On this day…

One of the few things I miss about participating in the Facebook platform is On This Day, where the app would push up photos and posts you had ‘published’ in the past. The photos were a nice blast from the recent past. Unfortunately, they encouraged participants to repost much like the boorish cocktail party guest who wanders from group to group telling the same overly-extended anecdote which bores each group equally.

But y’all haven’t seen these, I think… (photos are from any June 4 through June 6)

The last of the roses. Choked out by invasives and my indifference, they haven’t appeared since. June 2021.

Some red lilies ready to bloom. Frustratingly, they disappeared only for one to appear a year or two later in the midst of a garden nightmare. I blame squirrels. June 2020.

These two white lilies bloomed for three or four years, through the date of this photo. After that they disappeared, but behind this location the RED lily suddenly appeared. Squirrel atonement? June 2020.

Houston, my second time to work at the same client. It’s a flat landscape. The sun sets and everything wallows in a beautiful light. Taken from my hotel window. June 2019.

And on and on they go… I cannot tarry or I will post all night. Each day brings a look at the past five years of retirement, the previous eight years of consultant work, and the mundane world of “home weekends/corporate trenches” that was my world before.

Swallowtail

Watching our newly landscaped front yard has become one of my particular joys this year. Where once there existed a lackluster lawn, pockmarked with chipmunk burrows—which I had to continually mow—now new plants take turns proffering flowers for the pollinators. The spicebush swallowtail butterfly shown above would have shown up better were not its wings fluttering madly as it sampled the scarlet beebalm flowers. Sharing the butterfly’s zeal were bees of all sizes: little ones that looked like flying sugar ants about a quarter-inch long to bumblebees and something larger which I haven’t identified yet.

As May ended and turned to June, fireflies appear at dusk to illuminate the plants. Shrubby St. John’s wort, below, seems to be a favorite of the Easter honeybee.

Ninebark

This spring has been a joy, watching our newly planted front yard bring forth blossoms we’ve never seen before. The one above, about the size of a standard marigold, tucks in by the front porch. Demure, perhaps, but eventually it can grow to small tree height if not pruned.

Amber waves of grain

To all those who served and gave their lives. They didn’t always know why, but they served anyway.

Where are we going in this handbasket?

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. This attitudinal shift remains a nearly unavoidable aspect of aging. We age and cast off following things for their own sakes. For example, fashion? Oh sure, we keep an eye on it, rotating neckties or jewelry to our favorite “it-will-come-back-into-fashion” location, but we pick and choose. Skinny, tailored suits? On this old beer-bellied bod? I think not. Hip-hugging jeans, says my wife? “I never wore them when they were in fashion decades ago!” And don’t get her started about wearing clothes which look more like lingerie than outer garments.

Everything’s going to hell. For us oldsters, new technologies get picked up as they’re convenient, and when they serve a purpose, not because they’re trendy. Consider: smart phones debuted (debatably) in 2006. I waited six years, until 2012, to get one. Even then I got it mostly because I needed a better communication tool when I started consulting. I might have picked up one eventually. I’m sure I would have been forced/enticed into it sometime before 2020…maybe. After all, I’m a techie; I like all the toys. About forty years ago I could hardly wait to upgrade my first desktop computer or for it to conk out and justify buying a new one. Now? I’m leisurely approaching the time when I’ll dig into my Windows 10 machine and tweak its registry settings to permit upgrading to Windows 11. Another old man thing: texting has proven to be a boon but it doesn’t replace email. And why trade clean, open texting for the closed gardens of WhatsApp, the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter, or Instagram? I resisted Facebook for years, but joined ten years ago. I grew uneasy with a technology that demands everyone ‘talk’ all the time. Doesn’t someone have to listen? And how can everyone something important to say? The horrible year of 2020 pushed me to delete the account. Who wants to be sanctioned for being reasonable? (I understand getting attacked for being ‘out there’, but for being calm and objective?) My point’s drifting here, old man! It’s this: seven decades in, one learns it isn’t very important to follow every trend…or pretty much any trend.

These thoughts crept into my mind as it wandered from thinking about our church’s chorister program (elementary and junior high students who sing in the cathedral once in a while) to the pre-pubescent boys who sing at New College, Oxford, or in the Vienna Boys choir, until finally it came to rest on my own 5th and 6th grade experience of participating in All-City Chorus in Spokane, WA. This program met once or twice a week after school in the most centrally located public high school, Lewis and Clark. How did I get there? I took the bus. Due to its meandering route the trip lasted about half an hour as it drove the seven miles from my elementary school to LCHS. I can’t remember if I took the bus home, or if my father picked me up, since he worked less than a mile away and would have been leaving work about that time. My brother similarly took private clarinet lessons in an old building downtown. It housed a music store on the street level and housed offices on the second floor, one for his teacher. My brother also took the bus, catching it at the end of the block where we lived, and traveling the same amount of time and distance as I. This wasn’t unusual for 10-year-olds at the time. My mind kept wandering. I wondered how common that is now. I don’t know as a parent if I would rest easy letting my child do the same. I’m certain few if any modern parents would. Kids seem to be scheduled for most of their free time and driven by an adult to these activities. This illustrates my point, the one I wandered to this morning:

Old people experienced a different world. I don’t care which generation you’re considering, it wasn’t necessarily worse in their mind. We–any of us at any point in time–dealt with what we dealt with. Life presented itself, and we were up to date with it. We cling to some of the practices from back then, not because they’re antiquated but because they worked. We cling to the beliefs which those practices engendered. Let me explain, by way of an example, how life occurred and thus, how we think and thought. Consider the situation in which two parents decide to let their boys travel alone on a city bus after school. During the winter we left our respective music activities in the dark—Spokane lies a latitudinal degree further north than Duluth, MN, and almost three degrees further north than Bangor, ME. How could a parent allow this? First, we didn’t have two cars. Though we were comfortably middle class, it wasn’t that unusual for families to have only one car. My parents decided they could share it—Dad took the bus at least two days each week—and the money would be better saved for other things (notably our college education). Dad could have taken the bus on those music days, though, leaving Mom the car to shuttle her children.

But you see, that was just a strange notion back in the 1960’s. Kids gained in freedom when they gained in age and maturity. When we were very young, three to five years old, we were told where our boundaries were in the neighborhood. We respected them (mostly). We got to travel the block and only on our street. I got in severe trouble when I crossed the street at the end of our block and decided with a couple other kids it would be fun to roll rocks down the hillside. (It didn’t occur to me that there were cars on the road a hundred feet below us or what a rock the size of a teapot might do to a car.) When a county sheriff’s deputy delivered us to our parents, we caught a lot of hell. When we were in elementary school we wandered wooded lots, rode bicycles for miles away from our homes, and all we had to do was say, “Mom, I’m headed down to Mitch’s house!” As we neared and then entered junior high it was more like, “so where did you two wind up today?” from my mother. Our parents expected us to entertain ourselves, stay safe, and observe the behavioral rules they laid down. We did pretty good with that first part, fairly good with the second part, and…what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them, right?

Today therefore represents a path to perdition, always, for every old person. I stay optimistic generally (and the further I look into the future), but many things worry me about habits which younger people have acquired. I now can see that 100 years ago cars would worry a 70-year-old born in 1855. “Everybody scootin’ and tootin’ these infernal muh-SHEENS! T’aint nachurl! Next thing ya know, people won’t even live together cuz they can just drive to work!” with the word “drive” carrying all the distaste and disapproval an old man might feel.

Humans measure the world using an internal scale developed through experience. We slow our learning process with each passing year, experience becoming a boon and an obstacle to learning new ways. Fifty years later, we don’t even see the same world as younger people do. This is neither good or bad; it simply explains our attitudinal shift. Maybe you caught a bit of that here, but I fear I’m too caught up in it to accurately relay it to you. Everyone my age is nodding their head while everyone thirty years younger has made some derisive sound en route to dismissing the whole notion out of hand.

So be it. You’ll see.

Surrendering…

…to the laziness of posting yet more cat photos because I haven’t been able to complete the pieces I’ve written this past week. Sigh. The late spring/early summer weather has Charlie and Benny enjoying the deck or any other place the sleep bug drops them…

Lately, Charlie sleeps with me, and Benny sleeps with my wife. This is because Charlie and I snore. I often sleep with a pillow between my ankles due to bunion and ankle pain. Looks like Charlie has taken a page from my book.

Like many “elderly” folk, my hips and back have bothered me a lot in the past few years. A lousy choice in recliners exacerbates the problem. Charlie thinks orthopedic cushions offer just the support he needs.

Charlie, using a lumbar support for (ahem) “gastric support”. May 2025.

On Easter Monday Benny went under the knife for removal of a neck cyst. It endured benignly until we had it drained earlier this year. He subsequently scratched it, tore it open, and surgery sounded like the best path. He surprisingly took the soft cone in stride, complaining little. Biggest issue? Drinking out of the cat fountain. He napped, waiting the ten days until its removal.

Sun-toasted decking makes a good nap spot. April 2025.

Guest poetry

Charlie, seen here two weeks into his stay with us, and letting us know that warm laundry out of the dryer is for sleeping and nothing else. January 2016.

A MOTHERS DAY GREETING
by Susan Pilcher

The cat blinked once,
The cat blinked twice,
'I love you, Mom.
That should suffice.'

Benny adds, “…and luggage…luggage is for sleeping also.” May 2021.

Cinco de Mayo visitor

Monday as we sat down to breakfast, my wife noticed a guy putting something on the parking strip in front of our house. I stepped out to see what he was doing, which turned out to be moving a box turtle off of the heavily traveled street. The turtle had been close to our side of the road, so he moved it along. Box turtles have five sub-species; at first this one looked to be a Gulf Coast one, strange as that may sound here in North Carolina, but I found photos of the Eastern which resemble this one. Apparently the shell wears as they age, and the shells will become the lighter, golden color seen in the pattern on the shell above. They fairly easily live to be 100 years of age.

Wondering “why the heck is a turtle up here about a full block and uphill from where there’s a creek?”, I learned something. Box turtles hang out in moist forests and wet meadows/pastures. I would like to think transforming our front yard from grass to a meadow facilitated this little visitor, but who knows? I do wish, however, I had just watched him/her from afar because I went back out five to six minutes later, and it had disappeared. I searched diligently around our front yard, near parked cars, even back on the other side of the street, but nope–gone. I worried. Drivers looking for a short-cut found our supposedly residential street a few years ago which makes it highly hazardous to slow-moving turtles. Heck, it’s become highly hazardous to humans. Despite a posted speed of 25 mph and that it’s only three blocks long, cars routinely hit 45 mph. I hope the turtle likes our yard and decides ranging from there to the drainage swale behind our property will be its new home. It’s safer and nicer.

Our new front yard at slightly over six months of age. This photo taken the final Monday of April 2025. Many of the taller red-brown plants in the middle (foxglove beardtongue) have since flowered. The purple ones are rose mock vervain.

A hawk visits

The neighbor’s roof. Red-shouldered hawk, Raleigh, NC. May 2025.

A hawk stopped by
Here yesterday
I learned of him
From angry jays. 

He acted like
He couldn't hear, 
Though jays buzzed by
His perch so near. 

Resigned, he jumped
To fly away 
Flapped once, twice, 
And sailed away.

Neighborhood walks

Every day walkers march past our house. They pass every ten minutes or so in the early morning, then dwindle. When summer brings 80+ degrees by mid-morning, accompanied with 80% relative humidity, “only mad dogs and Englishmen” will attempt a walk. Some walk to exercise dogs which have seemingly conducted a PR campaign to make sure every house has at least one. Some walk because they like it. (You can tell: they appear to be in good physical shape, they walk on a regular schedule, they seem to enjoy it.) Others walk because someone told them to–perhaps a doctor, a spouse, their conscience, a good friend, or one of the ubiquitous self-help gurus on the internet. We suspect one elderly gentleman walks three times each day to regulate his blood sugar. My father-in-law did that for many years, and managed in that endeavor to postpone insulin shots for more than a decade.

For several weeks I’ve joined them on this circuit, up and down this short stretch of street, oddly reminiscent of a treadmill laid out in a short course of concrete. I’ve learned by leaning into this as a practice (as opposed to “an exercise program”). Sometimes, I walk more slowly, listening to my muscles, my fortitude, walking within the boundaries of what is possible. Sometimes I push my pace exuberantly, reveling in my ability at 70 to suck oxygen into my lungs quickly enough to maintain this rapid pace, thrilled that EXERCISE can still be a part of one’s life.

Today I melded the two, yielding to an inner desire to go slower, not for physical reasons but to focus on the incremental occurrences which blow by me normally. Today….

I noticed how rapidly tulip poplars have dropped their blossoms. Apparently a quick flowering gets consummated as rapidly. Their flowers no longer being necessary….

Tulip Poplar flowers. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

It’s trash day and with it, yard waste pickup day. Reflecting the beginning of the spring/summer interface, we see sights such as these…

Overfull yard waste containers. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Circling at the block’s end, I encounter my across-the-street neighbor’s sidewalk. Older than me, quite likely in his 80’s, he maintains his large corner lot minimally. Those of us who pass make our own paths through the accumulation of leaves he does not clear:

Many sights beckon, but one cannot stop every few feet to snap photos. (Not if one desires to arrive home and brew tea before one’s spouse arrives at the kitchen.) At the “modern” end of the three-block length of our street, where a developer with more cachet than aesthetics decided “hey, a boulevard would be nice,” said boulevard is filled with ornamental trees which have no right to be here. This is a Chinese snowball tree, on the backside of its blooming peak:

Chinese snowball tree. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

One of the delights of continuously walking a circuit lies in encountering familiar sights suddenly made new. How does one walk past a plant daily without focusing on what it is? Suddenly it blooms, saying, “Take notice! Look at me!” I did not use my plant identification software on this, and I don’t know what it is. It looks rose-like, but obviously it isn’t. A mystery to be solved for another day:

A plant. A beautiful plant. Another day. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

And one notices the fire ants have established many beachheads in the sidewalk crevices.

Fire ant colony. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Finally, arriving at the start point, one marvels at the stark contrast of a natural environment composed of native plants that have flowered vociferously in the past weeks.

Our front yard, six months after its installation. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Mock vervain (I think) on the left, Robin’s plantain on the right (a cultivar of fleabane). Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Watching a specific environment over time delivers meaning which a one-time walk through a park does not. The tide and ebb of the seasons, the minor changes in foliage, the calls of the birds as they cycle through a mating season, the feel of the air as less humid air gives way to summer–all of this imprints the incremental passage of time on one’s psyche.