Ideal Cosmos

At my latitude, nine rotations in mid December exclude daylight for fifteen hours and fourteen minutes. This slow motion reversal at the planetary elliptical vertex is experienced as stasis. Nine days of nearly equal day light. Then, day by day, our planet rushes toward another season at 67,000 miles per hour, delivers us a minute, then two, and finally three minutes additional daylight per rotation. This is time, flying.

That it is completely dark at seven thirty five in the morning, nearly 26,000 minutes after that reversal, is still surprising. The moon, approaching its 297° northwest by west horizon, nearly full, cast its reflected light through our window, waking me as would the morning sun, set to meet the horizon only fourteen minutes later.

The rising sun's countenance a dim facade.

Winter, with it's frozen palette,

 pushes me to reconsider a lifelong disinterest in Florida.

 All places can challenge our preconceptions.

Although Florida's humanity has created endless reaches of entertainment and consumerism, gated communities and social poverties, it is a place of subtle beauty, and warm, ever so warm. I've still not grown accustomed to winter travel, its luxury and privilege. Yet, it does aid the spirit and what does one have if one is low in spirit?

I've become taken with this greenhouse situated within Florida's Mead Botanical Garden. It's not my first greenhouse, and won't be my last.

At home we invite the aura of a Floridian winter when we bring outdoor plants indoors to overwinter.  With them we bring various creatures, including this year's populations of aphids and fungus gnats.

In this choice we face the decision, should we be so thoughtful, of life or death for these insects. The suffering of plants, should they experience suffering at all, is weighted against the immediate squish or the slow, sudsy demise of soft-bodied beings. We recoil at the sticky residue and skins shed onto the windowsill, but not the lack of empathy for life. Expanded, these thoughts engage all the world, all the choices within our power to make.

Despite myself, I still moved to extinguish the aphids, to eliminate the gnats. A garden is celebrated, but a gardener kills. We do not move against the gardener, decry their deeds and demote their effort -apart from the more fashionable descriminations. We do not yet belong to an ideal cosmos, of which only mathematics and our imaginations approach.

Blazing Star

Passing through the landscape planting at the entrance to the new Bell Museum, I was struck by the persistently pink among a tawny sea -the blazing star, possibly Liatris aspera -rough blazing star. 

Here, at age 18, is another persistently blazing star who brought to my young world wonderfully scented tea roses, cloches, lavender and hardy ageratum, spring tulips and daffodils, dunking (not spraying) for a nickle a critter, garden flowers not florists, cuttings and rooting, weigelas and azaleas, cinnamon and chocolate.

At 99 she confessed to me that she did not love my grandfather as much as he loved her, but had a good life nonetheless, and that was all she ever said of it. Life is always more complex than we let on, but why go on about it? She the flower gardener, he the vegetable "farmer," each had their spaces, their gendered roles distinct, yet the young me watched them work together, modeling togetherness, a value she held higher than her own contentment. At 100, Anna's first selfie, above.

Anna Steinert Meuschke (1915-2019) died on New Year's Day at the age of 103. 

Infestans

Had you asked me one week ago, before my excursion to New York City, about my tomatoes, I would have told you how wonderful they look, not a blemish, not a spot, so much growth if but a little slow to produce. The weather had been perfect -mid eighties daily, mid sixties nightly, occasional rains, some quite heavy, but spaced well enough to dry the soil and leaves consistently.

But you did not ask me a week ago, you asked me today, after temperature and moisture have acted in concert to produce a bloom of quick death, the ebola of tomatoes, a harshly sudden and lethal affliction with the curious botanic moniker P. infestans, late blight.

We can only watch as the plant withers, top and bottom, leaves, stems and fruit. Picking from this blackened tangle of vines is like stealing from the dead; the experience of tomato too close to mush and slime, one picked from this vine makes an appetite for it tarnished, rotten.  

It will be only a matter of days, maybe by this weekend, that the once strong will be blackened and slumped. I will watch them die and think about what little control we have over life, the one we wish for and the life we wish away.

The tomato patch after severe cleaning.