Elizabeth Moon's Blog, page 66

The Consuming Passion: Roses

This location is everything roses do not like:  very alkaline soil (either heavy clay over limestone or limey marl-y stuff over limestone),  hard water (see "limestone" above), extremely long, hot, dry summers,  water restrictions in summer that result in thirsty plants,  sudden (as in an hour or so) plunging temperatures in winter followed by rapid rewarming to hot, windy.    So few people out in the country attempt rose growing except for one or two pampered (and very tough) roses like Cecile Brunner and Lady Banks.

In addition, I've never been a serious rose gardener...my real passion (until recently) has always been native plants.   The change from mostly fragrant roses (when I was a child in another part of Texas and my mother grew roses)  to scentless varieties did nothing to lure me to roses...for a long time.


The white climber/rambler rose, though, I would never have pulled out--though it blooms only once a year, for about a week, the fragrance is incredible.   The flowers form terminal trusses of small, single white, from pink buds, and I will stand in the driveway for a long time just to smell them.   It seemed to like what we did for it...until the oaks grew.  Dense oak shade it does not like.    Over the years, as the oaks got taller and produced more shade, it declined.   

At the other end of the driveway, meanwhile, the removal of non-native shrubs (like pyrecantha) continued and opened a space.  My mother had bought the house across the driveway, which meant we now own the back garden there--on the other side of the fence from the driveway.   We removed the fence, and built a walkway from the lower end of our driveway to the back end of that garden...and then thought a trellis over it would be nice, and we could have flowering vines...or...a rose or so.  Like the old white climber, still hanging on. 

                         Trellis nearing completion

But, never having transplanted a rose, and having had bad luck with cuttings before, we started looking at rose catalogs to see if we could find "our" rose in case something went wrong.  No such luck.  The closest I've found is a rose listed at the Antique Rose Emporium as "Kathleen"--but it's much pinker than ours.  We started asking for advice on transplanting (and looked up some online.)  We realized that even if we did get the old white rose transplanted, we'd still need (cough-cough) another rose or two to cover the trellis. 

I called the garden center we've used for other things, and asked about their climbing roses--and then we went down to see.  The only climbing rose they had with any real fragrance was "Don Juan"--a dark, velvety red, and not really what I wanted.  In my mind's eye, that trellis is covered with soft-colored flowers.   But near the "Don Juan" were some roses in pots emitting a strong fragrance of their own.   The roses were covered with both yellow and white flowers.   We didn't need a bush rose...exactly...but the fragrance crawled up my nose and attacked my sales resistance successfully.  We drove the 20-odd miles back in a haze of scent that easily filled the car.   It's a "knockout" rose that's supposed to be resistant to several of our local rose diseases and heat and drought tolerant.   The buds are golden; the flowers open yellow then quickly turn white.

From Twitter 10-05-2010

07:47:02: RT @NASA: First-of-its-kind study shows freshwater is flowing into Earth's oceans in greater amounts every year. http://go.usa.gov/alc
07:48:18: RT @katelaity: "Shut up and write" still works as my best motto. #shuttingupnow
08:51:32: RT @NASA: [News] NASA, USAID Expand Web-Based Environmental Monitoring System SERVIR Program Brings Satellite Imagery, Decis... http://b ...
14:09:44: RT @MarsRovers: Metal Martian mass is meteorite made of nickel-iron, determines Oppy! See color pic: http://bit.ly/95PUui

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From Twitter 10-04-2010

09:35:50: RT @patinagle: RT @bookviewcafe: Today's Special from Judith Tarr: new chapter in Alamut. Read it for free at http://www.bookviewcafe.com
09:54:49: RT @natachakennedy: New blog Post; No Safe Spaces for Trans People. http://bit.ly/aOWjlS
10:43:48: RT @NASA: Today in 1957: Sputnik I was launched. Check out the feature we did for the 50th anniversary http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash ...
15:02:27: Spent a couple of hours watching amazing butterflies in an ugly (but heavily flowering) native shrub. It must taste great.
22:19:50: RT @digby56: Tough love for the sick and frail http://bit.ly/bdMZTw

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Spirit Day

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at Spirit Day 


It’s been decided. On October 20th, 2010, we will wear purple in honor of the 6 gay boys who committed suicide in recent weeks/months due to homophobic abuse in their homes at at their schools. Purple represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality. Please wear purple on October 20th. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and schools.

RIP Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh (top)
RIP Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase (middle)
RIP Asher Brown and Billy Lucas. (bottom)

REBLOG to spread a message of love, unity and peace.

Twenty Years and Counting

Twenty years ago today, October 5, 1990, my mother died.   About an hour from now.   It was a Friday, and a bright, clear October morning, as it is today.   She was at home, as she had wanted to be, and I was at her bedside.   The previous weekend, an old friend of hers had died; her own health had been steadily worsening over the months, but this pushed the decline steeper.  She had insisted that I not spend the night at her house (across the street from ours) and so--though I could tell she might be dead by morning--I gave her that last gift of privacy.   I sat up until midnight, as I did last night, and woke early, as I did this morning, raw-eyed and worried and unsure.   When daylight came, I went over to her house.   She opened her eyes and said "There you are!" and then went on about the business of dying.   Two hours later, it was over...for her.  Though it had been over for her earlier in one sense.

It's still not over for me.


Alive, a parent is a direct connection to a child's past...and to the extent that the past influences the future (and it does) connects the child in the human web.  A parent's death is a severance so severe that a child can be floating in limbo for a long, long time.  What is lost is not merely that one human contact, that one human personality, but what it represents is loss of all that came before--all history that is personal.

My mother and I had made time to talk in the months of her decline.   We talked about many things, including family things...but there are always questions you mean to ask next time, or ones you didn't think of...and on that morning, when she closed her eyes and her breathing began to change,  those questions I hadn't asked and she had not answered rose up in a cloud.   Her family--her parents and one brother--had lived a long way from their relatives, so she saw them seldom.  She wasn't close to any of them.   Her brother had already died, over on the east coast.  Her mother had died when she was 14; her stepmother had died when I was less than two, and then her father died when I was four.  We were a last tiny two-leaved twig far out on a long limb...and now the other leaf was falling.  

I know things she told me, and incidents from our life together when I was a child,  that no one else knows.  But it's decades now, and do I remember accurately?   Probably not.  I don't know distant cousins she knew slightly, at all.  I met three of her aunts--once.  None of her uncles.   I don't know many things I wanted to know and we ran out of time to talk about.  She kept in touch with people she barely knew, trying to mend old family quarrels she wouldn't tell me about.   I haven't done that.  Having grown up isolated (by distance, by lack of money, by those same quarrels and ignorance of them)  I had no good experiences to balance the blankness...so my emotional family is almost entirely people with whom I share no genes.  

My mother outlived, by 32 years, the prediction of her imminent death.  (The last time someone made one: she'd outlived other dire predictions before that.)   She outlived friends who were thought to be healthier.  She outlived the doctor who had given her the "dead in six months" sentence (and two others--a third died a week after she did.)  She died twenty years ago today.  She was sick, but still clear of mind within hours of death.  She was in her own bed, with her own flowers blooming outside and her daughter and grandson in the house with her.  I could not wish her still alive, because she would then have spent another twenty years of sickness and pain...so, as deaths go, it was a good one: it was time, and she acknowledged that I'd made it back to her bedside in time, and she let go.

Every year, when the autumn equinox is past, and the slant of light changes dramatically...it comes back to me.  I can't help thinking it over yet again...what she was, what she accomplished, how she lived her life.   What was lost to the world when she died.  What I lost, the personal things the world knew nothing of.  She was not perfect, and admitted it--taught me not to expect perfection in others, or demand it before sharing bread and salt.   We did not agree on some things, and would not agree now if she were still alive (the chance of my convincing her, or her convincing me, is miniscule if it exists at all.)  I can see her faults almost as clear as I did as a teenager; I can see her gifts and talents just as clearly now.  What I can't see--because the connection was cut--is what lay behind her (and thus, behind me) except as an intellectual construct.

It's a difficult day, some years.  It's a thoughtful day always.  It's a day of prayer for all other mothers raising kids by themselves, as she did.  For all other women who are judged unfairly because they're women, or because they're divorced,  or because of something society thinks about their choice of occupation.

It's a day to find a quiet place, usually out of doors (and always on a day as crystalline as this one is) to have a little time to cry, and thank her.  May she rest in peace. Amen

From Twitter 10-03-2010

17:06:40: Mendelssohn in quantity for anthems today. Mendelssohn is like cream and honey in your mouth, to sing.
17:07:20: Long walk on land on gorgeous afternoon, doing some trail maintenance and taking pictures of fall flowers & butterflies.
21:29:21: New post up at http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/ "Monarchs in Fall" with pictures.
21:31:37: RT @kaysea14: Future Generations Will Condemn Us For: Legalizing Bribery Through Campaign Finance | Focal Point .. http://bit.ly/90xPda

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The Importance of Plan B (and C, D, E, F.....)

When young people commit suicide, many people wonder why, what drove them to it.  No one has all the answers.  But one common denominator is the crushing hopelessness, the sense that things have gone completely wrong and can't ever improve.  In the case of young college students, their Plan A...the way they thought that first or second year at college would go...has gone down in flames.   The flames may be academic, or social, or religious, or sexual...but whatever the flames are, the Plan A they've cherished as their hope for the future is now an ugly mass of twisted metal and bitter smoke.

I know, because my Plan A crashed and burned.   I had, against the odds, gotten into an excellent university, heading for a science major--something girls hardly ever tried, in those days.   I had fought off years of disapproval by those who thought a child of divorce--especially a girl child of divorce--should be submissive and humble and agree to be a meek little marginal character, doomed to fail at everything.   I got away, I thought.  And then...I failed.  Spectacularly, in more than one area.    My Plan A was gone, and I had no Plan B...I had not thought of failure, only of what lay beyond that first success, that first degree.
When an intelligent, focused, ambitious young person--the very kind who does not have a Plan B, because so far they've been on target with their Plan A--fails, it produces a level of shame, guilt, despair, hopelessness that shakes that individual's whole being.   And if a Plan B isn't cobbled together fairly quickly,  it can lead to suicide.  The lure of ending it--of being rid of the pain and the torment of everyone knowing about the failure--is very strong, especially to those who haven't failed before.  "Failure is not an option" is a fine thing to say to a group of engineers working on a problem---but the student who has just failed at something knows that failure is not just an option--it's now a big black line between what you were, and the future you used to have, and what you are now, and the future that's left.

Surviving failure is an essential life skill, as important as knowing how to drive a car or use a computer.   We will all fail at things, if we do anything at all.  If we don't flunk any courses, we can still be fired despite doing a good job.  We can still be dumped by someone we love.  We can still discover that we aren't who we thought we were--in a bad way.   That failure may be measured in one's own value system or may be an imposed definition from outside--but if it feels like failure (failing oneself, or failing someone else) then it has the same dynamic.   People who don't succeed the way their family (or culture) expects them to can feel like failures even though they're succeeding in their own field.  (My mother had black hair.  All her cousins were blond, and her grandmother criticized her black hair and darker skin.  To the end of her life she felt ugly and also guilty because she couldn't get over the feeling.  Is being born with straight black hair "failure" just because a slew of cousins had curly blond hair?  No, but her blond grandmother made her think it was.)   Most of us fail at more than one thing in life, and it never feels good.   So failure, and the feelings that go with it, are common...and thus everyone needs to know when and how to construct a Plan B (or C, or D, or...) 

But surviving failure isn't taught, which is kind of like not telling people on a hurricane coast how to survive a hurricane.  

Essential to surviving failure is both knowing and believing that the black pit that comes with failure is not forever...as long as you don't do anything terminal, like killing yourself.   Failure is survivable.    Other people have failed (probably many of them in the same way.)   Other people have flunked courses.  Other people have been humiliated by rejection.  Other people have gone bankrupt.  Etc, etc, etc.   It's true that some failures foreclose some future possibilities...but those aren't the only possibilities.   Plan A (anybody's Plan A) doesn't include all the possibilities, or all the potential good in life.   If my Plan A had succeeded, I most likely would not have written any novels, because I'd have been too busy with the demanding career I'd hoped for.  If, later, Plans B, C, and D had succeeded, I still might not have written any novels.   Nor would I have been in the right place at the right time to adopt our son...and that by itself would have ensured a different life...but not a better one.)  

And if I had killed myself, in the storm of grief that came with my first big failure--not impossible, though it didn't happen...then none of the things I've done since I was 19 would have come to pass.   Does that matter?   I think so.  The lives lost to suicide matter--not more than those lost to trauma or illness, but also no less.   Things only those people could think, could create, could do...will not be thought, created, done.  

Lack of a Plan B made my recovery from failure slower...I had to spend time piecing one together from what seemed like useless little fragments after the great crash.  But a Plan B was possible...and Plan B rattled along, not so smoothly as Plan A had, eventually getting me through college.   Other plans (B and B' and C) had their own problems, but by C I was beginning to catch on, beginning to realize that I was going to fail more than once, and (having survived the first big one) was going to survive the others, uncomfortable as they'd be.  So I'd better figure out how to cope, what strategies would come up with the next plan more quickly and (though never painless) less painfully.

I had some help with creating that first Plan B.   A couple of poems.   The example of some older adults who had, I knew, failed at things that meant a lot to them and yet made a good life for themselves anyway.   But ideally young people could learn to make a Plan B--and cope with failure without going into months' long declines and maybe suicide--before the crisis arrives.   When the mind is still clear enough to think (with some help) how to deal with the predictable stresses of college, including those other students whose maturity level is...not what it should be.   What do you do when you flunk half your courses?   When you find out you're gay?  When you find out your roommate is (any of the bad things roommates can be?)   When you've made a fool of yourself with someone who dumps you very publicly?  When you're on the team and have a career-ending injury?  Etc...all the things that students can experience as "failure" whether or not they are, objectively, failure...but Plan A is in shambles.

Older adults, who have experienced and survived failure, could be a valuable resource for those who have only a Plan A, if willing to talk about their own failures and the strategies that got them through.   But of course, some of that's going to sound preachy to the adolescent (a reason to start earlier, she mutters...)    My whole generation expected to be dead before 30--or at least 35, when we were mostly convinced that people turned into cement blocks, as far as interesting went.  We thought WW III was coming, nuclear annihilation...and now we're sixty-something.  (The realization hit long before, of course.   "Wait--we're 30--and still alive--so--shouldn't we be doing something with our lives?  If we're going to live...")   So our interest in hearing "Just keep plugging along" was about as low as it could go.   A life of acting like a cement block?  Yuck!

And yet...hanging on, not giving up, keeping busy, plugging along, etc.--all the cliches--actually did contribute to the Plans B-through-whatever one I'm on now.   Failure kept happening.  Recovery kept happening.  Dream after dream went down the tubes, and new ones surfaced.   Doors slammed shut--rows of them--but over there in the corner was a weak spot in the wall.  One last whack with a sledgehammer and...a way out of that trap.  Maybe.  

Yet, though the struggle is said to be character-building, I don't feel character-built, exactly.   And I think leaving someone to dangle in ignorance, flailing around, because it builds character, is the wrong way to go--better to teach the skills needed and then let the kid (if you start at kid age) do the flailing around with some skills.  We don't turn people loose in a car without teaching them something about driving safely...we don't expect everyone to re-invent how to make bread or how to do brain surgery.   We are losing people--including a lot of young people with years of potential ahead of them--because they don't know how to survive failure, don't know how to create their own Plan B.   We need to figure out how to teach that, and especially how to convey to the bright, goal-oriented ones with only a Plan A and a strong sense of responsibility that it's OK to think about, and devise, a Plan B (and C, D, E...) that this is not weakness, or lack of commitment to their Plan A.  Not going to be easy. But might save some lives.

From Twitter 10-02-2010

10:48:20: RT @robinmckinley: I'm also big fan. Undervalued painter, sad & perhaps awful life @GuardianBooks: My hero: Gwen John, by Anne Enright ...
18:33:04: RT @Quotes4Writers: "There isn't any secret. You sit down and you start and that's it." Elmore Leonard (Born 1925) Novelist, Screenwriter

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From Twitter 10-01-2010

09:34:38: RT @kaysea14: "Pledge to America" Not as Fiscally Responsible as It Claims http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/09/pledge_to_amer ...
09:38:37: Salon: "Why are so many gay teens dying" and "It Gets Better" project: http://tinyurl.com/2vghp42
10:33:09: RT @vondanmcintyre: Book View Cafe's free Friday special is "Little Faces" http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Vonda-N.-McIntyre/Short ...
10:36:40: RT @robinmckinley: Not sure all successful but HUMOUR even abt book banning YES RT @HuffPostBooks: Better Book Titles For Banned Books h ...
10:37:02: RT @patinagle: 4 of 5 stars to War for the Oaks by Emma Bull http://bit.ly/bEYRI3
10:37:17: RT @patinagle: RT @bookviewcafe: Today's Special from Jennifer Stevenson: new chapter in Fool's Paradise - read it for free at http://ww ...
10:38:14: Laundry day. LOTS of laundry day. OTOH, a lovely day to hang things out.
10:59:54: Bewick's wren on the windowsill singing the most enchanting autumn song... #birds
22:53:42: RT @kaysea14: Conservative just killed 240K jobs. The Washington Monthly http://t.co/NtFrv8x via @AddThis

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From Twitter 09-30-2010

10:03:18: RT @NASA: Arctic sea ice has hit its annual low. Daily satellite updates: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/ http://twitpic.com/2td1w2
10:07:35: Monarch larvae attached itself to a board in the current construction project--pupation hasn't progressed much at all--not sure why.
12:31:39: RT @NASA: NASA spacecraft sees something new at the edge of our solar system!
http://www.nasa.gov/ibex
12:34:17: Experiment of the day--have large chunks of rough draft printed elsewhere while I keep writing. If works, will save my time & printer.
13:18:45: New big external hard drive appears to be nonfunctional. Says it's empty. Won't format. Urg. Had a lot of image-copies on it.
23:04:47: Up too late. Again. But now have printout of 784 pp of rough draft. MUCH easier to reorganize in paper form, then in computer. #writing
23:05:48: Seriously annoyed with former Congresscritter, who is still trying to drape a donkeyskin disguise over elephantine voting record.

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