Dear Carol, Mary Ann and our other wonderful friends, Sorry about missing last week.  My hands were full of maternal and daughterly duties. This summer has been hard on vegetable plants.  While the annual and perennial flowers either bloomed with abandon or hunkered down in the over 100F heat, the veggies were stifled.  Our high summer temperatures don't normally start until the end of July, but this year, the sun decided to spread its warmth a bit earlier.  June is usually a month of moderate rainfall (for Oklahoma) and temperatures in the 80s and 90s, but you know the story from my earlier letters. I'm frustrated with tomato plants that bloom and then drop their withered blossoms as though they're embarrassed.  I have beautiful plants, but very few tomatoes.  I did eat two 'Pink Brandywine' and several handfuls of 'Sungold', but that's it.  Cucumbers are the same way, along with...

Books have always been my salvation. So much so that when I learned to read in the first grade, I felt an empathy . . . no, more than that, a oneness with Helen Keller when she finally linked words to the pictures in her mind. That moment when Anne Sullivan pumped cool, clear water over Keller's fingertips and pressed the letters for water over and over into her hand, I held my breath. I, for the first time, felt the tug of the storyteller upon my soul, and I never looked back.  I was seven years old. I read that biography over and over until its spine broke, and Keller and Sullivan became my role models.  The first, for her tenacity to understand the human language, then read (in Braille) and finally speak (all without the ability to see or hear).  With Sullivan's help, Keller graduated from college and...

Hurrah might be spreading it on a bit thick.  July and August, with their heat and drought, are not my favorite months in the garden.  However, they do beat February like a drum, so Happy Bloom Day, hosted each month on the 15th by Carol of May Dreams Gardens. It's still hot in beautiful, breezy Oklahoma, but a cold front is scheduled to come through this evening, and not a moment too soon.  Eleven days straight of 104F and above temperatures is making everyone cranky including the plants. Some of the plants, with water, like the petunias and verbena above, are happier than I expected.  I do like this color combination, which is planted with yellow and blue-pink daylilies.  The daylilies are nearly finished, and the camera lens I use most often is broken, so this will be a mostly macro post. There is still a lot of color, but...

Dear Carol, Mary Ann and Everyone, Last summer, I wrote about summers that make you forget you live in hot, dry Oklahoma.  This summer is its infernal opposite. You know it's hot when . . . the rosebuds air dry before they completely bloom you go outside only to water the containers and check for any vegetables, and you are dripping sweat within a moment or two; the thermometer measures 108F for days and days and days; the air conditioner is running full blast indoors, and it's still not cool; you go to the hospital, and you pass folks in the parking lot who not only don't say hello (which in Oklahoma is odd), but they also walk with their heads down as if to ward off a blow; concrete parking lots shimmer like diamonds too bright, and asphalt streets create mirages from their surface heat; you no long make hot tea,...