here. It could be anything. A flower in a flower pot. A goldfish. News that a beloved aunt has passed away. It’s all the same.

And the rest of the story?" he asked, trying to force a smile. "Is that like everything else in POT, on a need-to-know basis?" She nodded. The waiter came to their table, but must have sensed his timing was off and went away again. She opened her mouth to say something. Harry could see that she was on the verge of tears. She bit her lower lip. Then she put the napkin down on the tablecloth, shoved her chair back, stood up without a word and left. Harry remained, sitting and staring at the napkin. She must have been squeezing it in her hand for some time, he mused, because it was crumpled up into a ball. He watched it slowly unfold like a white paper flower.

Dear Deborah, Words do not come easily for so many men. We are taught to be strong, to provide, to put away our emotions. A father can work his way through his days and never see that his years are going by. If I could go back in time, I would say some things to that young father as he holds, somewhat uncertainly, his daughter for the very first time. These are the things I would say: When you hear the first whimper in the night, go to the nursery leaving your wife sleeping. Rock in a chair, walk the floor, sing a lullaby so that she will know a man can be gentle. When Mother is away for the evening, come home from work, do the babysitting. Learn to cook a hotdog or a pot of spaghetti, so that your daughter will know a man can serve another's needs. When she performs in school plays or dances in recitals, arrive early, sit in the front seat, devote your full attention. Clap the loudest, so that she will know a man can have eyes only for her. When she asks for a tree house, don't just build it, but build it with her. Sit high among the branches and talk about clouds, and caterpillars, and leaves. Ask her about her dreams and wait for her answers, so that she will know a man can listen. When you pass by her door as she dresses for a date, tell her she is beautiful. Take her on a date yourself. Open doors, buy flowers, look her in the eye, so that she will know a man can respect her. When she moves away from home, send a card, write a note, call on the phone. If something reminds you of her, take a minute to tell her, so that she will know a man can think of her even when she is away. Tell her you love her, so that she will know a man can say the words. If you hurt her, apologize, so that she will know a man can admit that he's wrong. These seem like such small things, such a fraction of time in the course of two lives. But a thread does not require much space. It can be too fine for the eye to see, yet, it is the very thing that binds, that takes pieces and laces them into a whole. Without it, there are tatters. It is never too late for a man to learn to stitch, to begin mending. These are the things I would tell that young father, if I could. A daughter grown up quickly. There isn't time to waste. I love you, Dad

I love people who play guitars on roofs!" said Rose, hopping along the pavement in one of her sudden happy moods. "Don't you?" "Never knew anyone else who did it!" "Don't you like Tom?" "Of course I do. But I don't know about all the other guitar-on-roof players! They might be really awful people, with just that one good thing about them. Playing guitars on roofs... or bagpipes... Or drums... Sarah would like that, and Saffy could have the bagpipes! Caddy could have a harp.... What about Mum?" "One of those gourds filled with beans!" said Rose at once. "And Daddy could have a grand piano. On a flat roof. With a balcony and pink flowers in pots around the edge! And I'll have a very loud trumpet! What about you?" "I'll just listen," said Indigo.

The Sky; that black lid of a mighty pot, Where, vast and minute, human Races boil.

I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms—flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.

William Morris championed the movement for Arts and Crafts. He believed that when we build a house with our hands, make furniture in our workshops, make pots and paintings in our studios, plant fruits and flowers in our gardens, we transform ourselves into alchemists, turning ordinary into extraordinary.

Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them. In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.

Silence then, a world at rest. Not the antithesis of dust, of speed, but its complement. The gloved hand ungloved its partner which in turn ungloved its mate. Fingers untied her chiffon and felt for hair under her hat. Strays tidied behind her ears. The chiffon became a scarf, her hands reawoke the wide sloping brim of her hat. Gradually the earth too rewoke. Hedges chirruped to life, a crow bickered above, the sea resumed its reverend tide. Her hat was hopelessly demode but the fashion was too ridiculous: she refused to wear flower-pots, and would have nothing to do with feathery things she had not shot herself.

Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners. Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better. Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do. All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective. Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you.

Last to check was her namesake: a rampion or bellflower, Campanula rapunculus-- little turnip. All by itself in a beautiful Spanish clay pot with a bright blue glaze. Its blooms were pinky-purple stars, tiny but perfect and delicate. Sometimes, if she was feeling down, Rapunzel would secretly break off a leaf and chew it, the sour/bitter taste comforting her through the worst of the drab winter months when nothing else grew.

and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

...the reality of late summer and early autumn when Adelaide, more than any place on earth, and as simply as pouring tea from a pot, pours fourth from a lavish cornucopia into gardens and parks and markets and arcade stalls a cascade of carnations and grapes and melons, guavas and Michaelmas daisies and tomatoes, zinnias and belladonna lilies and tuberoses, lavender and quinces and cumquats and pomegranates, roses and roses and roses.

In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. “Say goodbye to your friend,” he’d say to them. “He just couldn’t cut it…” Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

What Whileawayans Celebrate The full moon The Winter solstice (You haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!") The Summer solstice (rather different) The autumnal equinox The vernal equinox The flowering of trees The flowering of bushes The planting of seeds Happy copulation Unhappy copulation Longing Jokes Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous) Acquiring new shoes Wearing same Birth The contemplation of a work of art Marriages Sport Divorces Anything at all Nothing at all Great ideas Death

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her. The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.

I closed my eyes and took more of those deep breaths Dad was so fond of, thinking that it was no wonder Prodigium were always getting their asses handed to them by humans. I mean, every time I had to do an intense spell, there was all this focusing, and relaxing, and picturing, and breathing...It wasn't exactly the most effective battle strategy against something like The Eye. I should've known better than to think about The Eye,though. As soon as the name popped into my head, my control shattered. And so did the terra-cotta pot. Black soil rained down on my feet, and the purple flower drooped even further. I could have sworn it actually bobbed accusingly at me. "Ugh," I groaned, as Cal quickly scooped the jagged pot out of my hands. "Sorry,but I warned you I was destructo-girl.

Her face deeply moved him. Why, he could at first not say. It gave him the impression of youth--spring flowers, yet age--a sense of having been used to the bone, wasted; this came from the eyes, which were hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely strange. He had a vivid impression that he had met her before, but try as he might he could not place her although he could almost recall her name, as he had read it in her own handwriting. No, this couldn't be; he would have remembered her. It was not, he affirmed, that she had an extraordinary beauty--no, though her face was attractive enough; it was that something about her moved him. Feature for feature, even some of the ladies of the photographs could do better; but she lapsed forth to this heart--had lived, or wanted to--more than just wanted, perhaps regretted how she had lived--had somehow deeply suffered: it could be seen in the depths of those reluctant eyes, and from the way the light enclosed and shone from her, and within her, opening realms of possibility: this was her own. Her he desired. His head ached and eyes narrowed with the intensity of his gazing, then as if an obscure fog had blown up in the mind, he experienced fear of her and was aware that he had received an impression, somehow, of evil. He shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all. Leo brewed some tea in a small pot and sat sipping it without sugar, to calm himself. But before he had finished drinking, again with excitement he examined the face and found it good: good for Leo Finkle. Only such a one could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking. She might, perhaps, love him. How she had happened to be among the discards in Salzman's barrel he could never guess, but he knew he must urgently go find her.

Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life might be romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom, she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack in the sitting-room floor with it. One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, eying the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said: "Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter." But Peter signified that he did want it. "You better make sure." Peter was sure. "Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't anything mean about me; but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't blame anybody but your own self." Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering over her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter.

Along with the greening of May came the rain. Then the clouds disappeared and a soft pale lightness fell over the city, as if Kyoto had broken free of its tethers and lifted up toward the sun. The mornings were as dewy and verdant as a glass of iced green tea. The nights folded into pencil-gray darkness fragrant with white flowers. And everyone's mood seemed buoyant, happy, and carefree. When I wasn't teaching or studying tea kaiseki, I would ride my secondhand pistachio-green bicycle to favorite places to capture the fleeting lushness of Kyoto in a sketchbook. With a small box of Niji oil pastels, I would draw things that Zen pots had long ago described in words and I did not want to forget: a pond of yellow iris near a small Buddhist temple; a granite urn in a forest of bamboo; and a blue creek reflecting the beauty of heaven, carrying away a summer snowfall of pink blossoms. Sometimes, I would sit under the shade of a willow tree at the bottom of my street, doing nothing but listening to the call of cuckoos, while reading and munching on carrots and boiled egg halves smeared with mayonnaise and wrapped in crisp sheets of nori. Never before had such simple indulgences brought such immense pleasure.

I want to dip my finger in your pot of honey.

He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares?

Favorite pots showed their dark bottoms from hooks and gaily colored flowers from the pasture leaned out of thin glassware.

Spring returns to my lonely chamber, Once more spring grass is lush and green. Some red plum blossoms are open, Others have yet to bloom. I grind tea bricks into fine jade powder In a pot carved with azure clouds, Still under the spell of the morning's dream, Till all of a sudden I am woken By a jug of spring. Flower shadows press at the double gate, Pale moonlight silvers the translucent curtains. A beautiful evening! Three times in two years We've missed the spring. Come back without further ado And let's enjoy our fill of this spring!

Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to

The Geranium When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail, She looked so limp and bedraggled, So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, Or a wizened aster in late September, I brought her back in again For a new routine - Vitamins, water, and whatever Sustenance seemed sensible At the time: she'd lived So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer, Her shriveled petals falling On the faded carpet, the stale Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves. (Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.) The things she endured!- The dumb dames shrieking half the night Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, Me breathing booze at her, She leaning out of her pot toward the window. Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me- And that was scary- So when that snuffling cretin of a maid Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can, I said nothing. But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week, I was that lonely.

The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard’s legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek;

He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. “Say goodbye to your friend,” he’d say to them. “He just couldn’t cut it…” Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified. The

It was Friday, so the farmers' market was in full autumnal swing, a sea of potted chrysanthemums and bushel after bushel of apples, pears, Fauvist gourds, and pumpkins with erotically fanciful stems. On one table stood galvanized buckets of the year's final roses; on another, skeins of yarn in muted, soulful purples and reds. Walter loved this part of the season- and not just because it was the time of year his restaurant flourished, when people felt the first yearnings to sit by a fire, to eat stew and bread pudding and meatloaf, drink cider and toddies and cocoa. He loved the season's transient intensity, its gaudy colors and tempestuous skies.

You're handling someone's life energy, so it's intense, yeah, but there's like this charge from it." "I'm not sure how I feel about you 'handling my life energy,' Cal." He grinned, and I was taken aback by how different it made him look. Cal spent so much time being stoic and solemn that it was easy to forget he even had teeth. "I'll buy you dinner first next time, I promise." Okay,the grin was one thing, but that had definitely been flirting. Then, like I wasn't thrown enough, Cal leaned down and picked up a potted African violet on the low table next to the sofa and brought it over to me. For a second,I wondered if this was his socially awkward way of trying to give me flowers, but he said, "Any Prodigium can do it,really.Not on the same level I can, but still.You just have to be patient." He pushed the plant toward me,and I noticed a few brown spots on its velvety petals. "Wanna try?" I looked at the droopy violet and snorted. "Thanks,but that poor little flower looks like it's suffered enough." Wiggling my fingers, I added, "I'm way better at the blowing-stuff-up part of magic.

Everything comes down to time in the end - to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things - even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos - ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that's long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced...Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.

One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, eyeing the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said: "Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter." But Peter signified that he did want it. "You better make sure." Peter was sure. "Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't anything mean about me; but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't blame anybody but your own self." Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering over her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter. "Tom, what on earth ails that cat?" "I don't know, aunt," gasped the boy. "Why, I never see anything like it. What did make him act so?

Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted, and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.

PEACHES" I imagine even peaches have bad days, their fuzzy bodies plucked before their prime and left to rot on a kitchen tray, their pudgy meat soft to the touch-tattoo of my finger checking for a pulse—nothing. Tia Marisol spends her days at the stove stirring chicken broth into a copper pot; a flowered apron hugs her waist. There is no more talk about a lover coming to take her north. These days she keeps to herself, a seed inside a green-peach shell, hard, bitter and tart.

It was spring all right, but it seemed to come shyly in that grim and sordid landscape as though unsure of a welcome. It was like a flower, a daffodil or a lily, growing in a pot on the window-sill of a slum dwelling and you wondered what it did there.

Drab and colorless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs. Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and color and which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers.... Outside the windows of her basement flat were two window boxes of geraniums, her favorite flower, and inside, wherever there was room, there was a little pot containing a geranium struggling desperately to conquer its environment, or a single hyacinth or tulip, bought from a barrow for a hard-earned shilling. Then too, the people for whom she worked would sometimes present her with the leavings of their cut flowers which in their wilted state she would take home and try to nurse back to health, and once in a while, particularly in the spring, she would buy herself a little box of pansies, primroses or anemones. As long as she had flowers Mrs. Harris had no serious complaints concerning the life she led. They were her escape from the somber stone desert in which she lived. These bright flashes of color satisfied her. They were something to return to in the evening, something to wake up to in the morning.

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking

Today the tower's flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot's lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he'd woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: "Paranoia is a flower in the brain." Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes--the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus dreamed sentences to begin with). Yet I hadn't understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain's flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in. Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.

Her life here in Carricklea is over, and either a new life will begin, or it won't. Soon she will be packing things into suitcases: woolen jumpers, skirts, her two silk dresses. A set of teacups and saucers patterned with flowers. A hairdryer, a frying pan, four white cotton towels. A coffee pot. The objects of a new existence.

We have a gray stone house with stone slates on the roof and wooden beams inside, and whitewashed bumpety walls and pots for flowers everywhere; the boards creak and he loves me, and there is something about having a child and being in a valley, and being loved, that is more marvelous than anything you or I ever knew about in our flittery days.

And she continued to steal scones for him. Definitely courting behavior. Only Percy didn't know how to really do it. (Peahen, he eventually decided, was not a good name for one's beloved. He'd have to do better. What did the ancients use? Time to research.) Percy understood the mechanics of courting, of course. One ought to write a lady sonnets, send her flowers, and purchase the dd trinket or two. But the only flowers aboard the Custard were the potted sunflowers to help cleanse the aether of malignant humours. They ought not to be cut and presented to doctors. Besides, Percy had never understood the notion of gifting the dead sexual organs of a plant to females. It seemed oddly threatening.

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets! Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.

He hopes the plant doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her. He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.

He hopes the plants doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her. He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.

Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry, about the edges of their hair.

Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behavior. Riots, lynching, and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.10 In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where staff members paid for their beverages.11 For the next 10 weeks, they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest in paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behavior. When we are made self-conscious, we become more accountable.

The small pergola that Michael had built was covered in loops of jasmine, and Lara's flower beds were blazing with color. Blowsy white peonies, dusky purple irises with golden stripes, pale orange poppies with sooty centers. The first tea roses of the year were budding. Elinas, pink petals tipped with crimson, and the ivory Jeanne Moreaus that smelled faintly of lemons. Lara wanted to pick one and put it on the breakfast tray, but Michael hated cut flowers. She went back inside and began to set the tray. Her mother's blue Venetian glass dish filled with raspberries. Orange juice in a white jug. A honey pot with a wooden dipper. Sunshine streamed in through the window, warming the terra-cotta tiles beneath her bare feet. She could not have cut flowers in the house so she had pictures of them instead. Two huge framed Georgia O'Keefe poppy prints. An apron with a pattern of climbing roses. A wooden clock that Phil had given her with a pendulum in the shape of a red rose.

Simple." Braydyn took a deep breath. "Those other lasses are vases and she's a flower pot." "Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Vases and flower pots?" Mitch furrowed his brow in confusion. "Vases are usually beautiful and purely decorative. They're sleek and sometimes expensive. But they are also the place flowers go te die. They can only bring life to the flower for so long before its empty shell eventually kills it. And if they're not used te temporarily hold flowers, then they're empty and meant for nothing more than te look pretty on someone's shelf or mantel." Bradyn leaned back in his chair, placed his hands on the back on his head and smiled, before continuing. "Now, a flower pot can be bonnie, painted, or even a little fancy. They can also be chipped and round and even plain. But they're filled with rich soil and if treated right, they are the places where flowers go te grow. Payton is a flower pot. Those other lasses are vases. I have no need for a vase.

She wandered around Sally's garden, sipping coffee, stopping to admire the grevillea and talk to the chickens. As the warmth of the sun unknotted the tension in her spine, Alice noticed a lush alley of potted tropical plants alongside the house: monstera, bird of paradise, agave, staghorns and ferns. Alice was filled with a sense of wonder; it was a garden within a garden, so meticulous and well-tended in contrast to the wild beauty surrounding it. The sumptuous blends of greens. The varying, glossy foliage.

It [the charcuterie] was almost on the corner of the Rue Pirouette and was a joy to behold. It was bright and inviting, with touches of brilliant colour standing out amidst white marble. The signboard, on which the name QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt letter encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On the two side panels of the shop front, similarly painted and under glass, were chubby little Cupids playing in the midst of boars' heads, pork chops, and strings of sausages; and these still lifes, adorned with scrolls and rosettes, had been designed in so pretty and tender a style that the raw meat lying there assumed the reddish tint of raspberry jam. Within this delightful frame, the window display was arranged. It was set out on a bed of fine shavings of blue paper; a few cleverly positioned fern leaves transformed some of the plates into bouquets of flowers fringed with foliage. There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes--stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red, varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs' trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar. Towards the back were large tureens in which the meats and minces lay asleep in lakes of solidified fat. Strewn between the various plates and sishes, on the bed of blue shavings, were bottles of relish, sauce, and preserved truffles, pots of foie gras, and tins of sardines and tuna fish. A box of creamy cheeses and one full of snails stuffed with butter and parsley had been dropped in each corner. Finally, at the very top of the display, falling from a bar with sharp prongs, strings of sausages and saveloys hung down symmetrically like the cords and tassels of some opulent tapestry, while behind, threads of caul were stretched out like white lacework. There, on the highest tier of this temple of gluttony, amid the caul and between two bunches of purple gladioli, the alter display was crowned by a small, square fish tank with a little ornamental rockery, in which two goldfish swam in endless circles.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

Naomi makes a face and points to the potted flowers near the front door of her houseboat. "Just look at that," she says, as if something upsetting has happened. She reaches into one of the pots and pulls out a green vine, a few feet long, with several bell-shaped flowers. "There," she says with a vindicated look in her eye, as if this vine has wronged her in some way. "What is it?" I ask. She flashes a patronizing smile. "An invasive weed," she says, tossing the vine into the lake. I watch the little white flowers flutter in the water. I want to kneel down and rescue them from drowning. "Morning glory," Naomi continues, shaking her head. "It'll take over if you let it." I watch as the vine drifts away on the lake. The little flowers bob up and down as if gasping for air. I consider that the vine might find its way to shore and wash up on a patch of soil, where it will start a new existence, maybe sink its roots and thrive. Maybe Naomi has set it free. I think of the bluebells that grew in my mother's garden when I was a child. Weeds, really. But I'd pick them by the handful, and when bunched together they looked stunning.

It was slow at first, dead things slowly mouldering away. The flies in the corners, the dried flowers in their clay pots. The stuffed bird Alfie bought, only because he was both fascinated and disgusted by it in equal measures, was molting on it's perch. It's feathers falling like leaves then laying, parched and cracking dry. The sea shells I kept on my windowsill turned slowly back into sand and the wind filtering through the curtains blew the pieces into the creases of my bedsheets. When I pulled them over my head at night they felt like waves crashing against my ears. It made my thoughts sodden and heavy like impalpable clay, they dredged through my mind like half-forgotten things. Wave: a face, a feeling, the ghost of a name balancing on my teeth and ready to- crash: and now gone, like a dream I once tried to remember though it was already evaporating quick from my morning-shaking fingers. I started dreaming of crumbling sandcastles and the ocean lapping at my feet. I woke in waves and lay, rocking, until I got up to place my feet in the quiet carpet and watch through my down-turned, dream-filled lashes, as it exhaled dust at every step.

To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The

Madrid. It was that time, the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette,' he with the hair of cream-colored string, he with the large and empty laugh like a slice of watermelon, the one of the Tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra on the tables, on the coffins. It was when there were geraniums on the balconies, sunflower-seed stands in the Moncloa, herds of yearling sheep in the vacant lots of the Guindalera. They were dragging their heavy wool, eating the grass among the rubbish, bleating to the neighborhood. Sometimes they stole into the patios; they ate up the parsley, a little green sprig of parsley, in the summer, in the watered shade of the patios, in the cool windows of the basements at foot level. Or they stepped on the spread-out sheets, undershirts, or pink chemises clinging to the ground like the gay shadow of a handsome young girl. Then, then was the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette.' Don Zana was a good-looking, smiling man, thin, with wide angular shoulders. His chest was a trapezoid. He wore a white shirt, a jacket of green flannel, a bow tie, light trousers, and shoes of Corinthian red on his little dancing feet. This was Don Zana 'The Marionette,' the one who used to dance on the tables and the coffins. He awoke one morning, hanging in the dusty storeroom of a theater, next to a lady of the eighteenth century, with many white ringlets and a cornucopia of a face. Don Zana broke the flower pots with his hand and he laughed at everything. He had a disagreeable voice, like the breaking of dry reeds; he talked more than anyone, and he got drunk at the little tables in the taverns. He would throw the cards into the air when he lost, and he didn't stoop over to pick them up. Many felt his dry, wooden slap; many listened to his odious songs, and all saw him dance on the tables. He liked to argue, to go visiting in houses. He would dance in the elevators and on the landings, spill ink wells, beat on pianos with his rigid little gloved hands. The fruitseller's daughter fell in love with him and gave him apricots and plums. Don Zana kept the pits to make her believe he loved her. The girl cried when days passed without Don Zana's going by her street. One day he took her out for a walk. The fruitseller's daughter, with her quince-lips, still bloodless, ingenuously kissed that slice-of-watermelon laugh. She returned home crying and, without saying anything to anyone, died of bitterness. Don Zana used to walk through the outskirts of Madrid and catch small dirty fish in the Manzanares. Then he would light a fire of dry leaves and fry them. He slept in a pension where no one else stayed. Every morning he would put on his bright red shoes and have them cleaned. He would breakfast on a large cup of chocolate and he would not return until night or dawn.

Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.

He liked to compare a horticulturist’s shop to a microcosm in which all the categories of society were represented: the flowers that are poor and coarse, the flowers of the slum, which are not truly at home unless reposing on a garret window sill, their roots jammed into a milk bottle or an old pot, the sunflower for example; the pretentious, conformist, stupid flowers, like the rose, which belong exclusively in porcelain holders painted by young girls; finally the flowers of high lineage such as orchids, delicate and charming and quiveringly sensitive to cold, exotic flowers exiled in Paris to the warmth of glass palaces, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living a segregated life, having no longer anything in common with the plants of the street or the flora of the middle class.

I close my eyes and hear wind rushing through palm trees again. And then laughter. The scene is foggy at first, and then it comes into sharp focus. I am standing in a kitchen. It's one of those big, well-appointed spaces you see in magazines, but this one is well loved, not just staged. A cake bakes in the oven. Carrot. There are matches and a box of birthday candles at the ready by the stove. Stan Getz's smoky-sweet saxophone filters from a speaker somewhere nearby. I'm stirring a pot of marinara sauce; a bit has splattered onto the marble countertop, but I don't care. I take a sip of wine and sway to the music. A little girl giggles on the sofa. I don't see her face, just her blond ponytail. And then warm, strong arms around my waist as he presses his body against me. I breathe in the scent of rugged spice, fresh cotton, and love.

There's no such thing as witches. But there used to be. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the summer solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs. But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses. Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be. Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking. Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens — how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard — and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers. The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughter’s daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics. Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way. She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, bill goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters. There wer ethree of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they'll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think — she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work. Or maybe they won't tell our story at all, because it isn't finished yet. Maybe we're just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks. There's still no such thing as witches. But there will be.

In the evenings after dinner, I set myself before Daedalus’ loom. It took me some time to understand it, for it was like no loom I had ever known in the halls of the gods. There was a seat, and the weft was drawn down rather than up. If my grandmother had seen, she would have offered her sea snake for it; the cloth it produced was finer than her best. Daedalus had guessed well: that I would like the whole business of it, the simplicity and skill at once, the smell of the wood, the shush of the shuttle, the satisfying way weft stacked upon weft. It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool. I squeezed them, pounded, soaked them in great bubbling pots until the stinking liquids foamed up bright as flowers: crimson and crocus yellow and the deep purple that

We entered the grove, and a few yards in, the trees opened to another clearing. In the center was a Sunbeam bread truck, the tires missing, mounted on cinder blocks. It had to have been from the 50s. Little Miss Sunbeam, blond curls framing her face, looking down from the side of the truck with one blue eye. The other missing, replaced by a large spot of rust. Innocent and poised, forever taking a bite out of a piece of buttered white bread. The slogan above her head, Reach for Sunbeam! ENERGY-PACKED! Under Miss Sunbeam the truck was lined and stacked head high with crosses of all sizes, the artificial flowers attached to them faded by the sun. I realized they were roadside crosses, many I recognized that were placed at accident scenes along Death Road and disappeared shortly after. An eighteen-foot four-by-four utility pole and meter leaned dangerously inward toward the truck, anchored by nothing but mud and rocks after the rain. A deep cast iron pot sat a few feet in front of the truck surrounded by ashes, bits of charred wood and odd shaped tree stumps.

Pack what you need for the divination,” he said. Relieved that he believed me capable, I walked to his desk. A detailed map of Hereswith was spread over the wood, river rocks pinning down the four corners. It was a map I had memorized with its crooked, winding streets. Above the desk, shelves lined the walls, burdened with leather-bound spell books, stacks of paper, jars brimming with crushed flowers and salt crystals and swan quills, ornate ink pots, cast-iron spoons with jewels embedded in the handles, silver bowls nestled into each other, a potted fern whose wilting leaves dangled like unrequited love. I gathered what I needed: a bowl that shone like a full moon, pink salt, dried gardenias, a spoon with an emerald chip, a pitcher full of water, a swan quill, a silver inkwell that was crafted as an octopus, its tentacles holding a vial of walnut ink. I charmed them all beneath my breath with a shrinking cantrip—a spell my mother had taught me—until the objects could sit cradled in my palm, and I slipped them into my pocket, where the remedies waited. The objects clinked like musical notes when they met, weightless as air.

Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.

Inside, the air was warm, humid. A mist hung. As this husband and wife strolled the rows arm in arm, the plants seemed to take notice—their swiveling blossoms followed in our lovers’ wake, as if to drink in the full flavor of Sun Moon’s honor and modesty. The couple stopped, deep in the hothouse, to recumbently enjoy the splendor of North Korea’s leadership. An army of hummingbirds hovered above them, expert pollinators of the state, the buzzing thrum of their wing beats penetrating the souls of our lovers, all the while dazzling them with the iridescent flash of their throats and the way their long flower-kissing tongues flicked in delight. Around Sun Moon, blossoms opened, the petals spreading wide to reveal hidden pollen pots. Commander Ga dripped with sweat, and in his honor, groping stamens emanated their scent in clouds of sweet spoor that coated our lovers’ bodies with the sticky seed of socialism. Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy. At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding. Suddenly, all the plants in the hothouse shuddered and dropped their blossoms, leaving a blanket upon which Sun Moon could recline as a field of butterflies ticklishly alighted upon her innocent skin. Finally, citizens, Sun Moon has shared her convictions with her husband!

And were you immediately taken with Charlotte, when you found her?" "Who wouldn't be?" Gentry parried with a bland smile. He drew a slow circle on Lottie's palm, stroking the insides of her fingers, brushed his thumb over the delicate veins of her wrist. The subtle exploration made her feel hot and breathless, her entire being focused on the fingertip that feathered along the tender flesh of her upper palm. Most disconcerting of all was the realization that Gentry didn't even know what he was doing. He fiddled lazily with her hand and talked with Sophia, while the chocolate service was brought to the parlor and set out on the table. "Isn't it charming?" Sophia asked, indicating the flowered porcelain service with a flourish. She picked up the tall, narrow pot and poured a dark, fragrant liquid into one of the small cups, filling the bottom third. "Most people use cocoa powder, but the best results are obtained by mixing the cream with chocolate liquor." Expertly she stirred a generous spoonful of sugar into the steaming liquid. "Not liquor as in wine or spirits, mind you. Chocolate liquor is pressed from the meat of the beans, after they have been roasted and hulled." "It smells quite lovely," Lottie commented, her breath catching as Gentry's fingertip investigated the plump softness at the base of her thumb. Sophia turned her attention to preparing the other cups. "Yes, and the flavor is divine. I much prefer chocolate to coffee in the morning." "Is it a st-stimulant, then?" Lottie asked, finally managing to jerk her hand away from Gentry. Deprived of his plaything, he gave her a questioning glance. "Yes, of a sort," Sophia replied, pouring a generous amount of cream into the sweetened chocolate liquor. She stirred the cups with a tiny silver spoon. "Although it is not quite as animating as coffee, chocolate is uplifting in its own way." She winked at Lottie. "Some even claim that chocolate rouses the amorous instincts." "How interesting," Lottie said, doing her best to ignore Gentry as she accepted her cup. Inhaling the rich fumes appreciatively, she took a tiny sip of the shiny, dark liquid. The robust sweetness slid along her tongue and tickled the back of her throat. Sophia laughed in delight at Lottie's expression. "You like it, I see. Good- now I have found an inducement to make you visit often." Lottie nodded as she continued to drink. By the time she reached the bottom of the cup, her head was swimming, and her nerves were tingling from the mixture of heat and sugar. Gentry set his cup aside after a swallow or two. "Too rich for my taste, Sophia, although I compliment your skill in preparing it. Besides, my amorous instincts need no encouragement." He smiled as the statement caused Lottie to choke on the last few drops of chocolate.

One thing I'm sure, you can't tell about love, or the lack of it, except from the outside, from the way two people look at each other, from the things they do. It's like the way you can tell about a house, about the people in it, whether they're happy, from the way it looks from the street: A small pot of marigolds, a couple of chairs in the shade, tells you pretty much everything you need to know. I could tell what they had. I could tell by the way he'd wrapped her up in that big coat of his that day in the rain, like he was a magician who could make them both disappear, by the way she'd walk next to him, or look at him when he talked to other people, that look saying, "This man is mine and I like how he is -- how he moves, how he laughs -- and he knows it and it's the two of us from here on, for everything." It was easy, unforced -- walking down the hall, she'd touch his elbow with a finger and he'd turn like a ship; she'd sigh and he'd look up. Sometimes at lunch, or in the library, you'd catch them looking at each other, a kind of calm in their eyes like after a smile, or before it, and know they were talking. She loved him -- what more is there to say? There were times I'd look at them and feel something in my chest and throat, an ache that made it harder to breathe, but I was OK with it. I can say that now. I was OK with it. I didn't know it then, but I loved them both. Who's to say which one of them more? It was the pot of flowers, the chair in the shade. . . .

AFTER THE DELUGE AS SOON as the idea of the Deluge had subsided, A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flower-bells, and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider’s web. Oh! the precious stones that began to hide,—and the flowers that already looked around. In the dirty main street, stalls were set up and boats were hauled toward the sea, high tiered as in old prints. Blood flowed at Blue Beard’s,—through slaughterhouses, in circuses, where the windows were blanched by God’s seal. Blood and milk flowed. Beavers built. “Mazagrans” smoked in the little bars. In the big glass house, still dripping, children in mourning looked at the marvelous pictures. A door banged; and in the village square the little boy waved his arms, understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples everywhere, in the bursting shower. Madame *** installed a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral. Caravans set out. And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night. Ever after the moon heard jackals howling across the deserts of thyme, and eclogues in wooden shoes growling in the orchard. Then in the violet and budding forest, Eucharis told me it was spring. Gush, pond,—Foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods;—black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll;—waters and sorrows rise and launch the Floods again. For since they have been dissipated—oh! the precious stones being buried and the opened flowers!—it’s unbearable! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in the earthen pot will never tell us what she knows, and what we do not know.

One day, at a quiet hour, I found myself alone in a certain gallery, wherein one particular picture of pretentious size set up in the best light, having a cordon of protection stretched before it, and a cushioned bench duly set in front for the accommodation of worshipping connoisseurs, who, having gazed themselves off their feet, might be fain to complete the business sitting. This picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection. It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was indeed extremely well fed, very much butcher's meat, to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half reclined on a couch – why, it would be difficult to say. Broad daylight blazed round her. She appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks. She could not plead a weak spine. She ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments – a gown covering her properly, which was not the case. Out of abundance of material, seven and twenty yards I should say, of drapery, she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans – or perhaps I ought to say, vases and goblets – were rolled here and there on the foreground, a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalog, I found that this this notable production bore name: 'Cleopatra.

Each year before the first rain after the harvest in Spring, I would look at the dry peach tree that I know so well at our backyard and anticipating that in summer it will be covered in an overgrown hedge unless my father who was a committed gardner of note take a weekend off from Jo'burg during the pruning season to prune it. Even now, I still remember with crystal clarity my childhood mood - warm days in Schoonoord with rich nostalgia of green scenery and flowers flowering everywhere.  One evening I was sitting at the veranda of our firehut looking at the orange tree between the plat (flat - roofed) house and the big L - shaped house - the tree served as a shelter from the sun for the drinking water pot next to the plat house - suddenly the weather changed, the wind howled, the tree swayed, the loose corrugated iron sheets on roof of he house clattered and clanged, the open windows shuts with a bang and the sky made night a day, and I was overwhelmed with that feeling of childhood joy at the approaching rain. All of a sudden, the deafening of steady pouring rain. The raging storm beat the orange tree leaves while I sat there remembering that where the orange tree stood used to be our first house, a small triangular   shaped mokhukhu ((tin house) made of red painted corrugated iron sheets salvaged from demolishing site in Witbank, also remembering that my aunt's mokhukhu was also made of the same type and colour of corrugated iron sheets. The ashen ground drunk merily until it was quenched and the floods started rolling down Leolo Mountains, and what one could hear above the deafening steady pouring rain was the bellowing of the nearby Manyane Dale, and if it was daylight one could have seen the noble Sebilwane River rolling in sullen glide. After about fifteen minutes of steady downpour, and rumbling sounds, the storm went away in a series of small, badly lit battle scenes.

Step 6. Ensure That Your Environment Supports Your Goals Some people subscribe to the philosophy that if the cure doesn’t hurt, it can’t be working. When it comes to permanent changes in diet and lifestyle, the opposite philosophy is the best: The less painful the program, the more likely it is to succeed. Take steps to make your new life easier. Modify your daily behavior so that your surroundings work for you, not against you. Have the right pots, pans, and utensils to cook with; have the right spices, herbs, and seasonings to make your meals delicious; have your cookbooks handy and review them often to make your dishes lively and appealing. Make sure you give yourself the time to shop for food and cook your meals. Change your life to support your health. Don’t sacrifice your health for worthless conveniences. Avoid temptation. Very few people could quit smoking without ridding their house of cigarettes. Alcoholics avoid bars to stop drinking. Protect yourself by protecting your environment. Decrease the time when you are exposed to rich foods to avoid testing your “willpower.” One of the best ways to do this is to throw all the rich foods out of the house. Just as important is to replace harmful foods with those used in the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss. If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible. Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she’ll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.

At the end of the evening, when Winterborne was donning his hat and gloves in the entrance hall, Helen impulsively picked up her potted orchid from a table in the drawing room, and brought it to him. “Mr. Winterborne,” she said earnestly, “I would like very much for you to have this.” He gave her a questioning glance as she pushed the pot into his hands. “It’s a Blue Vanda orchid,” she explained. “What should I do with it?” “You might wish to keep it in a place where you can see it often. Remember that it doesn’t like to be cold and wet, or hot and dry. Whenever it’s moved to a new environment, the Vanda usually becomes distressed, so don’t be alarmed if a flower shrivels and drops off. Generally it’s best not to set it where there may be a draft, or too much sun. Or too much shadow. And never place it next to a bowl of fruit.” She gave him an encouraging glance. “Later, I’ll give you a special tonic to mist over it.” As Winterborne stared at the exotic flower in his hands with perplexed reluctance, Helen began to regret her spontaneous action. He didn’t seem to want the gift, but she couldn’t very well ask to have it back. “You needn’t take it if you don’t want it,” she said. “I would understand--” “I want it.” Winterborne looked into her eyes and smiled slightly. “Thank you.” Helen nodded and watched forlornly as he departed with the orchid caught firmly in his grasp. “You gave him the Blue Vanda,” Pandora said in wonder, coming to stand beside her. “Yes.” Cassandra came to her other side. “The most diabolically temperamental orchid of your entire collection.” Helen sighed. “Yes.” “He’ll kill it within a week,” Kathleen said flatly. “Any of us would.” “Yes.” “Then why did you give it to him?” Helen frowned and gestured with her palms up. “I wanted him to have something special.” “He has thousands of special things from all over the world,” Pandora pointed out. “Something special from me,” Helen clarified gently, and no one asked her about it after that.

Outside the snapdragons, cords of light. Today is easy as weeds & winds & early. Green hills shift green. Cardinals peck at feeders—an air seed salted. A power line across the road blows blue bolts. Crickets make crickets in the grass. We are made & remade together. An ant circles the sugar cube. Our shadow’s a blown sail running blue over cracked tiles. Cool glistening pours from the tap, even on the edges. A red wire, a live red wire, a temperature. Time, in balanced soil, grows inside the snapdragons. In the sizzling cast iron, a cut skin, a sunny side runs yellow across the pan. Silver pots throw a blue shadow across the range. We must carry this the length of our lives. Tall stones lining the garden flower at once. Tin stars burst bold & celestial from the fridge; blue applause. Morning winds crash the columbines; the turf nods. Two reeling petal-whorls gleam & break. Cartoon sheep are wool & want. Happy birthday oak; perfect in another ring. Branch shadows fall across the window in perfect accident without weight. Orange sponge a thousand suds to a squeeze, know your water. School bus, may you never rust, always catching scraps of children’s laughter. Add a few phrases to the sunrise, and the pinks pop. Garlic, ginger, and mangoes hang in tiers in a cradle of red wire. That paw at the door is a soft complaint. Corolla of petals, lean a little toward the light. Everything the worms do for the hills is a secret & enough. Floating sheep turn to wonder. Cracking typewriter, send forth your fire. Watched too long, tin stars throw a tantrum. In the closet in the dust the untouched accordion grows unclean along the white bone of keys. Wrapped in a branch, a canvas balloon, a piece of punctuation signaling the end. Holy honeysuckle, stand in your favorite position, beside the sandbox. The stripes on the couch are running out of color. Perfect in their polished silver, knives in the drawer are still asleep. A May of buzz, a stinger of hot honey, a drip of candy building inside a hive & picking up the pace. Sweetness completes each cell. In the fridge, the juice of a plucked pear. In another month, another set of moths. A mosquito is a moment. Sketched sheep are rather invincible, a destiny trimmed with flouncy ribbon. A basset hound, a paw flick bitching at black fleas. Tonight, maybe we could circle the floodwaters, find some perfect stones to skip across the light or we can float in the swimming pool on our backs—the stars shooting cells of light at each other (cosmic tag)—and watch this little opera, faults & all.

Elizabeth?” Ian said in a clipped voice. She whirled around, her heart slamming against her ribs, her hand flying to her throat, her knees turning to jelly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You-you startled me,” she said as he strolled up to her, his expression oddly impassive. “I didn’t expect you to come here,” she added nervously. “Really?” he mocked. “Whom did you expect after that note-the Prince of Wales?” The note! Crazily, her first thought after realizing ti was from him, not Valerie, was that for an articulate man his handwriting verged on the illiterate. Her second thought was that he seemed angry about something. He didn’t keep her long in doubt as to the reason. “Suppose you tell me how, during the entire afternoon we spent together, you neglected to mention that you are Lady Elizabeth?” Elizabeth wondered a little frantically how he’d feel if he knew she was the Countess of Havenhurst, not merely the eldest daughter of some minor noble or knight. “Start talking, love. I’m listening.” Elizabeth backed away a step. “Since you don’t want to talk,” he bit out, reaching for her arms, “is this all you wanted from me?” “No!” she said hastily, backing out of his reach. “I’d rather talk.” He stepped forward, and Elizabeth took another step backward, exclaiming, “I mean, there are so many interesting topics for conversation, are there not?” “Are there?” he asked, moving forward again. “Yes,” she exclaimed, taking two steps back this time. Snatching at the first topic she could think of, she pointed to the table of hyacinths beside her and exclaimed, “A-Aren’t these hyacinths lovely?” “Lovely,” he agreed without looking at them, and he reached for her shoulders, obviously intending to draw her forward. Elizabeth jumped back so swiftly that his fingers merely grazed the gauze fabric of her gown. “Hyacinths,” she babbled with frantic determination as he began stalking her step for step, pas the table of potted pansies, past the table of potted lilies, “are part of genus Hyacinthus, although the cultivated variety, which we have here, is commonly called the Dutch hyacinth, which is part of H. orientalis-“ “Elizabeth,” he interrupted silkily, “I’m not interested in flowers.” He reached for her again, and Elizabeth, in a frantic attempt to evade his grasp, snatched up a pot of hyacinths and dumped it into his outstretched hands. “There is a mythological background to hyacinths that you may find more interesting than the flower itself,” she continued fiercely, and an indescribable expression of disbelief, amusement, and fascination suddenly seemed to flicker across his face. “You see, the hyacinth is actually named for a handsome Spartan youth-Hyacinthus-who was loved by Apollo and by Zephyrus, god of the west wind. One day Zephyrus was teaching Hyacinthus to throw the discus, and he accidentally killed him. It is said that Hyacinthus’s blood caused a flower to spring up, and each petal was inscribed with the Greek exclamation of sorrow.” Her voice trembled a little as he purposefully set the pot of hyacinths on the table. “A-Actually, the flower that sprang up would have been the iris or larkspur, not the modern hyacinth, but that is how it earned its name.” “Fascinating.” His unfathomable eyes locked onto hers. Elizabeth knew he was referring to her and not the history of the hyacinth, and though she commanded herself to move out of his reach, her legs refused to budge.

Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it. What is Marijuana? Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.) First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain. How is Medical Marijuana Used? There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more). ● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis. ● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales. ● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere. What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo? We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean. ● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled ● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed ● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco ● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis How Does It Feel to be High? When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie. Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours. Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe? Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.