Other People's Gardens in Everyday Ramblings

I am fascinated by other people’s gardens. You may have noticed. It is so much fun. The colors and textures, the spacing and the overall aesthetic based in the unpredictable nature of the whole venture, especially now that we are experiencing climate change.

Did you know that we have no native honeybees here in America? Like the squirrels they were imported. I was reading about the timbers they found this week in a sea cave on the Oregon Coast from a ship they think wrecked in 1693 traveling from the Philippines to Mexico.

Apparently blocks of beeswax with a special stamp on them as well as blue and white porcelain shards have been washing up near there for years. The wax was specifically for candles used in Catholic ceremonies. There was fine silk aboard as well.

The wood they found was from an Anacardiaceae tree, in the Sumac or Cashew family, and was felled around 1650. As we have really only a few hundred years of history here as white settlers and colonizers something this old in our midst is exciting. The native tribes have stories about the wreck. There were apparently survivors. One can only imagine their story here on our wild wild coast.

I was happy that the group of people that had 90 minutes at super low tide to get into that cave and get the timbers out included folks from the local tribes.

Now to a completely unrelated question…have any of you read or listened to Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr? I started it yesterday as I had heard that it is similar in a way to Sea of Tranquility, which I enjoyed very much except for the slight lag in the middle.

Not very far in, there is a young man alone in a car with two pressure cooker bombs about to blow up a library full of 5th graders… I had to stop. If you read it, can you tell me, will I be able to get over what comes next?

Well I hope it isn’t this…
“delegates to a convention of the Texas Republican Party yesterday approved platform planks rejecting “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and [holding] that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States”; requiring students “to learn about the dignity of the preborn human,” including that life begins at fertilization; treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice”; locking the number of Supreme Court justices at 9; getting rid of the constitutional power to levy income taxes; abolishing the Federal Reserve; rejecting the Equal Rights Amendment; returning Christianity to schools and government; ending all gun safety measures; abolishing the Department of Education; arming teachers; requiring colleges to teach “free-market liberty principles”; defending capital punishment; dictating the ways in which the events at the Alamo are remembered; protecting Confederate monuments; ending gay marriage; withdrawing from the United Nations and the World Health Organization; and calling for a vote “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”…

And these are the people who reject the idea of living under a code laid down by Fundamentalist Islamists? Whoa baby.

Jared, can we talk about who is whining?

There is one heck of a dystopian future sketched out there in the above planks.

There was that study that was released last week that based on current mortality data you are much more likely to die a premature death if you are a Republican than if you are a Democrat. Isn’t Space X headquartered in Texas? Perhaps they could all go start a colony on Mars.

Maybe in four hundred years we can find parts of a spaceship floating and lodged in an asteroid cave. Little shards of petroleum based plastic drifting drifting and falling to Earth like rain.

Last updated June 19, 2022