The Story of Asenath

The Story of Asenath

Pyracantha

Today I moved a mountain of weeds and did battle with a ferocious pyracantha bush. The pyracantha ripped a scratch in my forehead above my right eye, but I won in the end. It is now trimmed back to an appropriate size and distance from the potato patch it was threatening to overwhelm.

Stained Glass sunsets

Alethea April 26 2013

hello im alethea and im almost 8 and my sister just got a husband and she is gonna get cats and my family is gonna have one last year it was fast me and my dad are going to get a cat thats white with blue eyes and i always go outside and look at the sky and play with my friends

Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell are stops on the same road.  Sometimes when you think you are headed for Heaven you find you wind up in the other place instead.

"There were wildflowers along the road to hell.
 The wind blew and the flowers
danced in the ditches alone or in pairs
in that cheerful way that flowers have
You had to be there to see them
and the guard towers coming into view.

I wasn't.  Still, one hot summer afternoon
as I lay resting, their bright colors came to me,
and that dusty road and that long ditch
Where the wind played with them
carrying their scent past the barbed wire
Or so I thought, too scared to imagine the rest."

Charles Simic, Wildflowers from Master of Disguises
(2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Helicopter wreck

In 1991 I watched my neighbor die. At the time I did not know I was watching the last moments of someone I knew, who lived within walking distance of the place I ate, showered and laid myself down to sleep each night.  I only knew I had seen a terrible accident and someone, maybe more than one, would not be going home to their loved ones.

The photo below has two red crosses.  The upper one shows where I was standing, and the lower one shows ground zero where the BELL BH-47G2A helicopter crashed.  A building partially blocked my view and those of the people standing with me.  We watched as the helicopter rose into the air, lurched to the side, then seemed to drop sharply to the ground.  We saw a plume of smoke spurt violently into the sky, and fire engines respond to the emergency.

 

One fellow I worked with was a volunteer fireman.  He went to find out the details of the crash.  When he returned he told us the pilot had not survived, and his wife was en route to pick him up at the time of the accident. 

I still had no name for the person who had died in the accident.  I learned the next day our neighbors were preparing for a funeral, as the father of the family had passed away.  No one told me how he had died, no one told me where or when the funeral was and I went to my routine job without knowing what my neighbor had died from.  It took me nearly 15 years to piece together the two stories.

During those years, the wife of the neighbor and his children did many kindnesses for me and my children.  We have reason to be grateful for their existence and their actions on our behalf.  They have been and are a great legacy to his name and his memory.

Deseret News article

 

http://cfile23.uf.tistory.com/image/12249B3E4F14CFE32B74C1

http://cfile23.uf.tistory.com/image/12249B3E4F14CFE32B74C1