Faith, Folklore, and Friends

Y'all know I love morning glories.  I've written about them before  and I am still planting them every year. Hub and I just returned home from a long road trip.  There was a lot of rain while we were wandering, and the morning glories just went wild.  When we got home, they had wound themselves around the glider and among the pots of rosemary and oregano. The glider is on the deck, and the morning glories have grown a long way to get there. I have no problem sharing the glider with these lovelies!

Beautiful September! You bring us nights with raised windows, snuggling under quilts in the wee hours. You mark the time with morning glories  and turn the roadsides yellow. You remind the hummingbirds that it is time to migrate, to journey over a thousand miles to places with warm winters. They know they will have to be fat for the trip, so they fight for the feeders, flashing their ruby throats for our amusement. You sober us with the knowing--summer, the time for growing and gathering, for swimming and playing, for travel and iced tea, no matter how wonderful or fruitful it has been--summer always ends. September. So beautiful, you strengthen us during the transition, and help us face the winter that will surely come. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.   Eccle...

Morning Glories may be the flower I have known and loved the longest. My maternal grandmother, Mrs. Georgia Gean, was a great lover of morning glories. She lived in a little four-room house that had been converted from an old church/school house. The front porch, with boards for the floor and tin on the roof, was built across the front of the house, which faced directly west. Grandma had dug up beds running parallel with the porch, on each side of the front door. Each spring, she would plant these beds with morning glory seed she ordered from a seed catalog. Long before the little plants were ready to send out tendrils, she built a trellis for them to climb on. Grandma knew what days in early spring would yield the highest sap, and that is when we would go to collect young hickory trees. Gathering her grandchildren and her chopping ax, she would head to the woods to cut down hickory saplings that were bursting with sap. We would haul them home under our arms, even the sma...

I posted this blog about morning glories about this time last year. This morning, as I wandered in the backyard wet from yesterday's soaking rain, my Grandma Gean was heavy on my mind. Would she smile at my feeble attempts? Morning Glories may be the flower I have known and loved the longest. My maternal grandmother, Mrs. Georgia Gean, was a great lover of morning glories. She lived in a little four-room house that had been converted from an old church/school house. The front porch, with boards for the floor and tin on the roof, was built across the front of the house, which faced directly west. Grandma had dug up beds running parallel with the porch, on each side of the front door. Each spring, she would plant these beds with morning glory seed she ordered from a seed catalog. Long before the little plants were ready to send out tendrils, she built a trellis for them to climb on. Grandma knew what days in early spring would yield the highest sap, and that is w...