An Unknown Flower

A while ago I told Ember, “I’d do anything for you.” No reply. It seemed like she didn’t hear me. Fast-forward to this week. A master of prolonging bedtime, she draws on techniques like engaging me with interesting questions she knows I can’t help but answer, or requesting things that seem suddenly essential. A few nights ago after I’d gotten her all tucked in, she asked for a back rub. I declined, on account of the hour. She was indignant. “But you said you’d do anything for me!”

She’s resourceful in other ways, too. I didn’t even know there was a hook under the kitchen cabinet. Who else but Em would have thought it the ideal place to hang fruit?

She was unhappy with what I packed in her lunch bag last week. “Too many bunnies,” she informed me.

When she first arrived at my house almost a year ago (!), scrambled eggs were her go-to breakfast, but soon she burned out and went on strike. Wouldn’t you know it would be this exact week that her ova interest would rekindle? According to Heather Cox Richardson on 12/13/22:

“New numbers out this morning show that inflation is slowing faster than expected… The worst category is the price of eggs, which is high because of a virulent outbreak of bird flu in the U.S., affecting layers but not birds raised for meat. But everything transported with diesel is also costly, as diesel is still close to $5 a gallon.”

Which helps to explain that $177 Christmas tree.

Despite consumer woes, Heather’s 12/13 letter focused on much better news:

This afternoon, in front of a crowd of more than 5,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House, President Joe Biden signed H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act, into law. The new law protects same-sex and interracial marriages after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision brought their safety into question.

What times we live in, when this is even an issue (again).

Eleni had been using the Venmo app on her phone to send someone (me?) money, and the next thing she knew, two-year-old Ruby had made some modifications to the transfer amount.

After an unusual hiatus, I’ve been reading a fair amount lately. I borrowed a book from Adi called Japanese Death Poems Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. Who knew that such a thing existed! How cool is that! Here are three of my faves.

By Shiyo (died on the fourth day of the second month, 1703, at the age of thirty-two)

Surely there’s a teahouse
with a view of plum trees
on Death Mountain, too.

By Moriya Sen’an (d. 1838)

Bury me when I die
beneath a wine barrel
in a tavern.
With luck
the cask will leak.

Finally, I identify with this poem by Tomoda Kimpei. Since I, too, will always be an unknown flower, I like to substitute my name for his in that last line.

In life I never was
among the well-known flowers
and yet, in withering
I am most certainly
Tomoda Kimpei.

Until this week, it’d been ages since I had a chunk of free time. What’s the first thing I did with it? Here’s Peter Allison (guitar and vocal, circa 1955) with Ginna Allison (vocal, December 2022).