To Love and Dance the Light Fantastic

There was a time when I was young - just after the dinosaurs met their demise.  While not a great beauty, I was considered quite pretty and intelligent.  I could always turn a gentleman's head, but relationships never lasted long, as the man was so wrong as far as the rest of my life was concerned.

I dragged around a collection of dirty old suitcases stuffed with baggage from my childhood, much like old Bob Cratchit of Dicken's Christmas Carol.  Feelings of insecurity and low self worth stunted my progress at the things I considered most important in my life.

I was raised not to be sustainable on my own, but to get married if I wanted the finer things in life.  I worked hard at jobs where at least 65% of my income went towards tacky housing in seedy neighborhoods.  I felt a prisoner in a life I could only except.

I managed to put myself through one year of college, but it became my goal of survival to marry into more money than I made myself to pull myself out of poverty.  It's a story that doesn't have too happy of an ending, but I'm ancient now; and although not rich, I have many comforts of life.

A Common Eastern Bumblebee, I think.

Wild onion beginning to bloom

Black Stink Bug

Small flowers on American Beautyberry

Lacewing Larvae with its shield of dead bug carcasses .

These insects are seen quite a bit around here.

Native Wild Petunia

Flowers fade and drop off by mid afternoon.

"Laura" Phlox

Joe Pye Weed beginning to bloom

Daylily "Aabachee"

I love this one.

A life like mine has many stories to tell, and some I wish to never tell.  While I poured my heart out in the early years of this blog about much of the unhappiness I carried through my life, no words of these writings exist now.  I chose it to be that way.

I suppose this blog is a personal one, and also a garden one at times.  Since I never garden 24 hours a day, I find writing about only one subject a bit of a bore for me.  I stress myself striving for my version of perfection in the production of my stories before one ever goes to print.  It's the artist in me, to never give up until satisfied.  I garden that way also...worse luck :(  It's exhausting.

Tonight is about fond memories one year while working in what I called the Woolworth of casinos.  Only the old will remember these five and ten-cent stores.  It was a  rundown casino owned by an old grumpy man with ties to the mafia at some time in his life.  

His wife would often accompany him from their living quarters above, and stand in the main cashier cage to survey their workers and customers.  Their two mean old crooked toothed schnauzers would mill around the cage nipping at our heels at times.  I worked the main cashier cage, then the credit department area of the cage.  Crap jobs, but the pay came with benefits.

Hibiscus moscheutos

With the Rose Mallow Bee

(Ptilothrix bombiformis)

Bumblebee resting in the heat of day in slowly closing mallow flower.

After much searching, I think this is an Assassin Bug,

maybe Stenolemus bituberus.  I saw it finish eating a spider,

and what's left of the spider is underneath it.

Lilium superbum

Black ground beetle taking a swim before dinner.

He was rescued and thanked me by scurrying for his life.

Orange Butterflyweed (Milkweed)

Since I mostly dealt with frustrated scared angry people as a credit cashier, the job was riddled with reasons to toss in the towel and move back home to start over again, but failure had a nasty taste in my mouth; therefore, I never allowed myself to move backwards unless a gun was pointed at my head.  I dosed with Excedrin for the headaches, and tossed the job in the trash can on my days off.

It was during one of these encounters with an angered man who threw himself across the counter in a fit of rage and grabbed me by my neck, that I met the love of my life for the next year and a half.  Please keep your head out of the clouds, as this isn't a romance centered around lust.

Saved by a somewhat good looking security guard twice my age, business settled back down to the usual.  He became my friendly confident, a person I could trust with all my thoughts.  We talked in spare moments on the job when business was slower than usual.

Dinners eventually entered the picture, and I guess one could say I was slowly... very slowly swept off my feet.  He became the person I always wanted to be with, the person who lite up my life like slow burning embers.

Autumn Minaret Daylily with Planthopper insect.

I think these insects originally came from Australia. 

 

Hard life for this echinacea cone flower.

Caught raiding the sack of soiled seed leavings from the bird feeder cleaning.

Just look at him waiting for me to go back into the house,

so he can continue his thievery :)

No longer remember the type of lily this is.

A free small bulb during Master Gardener year,

and it is still alive with a bit of a struggle.

Bumblebee with Clematis Viorna

Yellow Blackberry Lily

One knows how love is in the beginning...you're floating on pure emotions.  The world is glossed over in perfection, and nothing ever gets the best of you.  It's like Nirvana, where all is as it should be and life is pure happiness.

His mother had been one of the Ziegfeld Follies in the twenties, and to dance with him was as if the music was wrapping itself around us as we barely touched the floor.  He was addictive, but eventually I floated right out of his arms into reality.

Struggling from a divorce, he was living in his camper truck and I gradually had to let go of the illusion there would be any future between us.  He was my piece of resistance while at that old casino, and he will always be remembered with fondness.

We live...we die.  In the in-between the ultimate quest is to love and be loved.  I've accomplished the former many times, the latter few times, but to keep score isn't the point.  To be happy is, and while I had my dancing partner, I felt like the happiest lady on earth.  

Cicada song in the background 

Take Care

This post is linked to:

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

My Corner of the World

Saturday's Critters

Summer days drag their feet towards fall ~

Hunting the wild persimmons

Native persimmons ~ ripe when they fall from tree  

Dustin raves about their tastiness  

No persimmon on the ground escapes his teeth

One of a kind

Who knows?

A neat looking small wildflower

Youth has a way of perceiving life as forever.  It isn't, of course, but that optimism is a great feeling while it lasts.  Cervical degenerative discs, pinched nerve flare-ups, shoulder muscle spasms; there are days when being optimistic is like climbing a rock wall up the face of a mountain.

I recline outside today on my plush chaise lounge; a first this year.  Actually, it's a first ever.  There's a saying... better late than never... I know, there's also another saying... a day late and a dollar short.  I'm a model example of why these sayings are still in use in these modern times.

I'm having a little skirmish with a pint-sized spider who thinks it's his chaise lounge also.  I move him, he comes back to spin another web.  It's never ending.  Of course, I could just squish him, but that's not my style, so we co-exist with some trepidation.

Southern Bee Blossom with a fly, tree cricket, 

and what appears to be another 

type of crane fly

Second bloom on clematis after rains in late summer

Beautyberry ripening

Coralberry

Sends runners out on top of ground

that root to ground at stem segments

creating nice trip hazards

Black Stink Bug (Proxys punctulatus) on spicebush

Winterthur viburnum berries 

turning from white to pink to blue

Crane fly (I think)

Natures artwork on a violet leaf

Porch plant

Maidenhair fern in 20" planter

The name of this blog has no rhyme or reason.  It was pulled out of thin air as I realized from the form being filled out, nameless blogs don't exist.  My bad.  It was the best I could cough up in ten seconds flat.  I've made fun of it more than once in my posts.

It's a play on words.  It doesn't make any sense, but you know how we humans love to give a word fifty shades of meanings.  Imperfection would fit me best today.  Oh, poo.....  Just checked the front bird bath, and six English sparrows are a dancing in the water while many others are pigging out at the feeder. 

It all began in spring with the next door neighbor hanging a large feeder overflowing with low quality seeds that drew in the English sparrows and starlings.  Upon discovering my feeder, they all made me the main attraction and my neighbor a backup.  Thanks, good neighbor.  We love you.

Spicebush swallowtail caterpillar

in its rolled leaf for protection. 

Liatris aspera 

Group of Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillars traveling across oak leaves 

at base of red oak tree.

Wasp mud nest on swamp hibiscus stem 

Purple leaf hopper - 1/4" long

Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillar munching on swamp hibiscus leaf

It's been near on five months of cicada songs with several different batches emerging out of the underground from late spring to now.  The last batch sings for mates until dusk has fallen into darkness.  I'm becoming quite adept at ignoring that eternal chatter of love to preserve what's left of my inner peace.

My vegetable beds are minus one cucumber plant that grew old and died with all the cucumbers still on it.  All desire seems lost this year to care for or about them.  Kaput!  I'm still eating cherry tomatoes off the vine, but the seed packets for the rest of the veggie patch are still on the kitchen table.  Oh, well.....

The almanac predicts winter will be warmer at this years end and on into the next.  I want nothing of it.  I wish ice and snow and thirty degrees below... well, maybe not quite that chilled, but those persevering little blood loving suckers called ticks embrace warmer winters to increase their brood ten-fold.  I will be living with the devil come next spring.

Chaos 

Brown-Eyed Susan

 Rudbeckia triloba

Tiny Golden Green Sweat Bee

(Augochlora pura)

on Marjoram flowers

Blue Lobelia

Spiny Assassin Bug

Brown-Eyed Susan flower is 1" in diameter.

Waited 2 hours for this little insect to come into full view.

When I could see only its head peeking over the flower center,

it looked like something from outer space.

Sideoats grama grass seed head flowers

'Sparkleberry' Winterberry

Miniature Robber Fly on grass seed head

(Holcocephala fusca)

Fierce hunters of other insects.

Orchard Orb-Weaver Spider

(Leucauge venusta)

A small spider with a complex web

While autumn teases with a bit of her colors, summer is still in the air.  The broomsedge bluestem, a tall grass that stands beautifully throughout the winter, is coming into its own.  Artistically snaking its way throughout the sunnier parts of the gardens, it is usually left where it decides to reside.

The turtlehead flowers are slowly loosing blossoms from the bottom upward, and leaving those beautiful stately seed heads, while the drying flowers of the Joe pye weed remind one of the ghosts of all the yesterdays.  Their neighbors, the swamp sunflowers are just beginning to see flower buds peeking out of their centers.

I saw a blue aster flower today, and many more will come as the days and weeks pass by.  While these native gardens are not drama queens, they create many delightful pops of color before the end of one winter and on past the beginning of the next winter.

Buildup of afternoon clouds

While it's easy to idealize nature standing on the outside looking in, the reality I see in my native gardens is that life encompasses both goodness and cruelty.  It is the nature of creation.  I always think of my gardens as my Eden and my Hell wrapped up in pretty trimmings.