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Such a simple word, hope.  The very act of believing it gone awakens it somehow.  Sometimes in those hours when hope seems lost, you will hear a song, see a sunrise, remember that silly thing you said, or look up at the beauty of the unattainable stars. Then, if you listen carefully the sound of hope rises like a great wind, all around us, each moment filled with memories pulling us back to the place where all things were possible; a place we never really left. We wait for hope to come round like a force of nature — to take us past the tough times and deposit us safe and sound on the distant shore — but in truth hope never comes to us.

It is us.

 

One of the advantages of living in Singapore or other country in Southeast Asia is the availability of amazing fruit, most of which I have been unable to find in the west.  The names themselves conjure up another world.

Behold:

Salak. Called the “snake fruit” because of its scaly outer coating, it houses a delicious sweet and tangy interior. It tastes a bit like pineapple, but then not. This is a characteristic of many of the fruits of this region; they taste like something you may have had before, yet are still unique.

 

Durian. Durian is known is Southeast Asia as The King of Fruits. It doesn’t smell like something you would actually eat. I believe the phrase “an acquired taste” was created expressly for the durian. The spines that form the outer covering of the durian are hard and sharp, and care must be taken in opening one. And one does not “eat” durian – one “has” durian.

 

Mangosteen. This is my personal favorite. You peel off the purple skin and expose the segmented fruit inside.  It looks all the world like a tangerine except the mangosteen segments are a brilliant white, a startling contrast to the purple skin. I could consume a dozen or more of these babies in a single sitting. The taste is an almost perfect balance between sweet and sour, a combination of strawberry and raspberry and peach and some elusive “other” flavor. The mangosteen is known as The Queen of Fruit in Southeast Asia.

If you happen to find your way to Singapore or Thailand or Indonesia or Malaysia, be sure to visit the open air produce markets, where you will find these and many more fruits to delight the senses.

As soon as you hear the sound on your roof you know it isn’t rain. It is hard and insistent like a stampede of tiny animals. The storm produces brilliant flashes tied to deep thunder trying its best to keep up. The hailstones can be cute little things, round and smooth as tiny cue balls, but sometimes they are ragged and rough like icy vagabonds hitching a ride to Earth. The largest hailstones can tear holes in the roofs of houses and dent cars at which point they cease to be mere novelties. Hail surprises because ice seems misplaced in the warm air of Spring; a remnant of winter swirling above us in the high, cold air.

The word “rambunctious” is not often seen in polite sentences these days, possibly because of its unruly length and large number of vowels, lacking only the ‘e’ to complete the vowel quintet.

The rowdy behavior described as rambunctious can only apply to a certain set of living beings, like puppies and teenagers. On the other hand one would never use the phrase “rambunctious turnips” unless attempting to win the Best Rock Band naming contest.

It comes all at once
A companion to contemplation
Displacing the quiet stillness
With a sudden fury
That rattles the windows
And hammers the roof;

Beyond ideas and dreams
And desires and wants
In case you had forgotten
The great world competes
With all the other things
That demand attention

Though tempted
By coy distractions
And insistent chatter
This fierce rain
Reminds the senses
and announces
not that it exists
But that you do.

 

One of the best and influential books I read as a child and one I would faithfully read to my kids at night before bed was the simple tale of The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. Silverstein’s vision of the tree as faithful companion of the boy, provider of shade to the young man, of wood for his home, and even in death as a place to rest the weary bones of the old man, resonates on some deep level with our better angels. And I want to believe that this sense of consistent caring is felt by everyone who reads the book. We all want to be that loyal and kind, to give of ourselves as part of all the things with whom we briefly share the planet. The Giving Tree embodies one of the reasons I write about “good stuff”.

We may give blood, or open the door for the person whose hands are full (or even if they are empty), or say “good morning” and “thank you”, or work at a food bank, or do all the myriad things large and small where we help one another. We don’t have to but we do them anyway, because it feels right.  In those moments we set aside our cynicism and ego and become The Giving Tree, each and one.

I am not sure what I find so intriguing about armadillos. It may be that they have adapted over the millennia and are a tenacious survivor of evolutionary tensions. They also have an unusual appearance in that they are armored with flexible plates, although only one of the 23 known species is capable of rolling up like a pill bug. All the others avoid predators by “fleeing on foot” through the dense underbrush, digging down in soft earth or swimming great distances.

There is one species called the screaming hairy armadillo which squeals loudly when picked up or is otherwise disturbed. It goes without saying that Screaming Hairy Armadillos would a GREAT name for a rock band and I blame the Rock Band Naming Society for this glaring oversight.

In doing what I laughably call “research” for this blog entry, I discovered that the overlapping scales on the armadillo’s back are called “scutes”, providing yet another triple word score in Scrabble and a candidate for Best Word Ever.

Like all living things, well *things* generally, behaviors and population dynamics are governed by physics. This is not surprising because physics attempts to describe and predict the physical universe, of which armadillos are a part. I think universities the world over should offer a course of study called Armadillo Physics taught by wild-eyed scientists wearing rumpled lab coats and carrying clipboards covered with cryptic runes.

Sign me up.

We all know that plants move, just that the motion is pretty measured relative to their brethren over in the animal side. This slow-motion dance is often the result of plants sensitivity to the gradual cycles of sunlight, darkness, warmth and cold.

Plants that seek the sunlight will twist and turn to follow the sun in an activity called positive phototropism.

On the other hand (or leafy appendage) some climbing plants, like vines, exhibit a very cool and remarkable behavior. If they become disconnected from the tree or structure that supports them and fall to the ground, the portion on the ground will move off in the direction of something else to climb. The strategy it employs is to basically move away from the light and toward the shadows, because darker areas are likely to mean the trunk of a tree or other vertical surface.

These vine stems are now *negatively* phototropic, growing away from the sunlight and toward the shade. Once the vine resumes its vertical climb, it switches back to its more normal positive phototropic behavior. As it grows upward toward the sun, its leaves become larger and larger to collect the maximum amount of the sun’s energy.

We humans like to place such plants in hanging baskets and let the vines trail down in artistic and dramatic ways. However when you understand the way these plants evolved and survived, we are basically hanging them upside down in a way that restricts their normal growth patterns.

When we think about vines and their complex behavior, we might conclude that these plants are in some sense thinking things through as we might, comparing and contrasting a risk/reward model and then making the “right” choice. But the reality — while not ours — is no less complex, happening way down at the molecular level where genes and enzymes interplay. Such mechanisms have been developing over millions of years and are happening right now, out there beyond your window in the light and in the shadows.

One of the things Pop used to make was a breakfast concoction called “graveyard stew”. There are many versions of this but I liked the one Pop would make because of its simplicity. Basically it consists of two pieces of toast, lightly buttered and placed in a bowl. Over the toast is poured hot milk. A few shakes of salt, a few shakes of black pepper and Ouila! or Voila! (or walla! as I like to say). Some folks like to make it using cinnamon toast, but that seems like gilding the lily. And please no poached egg because, guck.  The origin of the name seems to be that (1) graveyard stew was served to sick people, (2) graveyard stew was a favorite of hobos who rode the rails, or (3) both. Bread, butter and milk – life in a bowl!

A number of years ago I had the chance to do one of those bucket-list things and design and build the house in which we currently live. Well, “design and build” really means herding an army of construction people and answering questions about faucets, door handles, flooring, paint and a bazillion other choices you will inevitably live to regret for the rest of your life. Bucket list indeed.

One of those choices had to do with lighting – placement, type, etc – and this is where I first encountered the curious little word “sconce”. Not to be confused with “scone” which would create some delicious yet strangely darkened spaces, sconce lighting is the type that fits directly on the wall, like those flickering torches attached to the granite slabs of medieval castles.  Modern sconce lighting looks like this

or this.

The word sconce hearkens back hundreds of years, and meant a screen or partition erected to defend the castle gate or wall. It’s a fun word to say at a party like “I don’t know about you but I prefer sconce lighting”, and watch as people slowly back away.