Honeysuckle Rose

Seen on Saturday’s trike ride — that’s a Cy Twombly-ish sky. N'est-ce pas? 
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In Word Land this morning I once again reaped the bennie of my throwing-junk-at-the-wall-and-maybe-some-will-stick method of play. Sometimes it does. Stick that is.

I had the letters and position on my Words with Friends board to play Thebes, one of the famed cities of antiquity, the capital of the ancient Egyptian empire at its heyday.

Awesome! Oh wait...proper nouns aren’t accepted. Merde! I didn’t want to lose the triple word score or the triple letter boon under the H (bringing me nine not just three points) so I figured I'd just try thebe, mebbe that’s a word. And HUZZAH it was and the Crazy Cat Lady picks up 48 points!

What’s a thebe you ask?

Thebe may refer to:

• Any of several female characters in Greek mythology - see List of mythological figures named Thebe
• Thebe (moon), a moon of Jupiter
• Thebe, a unit of currency in Botswana - see Botswana pula
• Copidosoma thebe, a wasp parasitic on caterpillars - see Copidosoma#Species

Clyde, our first

A river birch for mia madre

OK, no way I’d have known the money thing or the //shudder// wasp bit. I feel like I cheated now. *sigh*
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Trees, you know I’m a tree hugging freak, right? I strongly, wicked firmly even, believe that just about everyone can stand to add, at bare min, a couple more trees. The planet, WE, need more of those air cleaning, energy conserving, oxygen providing, home providing babes.

Why do I bring this all up this morning? Well, boyhowdy, Jen and Oni gave me yet another god-yur-old-now prezzie — a river birch! YEA! I’ve been wanting to plant a birch in Mother’s honor (it was her fav tree) ever since she took that early AM, Paradiso bound train.

Boom. Done.

Our new, fabulous bairn joins the Chinese red maple, planted for Oni’s mother a few years back, the two dwarf pines we put in for Mary Ann and Clyde — the formerly wee blue spruce, our first Christmas tree here in Valhalla. He’s getting to be a big boy now.
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before

after

I’m also a big fan of honeysuckle. Day-um that shit smells dreamy AND it’s beautiful. Our neighbor, to the back of us, had the MOST amazing bushes. They ran the length of her driveway and enveloped the nasty-ass chain link fence that runs between our yards. Over the last two summers the shrubs have grown mega huge — they became the hedge equivalent of the Fantastic Four's Thing. Tremendous! Sure, it now overshadowed our thin flower garden but, hells bells mon ami, this was one mind bendingly stunning Super Honeysuckle. Just astronomically gorgeous.

And then, then, for some unfathomable reason, our neighbor cut it all down. I don’t understand. It’s her yard, her right but...but...damn I’m sad that it’s gone.
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Honey Suckle Rose performed by Emmy Lou Harris and Willie Nelson