Mowing and Mom

Dave and I debated doing "No-Mow May" again, like we did a couple of years ago. But in the end I mowed the lawn yesterday. I'm just too neat to let it go entirely. What I did do is leave several patches of daisies (above) and dandelions, as well as the bluebell, preserving an unmowed grassy area with flowers for pollinators. I don't want to give the garden over entirely to the bugs, but I can certainly share it.

Yesterday turned out to be a beautiful day, sunny and warm-ish. In addition to mowing I did some weeding, trimming and other garden tasks. (Anything to get out of the house, because the Russians were doing construction again and I couldn't stand that dentist's-drill sound of their sanders or saws or routers or whatever.)

I got all of my rescued slides from Camden Market uploaded to Flickr -- if you're interested in viewing the whole batch, they're here. I discovered with the help of someone on Flickr that one of the photos -- the one of the woman walking past the tulip beds at the end of this post -- was in the wrong cardboard frame. (Several of the slides in the bin had come loose from their frames, and I tried to reunite them based on the handwritten descriptions.) So the caption I gave it in that post is incorrect. Fortunately, by some miracle, I had the empty frame that it belonged in, so now I know the picture actually shows "Torquay Gardens -- Diana" and not Kew Gardens. Whew!

Anyway, here's the whole garden after my mowing job.

And here's another look at our pink spider azalea. Some of the flowers have these white edges. I think there are actually two azalea plants in this pot. They seem happy together, so we're letting them remain conjoined twins.

I watched a peculiar movie yesterday afternoon: "The Sterile Cuckoo" from 1969 with Liza Minnelli. Somehow this movie had entirely escaped my radar until recently. I was on YouTube and came across the song "Come Saturday Morning," by the Sandpipers -- and that song is from this movie, so I decided I had to check it out.

Minnelli plays an energetically quirky college student named Pookie and the movie tells of her relationship with another student, a taciturn young man. At first she seems harmless enough but by the end you're not sure whether she's entirely sane. Or, as Vincent Canby put it in The New York Times back in 1969, "'The Sterile Cuckoo' documents the breakdown of a desperate personality, but disguises it as a tale of first love, gone slightly awry."

(Although "Come Saturday Morning" became a hit song, Canby also carped about "the relentlessly sentimental background music that fills the soundtrack every time they wander through a meadow.")

The title was a complete mystery to me, but apparently it comes from a poem Pookie writes in the original novel -- never mentioned at all in the movie.

Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to know about "The Sterile Cuckoo." It was an interesting cinematic experience, with lots of good nostalgia value. Minnelli cries very convincingly.

I also talked to my brother in Florida via Facetime, since I couldn't communicate with my mom on Mother's Day. We have enrolled her in Hospice, which basically means she will be shifted toward palliative care rather than any continued attempts at rehabilitation. Her dementia is quite advanced at this point, and her physical health is weakening. She briefly stopped eating not long ago, but she's started again. I'm considering flying to Florida this summer for another visit, even though in all likelihood she will remember nothing of my presence. We'll see.