The Flowers

ALL the names I know from nurse;
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.

Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames ~
These must all be fairy names!

Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!

Fair are grown-up people's trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Happy Holiday Easter Weekend

 

 

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn'

Morning's at seven'

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing'

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven ~

All's right with the world!

 

~ Robert Browning (1812 - 1889) English poet, playwright.

 

[Photos:  Ruthven, June 2011 lbw]

 

 

"When she rises up, she gets confused!"
Washington Post, 1983, when the wife of the Canadian Ambassador meets President Reagan.

"Before we met the president in his Oval Office they took us to another room, where some anxious young men told us where to stand, how long to speak and when to shove off.  They told me that only Mr. Ambassador (that's what the Americans call my husband) was to have his photo opportunity with the president, in front of the fireplace.  Wife of Ambassador was supposed to move away from the fireplace and out of camera range.
Well, you know how they used to describe me at home:  "When she rises up, she gets confused."  After the handshake I backed into the camera crew.  Some of the young men began to hiss at me, but the president grabbed my arm and insisted I be in the picture too.  I really didn't want to have my picture taken with the president because I know my hair looked like corkscrews.  But I didn't have enough time to tell the president about this hairdresser with the gold chains who had just given me the worst permanent in my whole life and that it was going to be weeks before I was photographable."

~ Sondra Gotlieb (b. 1936) Canadian journalist, novelist, lives in Toronto, Ontario. When I Rises Up, I Gets Confused!  The Best of Sondra Gotlieb. McArthur & Company 2004.

"Well into the 1800s, maple sugar was the only sugar readily available to North Americans.  However, in the late 1800s, the cane sugar industry in the Caribbean began to compete with the homemade delicacy.  After a war that included tariffs on the refined, tasteless white sugar, and bounties for maple sugar production, maple sugar gave way to the mass-production economy of cane sugar.  During the first half of the twentieth century, except for brief periods during World War 1 and World War II, when maple sugar helped ease the North American sugar shortage, maple sugar and its companion, maple syrup, became delicacies valued for their flavor rather than for their sweetening power."

Today, maple syrup, not sugar, is the favored maple product."

~ Sugartime, The Hidden Pleasures of Making Maple Syrup with a Primer for the Novice Sugarer,  Susan C. Hauser, Key Porter Books Limited, 1998.

[Photos:  Haldimand, March, 2016. lbw]

Wear the Green

The Neat Little Bookshop

 

"May you always walk in sunshine & never want for more.  May Irish angels rest their wings right beside your door."

 

 

"Searching For Green Roots" ~ History of the Beacoms

Quoting from a 1967 booklet, "Through the Years in West Nissouri 1818 to 1967" by Ida Logan of Thorndale, ON. about the crossing from Ireland to the new world.

"For the early immigrants, the six-week Atlantic crossing was quite a hardship.  They sailed in cargo vessels which carried squared timber back to Britain.  The ship's captain put in a few temporary partitions and bunks, and jammed in hundreds of passengers, who had to look after their own needs on the long voyage.
They supplied their own bedding, dishes, food, except bread and water which the captain provided.  The cooking was done over fireplaces where much pushing and shoving occurred over turns to cook porridge, salt pork, or potatoes.  The same confusion reigned over wash basins and corners for fresh air as the quarrels raged between peopled housed in such cramped quarters.  Colds and other diseases spread rapidly among the passengers.  It was not unusual to have 40 - 50 funerals in one crossing."

~ Lulu M. Carson & M. Phyllis Thompson,
Abco Copy Cat Limited, London, ON, 1989.

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

~ Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) A Room of One's Own [1929]

March 8 is International Women's Day.  Theme for 2016 is Pledge for Parity.

 

 

[Photo:  Vintage hand-fan advertising for G. W. Robinson Co. Ltd. Department Store lbw]

 

 

 

 

"Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know."

~ Sir Richard Francis Burton [March 19,1821 - October 20,1890] British explorer, writer, poet.
Familiar Quotations, John Bartlett./ Little,  Brown and Company, Centennial Edition. 1955

[Portrait:  Wikipedia]




 

"...the fear of hurting someone's feelings may be having a chilling effect on solid conversation in general ~ not only political conversation.  At dinner parties I've attended, the topics of conversation mainly were restaurants, vacations, and health ~ all safe subjects.
To engage in small talk is often enjoyable and it certainly is "polite," but a steady diet of conversation about food, vacations, and health is tedious.  "Politeness," La Rochefoucauld says, "is essential in social life, but it should have limits;  it becomes a kind of slavery when it is excessive."
...
"Yet it is hard to avoid saccharine politeness when the alternative is often the angry venting of opinions.  Judith Martin says that "she would be only too happy to welcome the return of substantive conversation at dinner parties; goodness knows she is weary of hearing people talk about the food.  But conversation requires listening respectfully to others and engaging in polite give-and-take, rather than making speeches and impugning others' motives and judgment."

Conversation requires listening respectfully to others and engaging in polite give-and-take, rather than making speeches and impugning others' motives and judgment.

"Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist, warns against discussing politics at dinner parties.  'Anyone who has ever even invited guests of opposing political persuasions over to dinner will know how quickly it can all go wrong....A chilly, polite dinner is more bearable than one that ends with guests stomping out the door'."

 

 

~ Stephen Miller, Conversation, A History of a Declining Art, Yale University, 2006.