Archive for January, 2010

Our screened-in porch is gone. It’s old bones lie crumpled in a red dumpster.

It was one of the reasons we moved to The Old Johnson Place. Our boys, two and three years old, needed room to grow so we bought the house built in 1855. It was way out in the country surrounded by a little land and great, old trees. And it had a charming screened-in porch.

We loved the wooden swing that hung from the ceiling. Many a warm summer afternoon, we’d nestle together, my babies and I, their sweaty, sweet smelling little boy bodies cuddled close to mine. They were city children who knew nothing of snakes or birds or chipmunks so I told them about Higgen Piggen, a bushytailed squirrel who lived in the hollow of a nearby elm tree. He knew all the animals in our backyard world and when they got into trouble, they came to Higgen Piggen for advice. But Higgen Piggen was only a small, young squirrel so he turned to the boys for help. Together, they solved the problems of the skunk that lost its stinker, the robin who’s breast turned green and the bunny with a floppy ear. Many other creatures needed assistance as well; caterpillars, crickets, mice and more.

When the boys’ baby sister arrived, she joined us on the screened-in porch and became a part of Higgen Piggen’s gang.  And sometimes, when the children were playing, I’d write down the stories so that when they got older, they’d remember.

In a kaleidoscope of time, the children grew up and moved on with their lives. Too soon, their father passed away. I took a new job that kept me on the road. Abandoned, the old screened-in porch sank into disuse.

Then one day, I remarried and we decided to stay in The Old Johnson Place. We built a swimming pool in the backyard, which brought new life to the screened-in porch. The children came back to visit and brought their little ones with them. Higgen Piggen came to life again. Stepchildren and relatives visited and birthdays rolled around creating a need for parties. Guests crowded together on the screened-in porch. Safe from mosquitoes and chiggers, my elderly mother loved watching the fun.

Now, at last, the screened-in porch has outlived its usefulness. We only go there when the weather is perfect, maybe four days in the spring and four days in the fall. We’ve decided it could be put to better use. A new entertainment/office center is taking its place. Each night, we rush out to see what progress has been made.

A new life is coming to our screened-in porch.

The old

I am delighted that art historian and collector Pinky Kase has offered to do guest articles from time to time. Pinky has a Master’s Degree in art history from the University of Missouri Kansas City. She is the author of UMKC Monographs and Helicon Nine Articles on Art History. She has served on the boards of the Nelson-Atkins Museum and UMKC Gallery of art and is a past President of the Midwest Center for the Literary Arts, Inc.

Pinky says:

Art can have many meanings and avenues of expression.  I have recently come face to face with a number of pejorative opinions about modern art.  To my understanding of the term art these are not kind, understanding or relevant.  But let me cite a few of them.  Art is deceitful cleverness.  It is a human effort to imitate, supplement, alter or counteract the work of nature.  It is a non-scientific branch of learning–one of the liberal arts.

And in their place I would like to stand behind several definitions
that I have espoused and that appeal to me, to wit:
Art is the window through which I gaze upon reality.
Art is communication by means of line, form and color.
Art is great when it turns a corner in the process and thinking of art.

Art in general is seldom about life or not quite about life.
Art is discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.
Or, as Pascal so aptly put it –The heart (or art) has reasons that
reason knows nothing of.

Now for what is new and current.

Museums are hard put to continue their objectives in the throes of
the continuing recession.  Many are forced to dip into their
endowments witness the almost total demise of that of the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Riding to the rescue was Eli Broad
with a bequest of $30,000,000 to the museum.  Many in the art world
are dismayed that one benefactor will thus be in the catbird seat to
dominate policy and determine selection of a leader and curators for
the collection.  Time will tell only after the winnowing down process
is completed.  Throughout history the benefactors have played an
important and often controlling role in the creation of art. More on this later.

If you would like to be a guest blogger here, send me your ideas.

Space Dust by James Rosenquist

Who would have guessed that IT would have meant anything other than an animate or inanimate object? Today, IT has a whole new meaning: Information Technology, the design, development, data collection and management of anything to do with computers. Because of computers, human behavior has changed faster in the last few decades in than at any other time in history. If you were born before 1980, you have had a front row seat to this remarkable revolution.

Computers have shrunk the world. We can sit comfortably in our home office and do business  with people in countries around the globe via the computer. Eventually, Internet access will be available to everyone everywhere.

I got my first computer in 1995. I worried I’d do something wrong so used it with extreme caution. One day our sixteen month old granddaughter came to visit. She sat on my lap and fearlessly drummed her fingers on the keyboard. The computer was up to the challenge.  It kept working while she boldly discovered the  world of technology. I smiled (and breathed a sigh of relief.)

The first call made on a mobile phone was in 1973. The phone was a big, cumbersome instrument concocted by Dr. Martin Cooper general manager of the communications division at Motorola.  Could he have possibly imagined that his dream of everyone carrying a phone in his or her pocket would become a reality?

My husband installed my first mobile phone in my car 1998. It was too big to carry around with me but it made me feel safe. If I needed help, I could call someone. Suddenly, I found myself a participant in the technology revolution. I was no longer watching history. I was making it.

Mobile phones morphed into pocket size devices with keyboards. For my granddaughter(s) and grandsons, texting has become an obsession, and social networking a way of life. In the wake of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti, some are able to connect with relative and friends using cell phones. Pictures of the devastation have appeared on You Tube and contributing to the Red Cross requires only a few strokes on the keys.

I-pods have become the rage. People walk around with wires hanging out of their ears. Headphones evolved into earbuds, tiny microphones that eliminate outside noise so you can concentrate on your music, movie or audio book.

Our urgent quest for instant technological gratification continues to grow. In fact, we can’t keep up. Even before newly purchased techno toys are used, they are obsolete.

3 D movies are nothing new but AVATAR grips us with its imagery even though we must wear 3D glasses that feed different images into our eyes. And 3 D TV is on the way.

Still, instead of becoming more connected, it seems that we have become less so.  At first, email was fun. It felt effortless to stay in touch. Hit SEND and you were done. But we actually talked to each other less. Text messaging is a phenomenon that changes our way of communicating.  Ultimately, it may transform the way we live. A teacher I know makes the students leave their cell phones in a basket until class is over.

Not that texting doesn’t have its place. I’m just saying . . .

So what’s next? Faster than the speed of light, our universe is changing.

It's his world now

If you are a gardener, you know that plants grow best if they are indigenous to your area. My garden is 100% perennial except for a few zinnias that I grow from seed. I love the Knock Out® shrub roses. They are showy and except for occasional trimmings, are almost care free.

The little orange berries of bittersweet are perfect for decorating in the fall but expensive to buy. Naively, I dug up a couple of small bushes along the fence line of our Ozark farm and brought them home to plant between our neighbor’s house and ours. In less then three years, they overgrew every tree and shrub in sight. It took lots of persistence and patience to get rid of them and I never did get any berries. I don’t plant anything invasive any more, especially plants taken from the wild.

Dogwood and redbud trees do well in the Midwest. Thanks to the birds, I have a profusion of redbud sprouts. It takes five years or more for seedlings to flower so I pick out one or two of the strongest plants and nurse them along.

Years ago, we planted a sweet gum tree near the driveway. It grew very fast and we relished its gorgeous fall display but it dropped hundreds of seriously dangerous, spiky little balls. Sadly, it had to go.

Our expert arborist has made it his mission to save a silver maple tree that has been growing in our yard for one hundred and fifty years. Its beautiful leaves provides vast amounts of shade from spring until fall and houses untold numbers of squirrels, raccoons, possum and birds. Who knows how many children have swung on the tire swing or how much joy the hanging wind chimes and a funny pottery face have brought? I’m sure the trunk is hollow all they way up and down but our arborist, who keeps it trimmed and wired together, reminds us that all  manner of tubes can be hollow but strong.

I love ornamental grasses, the ones that stay in neat clumps until you divide them, not the rhizome forming type that spread underground. My favorite is called Heavy Metal (Panicum virgatum) It is light and airy and keeps its shape. It has tiny little seeds that make wonderful foliage background for indoor arrangements. Ornamental grasses take very little care, are nice to look at and make interesting viewing in the winter when everything else is gone.

Bird, bat and butterfly houses add interesting visitors to any yard. Before water gardens became popular, we added a little pond made of cement and a bunch of rocks we dragged home from the Ozarks. Pumped water flowing over the rocks makes a lovely sound and attracts all kinds of wild life. Moving water also stops mosquitoes from hatching. By the way, don’t use bug zappers. They hardly ever attract mosquitoes and the good ones give off a lot of CO₂.

We tried putting gold fish in the pond but they disappeared during the night. A hungry raccoon maybe? Last summer, the cement finally started to crumble so fixing it will be our spring project.

I love butterflies so have  several butterfly bushes scattered about. Last summer, I bought a swamp milkweed plant (Asclepias incarnata). Monarch butterflies like to lay their eggs on the leaves of this plant and when the larvae hatch, they feed on the leaves until they transform into a chrysalis.

February 12-15 is the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. Watch a video explaining how to participate. It’s fun.

Finally, we have an area under our silver maple that is in total shade. No sun at all. Maybe you can help me figure out what to plant there, so here are my criteria: perennial, doesn’t need much water, non invasive, grows well in the mid-west and pretty. I’m willing to try all sorts of things and will let you know the results.

Hard Metal Ornamental Grass

A new book, Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity published by Oxford Press provides great incite into the workings of our universe.

For example, did you know that dragging heavy fishing nets across the bottom of the sea is like clear cutting forests on land, forever destroying life that has never even been explored. Or that the waste water from washing impurities from coal before it is sold is impounded into toxic sludge ponds which if breached can contaminate the water supply of tens of thousands of people? (Do we really want two new coal plants near Wichita Kansas?)

Our rapidly rising resistance to antibiotics has become an alarming phenomenon as doctors “struggle to keep one step ahead of their patients” infections. Sadly we are losing creatures that can provide us with answers and even cures. Studies on the Southern Gastric Brooding Frog ceased when the species became extinct and with the cessions went the hopes of a cure for 25 million people suffering from peptic ulcers.

Agricultural fertilizers and sewage find their way into our rivers, our lakes (Lake of the Ozarks for example) and the oceans, and contaminate our water supply and kill our fish. Eating poisoned fish can “cause serious neurological symptoms or even death.”

We’ve heard of lead poisoning. If exposed in uteri, the fetuses of all vertebrates may suffer behavior problems and a decreased chance of survival.  Did you know that the main source of lead and mercury comes from gas burning cars and coal power plants?

Mercury causes its own set of horrific problems; impaired hearing, vision and other brain maladies.

The surface of the earth has warmed just one degree in the last 150 years but that has already affected some migrating birds and animals. It is predicted that the earth’s surface will warm more than 10 degrees over the next 100 years, the same amount as the last 18,000 years. Many species will be caught in an “extinction vise, squeezed from the north by habitat loss and from the south by climate change.” Because of the food change, every species lost impacts the survival of many others. Each time a species becomes extinct, its molecules and genes are removed from studies  which might have saved our lives.

Some fishermen would like to rid the seas of the prolific Spiny Dogfish Shark because it chases off other fish, but by studying the salt gland of this shark which produces a certain kind of diuretic, doctors are better able to treat kidney disease, chronic heart failure, cystic fibrosis and pancreatic disease.

Pesticides do irreparable damage by killing insect’s natural enemies such as birds. We suffer too by ingesting chemicals harmful to our systems. Fortunately, farmers are learning better ways to lessen the damage to their crops by using biological controls that occur in nature.

The controversy over the stratospheric ozone depletion is well known but there is no controversy over the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays. We know they cause skin cancer and cataracts and may be responsible for impairing our immune systems as well.

If you doubt the importance of plant life on our own lives, take a look at these examples.

An amazing cure of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and acute leukemia is found in a species of Periwinkle that was nearly over harvested to extinction.

The bark of the African Cherry Tree is used to treat prostate gland enlargement, malaria and other fevers, and will go extinct in the wild unless something is done to prevent it.

If you have glaucoma, quinine from the bark of the  cinchona tree might lower the fluid pressure in your eyeball.

If you are in pain, you should be grateful to a German chemist who isolated Morphine from the opium poppy in the early 1800’s.

Warfarin comes from sweet clover and is used in the treatment of blood clots along with heparin, first isolated from the liver of dogs.

If you have had breast reconstruction or plastic surgery, you ican probably thank leeches for contributing their anticoagulants to your successful recovery.

We owe our gratitude to many the species, vertebrates, invertebrates, insects, plants and numerous others that have contributed to our health and wellness. It is in our own best interests to preserve as many endangered creatures as possible.

Here’s what we can do to keep ourselves healthy and protect our environment.

Buy locally grown edibles.

Join like-minded community groups.

Don’t buy foods that list palm oil as an ingredient because of the high levels of saturated fats. Instead, use olive, soy and canola oils.

Turn your thermostat down just 1 degree.

Recycle.

Grow your food.

Next week, I’ll talk about our own back yards.

In the meantime, take a look at The Tree of Life web project.  It explodes with amazing pictures, information, games and movies.

Have a healthy, happy and safe New Year.

Happy 2010