Full Baby Yellowtail Moon

FMA July 23, 2021 Full Baby Yellowtail Moon Hey y’all, I hope this finds you great! I just finished a wonderful book The Seed Underground by Janisse Ray. Oh wow, what a writer and full of good stories and information for us all. The book opens with Janisse saying that it is time to start building “lives that make sense, that contribute to a lighter, more intelligent, more beautiful way of living on the earth, lives that are lived as far outside and beyond corporate control as possible”. On a visit to Sylvia Davatz’s garden in Vermont “where grows the largest White Oak in Vermont”. Now that grabbed my attention y’all! Sylvia told Janisse that she is just a gardener, trying to garden like we no longer have oil, because soon we won’t. Janisse is inspired by her visit to say that “it is time to establish locally grown seeds, to return to our grandmother’s ways, growing our veggies, traveling less, treasuring home, family and friends more.” Amen sister! Now to the end of this fine book. Janisse states, “Rev up your awesome. Look around, so many people have put their shoulders into the load. You. Find a place to push. Pick up a tool—a hoe or a shovel. Start turning compost, make the soil in which your seed will grow… …Many of our seed have been lost forever. But we can protect what is left and in our revolutionary gardens we can produce the heirlooms of the future. Begin now.” OK Janisse, count me in! My new mantra: “mow where you go, grow where you don’t”- OK, maybe not so new. 6-24-21 Full moon tonight, rains off and on. P and I drove around looking for a break in the clouds so we could see the “Super Moon” per our weather guy. All we could see was a line of glow through a seam in the clouds, kind of like what David Lee has to contend with when he is residing in his cloudy Oregon. Speaking of Dave, he said that with the Full Moon it is a reminder for him and Jan to catch the low tide action along the coast. That sounds like beach comber’s heaven with low tide running 2’ below normal, YAY! 6-25-21 Acadian Brown Cotton, ABC, closing reception at the Hilliard Art Museum on campus, P tagged along with me, she really looked good (and as you know it helps an older, wrinkled, white headed guy to have a young babe on his arm) and she enjoyed meeting and learning from everyone from weavers to brown cotton growers to film makers. 6-27-21 Busy day mowing between showers (that is what we call rain here Dog, I know you folks in Grand Junction, C. have not seen any rain in a good while, sorry). I stole 45 minutes to harvest honey from my top bar hive. 6 pounds or so and a bag of honeycomb. YeeHaw! Then singing at church for two masses (don’t worry, I just move my lips and my mike is turned off) P is the real singer. Then off to LaPoussiere for an evening of Music by Geno Delafose and French Rocking Boogie. Cajun/Zydeco two-stepping and waltzing until way past 1030! We ran into Margaret and hubby Jeff there with friends Barry and Jenny. Margaret had her cowboy boots on and as Jeff says “they do give her an attitude”, ha! We had much fun and stayed way longer than we planned as we are early-to-bed folk usually. Saw the remnant of the super moon finally between Parks and St. Martinville. Now that was a grand view! Speaking of Margaret: Mississippi Heat Wave August was long of light in a Mississippi heat wave that summer of ‘72. On the path to Purple Creek, my flip-flops kept the stickers away and mosquitos preferred Missy’s freckle-juice. Covered in Off and Coppertone, we’d hold hands to cross the waterfall, tip-toe trickle over a concrete slab. On the other side was an endless pine forest. We’d walk the path of dirt bikes, side-stepping ruts in the muddy red clay. Avoiding under-the-bridge where the smoking kids hung out, we’d wander to the stables, pick out a favorite horse, pretend they were ours. Endless summer days stretched out like a Gulf Coast beach burned our tender noses, streaked our blonde hair, became a backdrop to childhood memories. Margaret Simon, draft http://reflectionsontheteche.com 7-1-21 Met up with my former student and good bud Skipper today at Reve’s for coffee and conversation. Our “excuse” was that I had a bag of honeycomb for his wife and my former student Amy who is my go-to-girl for anything to do with Herbal. She makes salves with honey saturated beeswax, very cool. Skipper is running a swamp tour for the BSA Swamp Base Camp operation in Henderson. He hails from the Henderson Swamp with a HS degree from Cecelia and the Swamp School of Hard Knocks so he has a real swamper w. requisite Cecelia accent. We first met in my class, I remember him being just a bit disruptive, something I need to keep me on my toes, then later Skipper was the one that helped me into my first pair of minimalist sandals, Zero shoes. I became an official Zero Sandal Cobbler because of his instruction. He also helped me to build my first twig burner stove out of recycled food and paint cans. 7-4-21 From my bud CA (Chuck Allen): “I get to say this once a year. If you have a fifth for the fourth, you may not go forth on the fifth.” I’m having fun despite the hopelessness of it all. I don’t think we are changed as a people at all, or as Wendell Berry said, “Be joyful although you’ve considered all the facts”. OR… like Rabbi Rami Shapiro so well pointed out Americans have learned nothing from this pandemic. He said what he observed is that by refusing to wear masks, we showed that our compassion rarely overcomes our selfishness. He says that the profusion of conspiracy theories points towards a pretty shallow, easily overwhelmed capacity for critical thinking. Lastly, that our refusal to accept virulent epidemics and catastrophic weather events as features of climate change show that we prefer to hide behind self-serving fantasies rather than dealing with the harsh realities. Amen Brother Shapiro! OK so now back to Margaret, her friend Marion died of an aggressive cancer back in January. Marion and her daughter packed up a big box of yarn and sent it to Margaret. When Marion died her daughter asked that friends plant a tree in her memory. I shared a Red Buckeye Tree with Margaret a couple of years back and she decided to finally plant it in Marion’s memory. Rita Dove’s poem Last Words published in The New Yorker on 1-18-21 reminded Margaret of her buddy Marion, a portion of it follows: “Let the end come as the best parts of living have come unsought and undeserved inconvenient now that is a good death” when Margaret planted the Red Buckeye she buried a scrap of Marion’s knitting under the tree. In response to a line of that poem and a challenge to write a Golden Shovel, Margaret wrote this poem: (Y’all, if you hadn’t noticed it yet, these poets are not like the rest of us, if you know what I mean. Hey David Lee, thank God! Right?) Bury the Knitting (Golden Shovel for Marion using the striking line from Rita Dove, “Let the end come as the best part of living.) I bury the knitting; Let dirt fall like rain on the stitches of your gentle hands. The end came too soon. I come to this tree today to pray as you did. The roots will travel around the best part of a daily life of love and care-filled living. Margaret Simon, draft OK, OK now for Finding Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, wow, what a read, all about plant intelligence and connectivity and really weird stuff you all should be exposed to. See mothertreeproject.org. TED Talk. Radio Lab. Ok last line in book was “Vive la foret! Hey, yay foret! 7-6-21 Michael loves to check for eggs in my coop. He is Paula’s math tutor. Today he found only 5. Later I was watering and feeding and had my hands full and noted one more “late egg”. When I returned to close the doors after dark and to collect my one egg, I only found a 5’ TRS, Texas Rat Snake, with a full belly. Now that was a thrill y’all. 7-10-21 Today I shared a jar of honey with my friends and the source of my bee swarm who now populate my top bar hive, Jeff and Margaret Simon. While there I helped Margaret decide where to place the Red Buckeye she wanted to plant. 7-15-21 Paula’s student Michael Classen came over to be tutored today, his mom stayed home tending to her mom. Michael’s uncle drove he and his older brother to our house. Michael and his big brother Nicholas walked to the door and Uncle Tom, ex US Marine, graduate USNA, got out the car and asked Mimi for a shovel to kill the young Copperhead Snake on our driveway. Mimi is all about killing poisonous snakes, I may have been able to relocate him if I had found him first… thus the name of this full moon, Full Baby Yellowtail Moon (nephew Andre ‘Bruce’ Broussard calls them Yellowtails). Tonight Michael’s grandmother the Warrior Woman Anne Classen (92) Wife of and mother of Marines,died quietly, surrounded by family. She was a force to be reckoned with. So glad she was my friend. 7-16-21 I brought arborist to look at two sites for customers so he could bid the work, one site, Mrs Bea’s tree was in Bendel Gardens, so he looked around and said “did I ever tell you what your dad told me about where he was when he heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour?” It seems like dad was on a picnic, on a Sunday, probably early afternoon, with a certain young lady (not our mom, she came along after his military discharge), at the intersection of Beverly and Margarite (at one of the higher points in Lafayette a lofty 30’ above sea level), an over-look of the Vermilion River. He had his car parked with the door opened and the radio on so they could hear the music from their picnic blanket, when the announcer interrupted the programming to announce our countries entry into WWII. Pretty cool stuff y’all. Dad was a POW of the Germans and never spoke much to us about his war experiences. Enjoy that moon rise Thursday around 8, a full two hours after sunset, yay! Peace love possumhugs BT