Persian Lilac, White Cedar, Chinaberry or Bead Tree?

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I followed a link to the TEDtalk page again. How could I not? Some intriguing conversations get started there more often than not. They're a definite source of inspiration for me, so following the link I found at one of the social sites I go to for news was practically a habitual, robotic thing for me to do:

http://www.ted.com/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

There's something beautiful about this unkempt, slovenly woman talking about what she's projecting on to the screen behind her. She casually shows the shapes and interactions I've been attempting to describe for decades as if it's the most natural thing to see and hear there can possibly be. As if to deny the implications practically makes one a dunce. If I didn't agree with her conclusions at such a deep gut level I might be offended.

Here's another TEDtalk by an old man who is a psychiatrist who has come to understand that some of the tossed-word-salad his patients have described for him have a basis in a commonly misunderstood reality that is in truth, vaporware. Some vaporware is more temporarily useful than other vaporware before it gets gaseous and disappears again. Things get created merely as a placeholder or Oasis on the way to the Forum:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html

Listening to this man chat about what various people see in their hallucinations intrigued me. It made me feel less alone. I've realized that if all the people who have had similar experiences as I have were to out themselves like I have, and this man has, it might make life a lot more comfortable for many more people ere now.

I've been obsessed with making it okay for what happened to me to be seen as fairly commonplace in the larger scheme of how things happen. I think this is how I've used my genius. I don't harbor the idea that what I do as an obsession is rational nor could it ever be. Irrationality gotta be there to balance out ration for the sake of the whole-y. Is the term "holiness" originally intended to be viewed as comedic in the same way as "truthiness"?

Something physical happened to me around the age of ten years old that I remember to this day. I didn't fall out of that chinaberry tree. The limb broke, and unfortunately I was out on that limb when that happened. I don't know how high in the air I was when the limb suddenly broke. I've used ten feet other times I've told this story. I have a tendency to exaggerate. It was a long way down for a little boy.

I landed flat on my back and it knocked the wind out of me, and I got panicky because I couldn't breathe. All I know is that at first I thought I was dead, then realized I couldn't be dead if I was worried about catching my breath.

The ground I landed flat on my back upon was packed hard by bare feet over a long period of time. Probably as long as the house in front of it had been built. The house was located at the intersection of two roads about a mile or so from the small town my family had moved to from an even smaller village not far away in order for my oldest sister to attend the twelfth grade level of high school so she could enroll in a University. It could have been to satisfy my father's ambitions just as handily.

The house we rented is remembered in our family by calling it "the yellow house". The road that ran beside it was the main road between two large military posts and was paved with concrete to connect those two military locations and paid for by the federal government. It was the only paved road in that part of the entire state.

North Carolina came to be known as "The Good Roads State" in my own lifetime, but not that far back. I think the laws that generated the taxes to build better farm-to-market roads throughout the state also foresaw the need to put an agriculture teacher in every high school in the state, and that's how my family ended up living in the Yellow House.

The other road that formed the aforementioned "intersection" wasn't much of a "road" as roads go. It was little more than an unpaved country lane for the people who lived off a larger country road that radiated out into a swampy area north and east of the military road. It was infrequently used by local farmers who were not going to the little town, but to a regional town called Kinston north and west of there where they had bigger stores and products to choose from. I loved going to Kinston with my entire family to shop at the A & P grocery store.

Seeing the Latino migrant families at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter reminds me of how it was back then as a kid. We'd get all goggle-eyed and wanna touch everything and embarrass our mother. Our oldest sister was a teenager about this time, and our antics humiliated her to no end, but nobody in my family liked going to Kinston back when we were a basic family unit living together than my oldest sister, the drama queen.

She's 79 years old now, and still a drama queen. She and her husband, who turned 83 a couple of days ago have been married for at least fifty years now. That's nothing to scoff at from a social point of view. I do it anyway. Staying married to the same person for all of your adult life is not the same thing as achieving immortality. Achieve immortality, and I won't hae a mumbling nasty thang to say to yo' powdered, lip-sticked face.

The Yellow House was originally built in the shape of an ell, and the front door and porch faced the little cutoff road. Behind the house and also along beside the paved road was a cow barn with a small hay loft and a corral-like pen in front of it, and a cow pasture behind that, also along the paved road.

This was the way it was sixty years ago, and there was barely any traffic on either of the roads both large and small, yet was routinely maintained by the state road scrapers, it served most usefully as a playground for us kids to play ball there.

As the crow flies we had a neighbor about a half mile away who had a couple of kids near my age. The other side of the paved road was the house of an older woman we called Miss Violet. I don't remember much about her except that she came running to help when I thought I was gonna get killed by a cow.

I was carrying a bucket of feed out to the barn to pour it into the trough the cows eat from. The trough was attached to the barn across the corral from the gate closest to the house. The big cow came toward me menacingly and wouldn't back off like she normally would. I didn't realize until my father pointed out later that the cow was after the feed in the bucket and not me. I understood the reasoning and agreed with the possibility that the cow was only after the feed that was in the bucket I was carrying. I didn't like the implication that I was too stupid to just put the bucket down and run if I was so scared.

For one thing, one of the first things that happen when I get scared is that my hands automatically ball into fists, and if I've got anything in my hands when fear inimitably possesses me, I can't drop it and run even if what I got in my hand is all they're after. It's how monkeys are snared by putting monkey goodies inside a coconut with a hole in it big enough for a monkey paw to get through empty-handed, but not if they grab the goodies and try to run away to eat them. They can't let go of the goodies to escape.

My original point for describing the geographical facts surrounding the Yellow House is that the area I fell out of the chinaberry tree when it's hollow, fragile limb broke, was that this area was in the nook of the L-shape of the Yellow House, and that's where the water pump was located, and where the clothes got washed, and where naked kids got their baths during summer when the rain ran off the tin roof to the sandy ground below where we stood ready with yellow lye soap to wash the summer sweat off our stinking little bodies.

The chinaberry tree was a part of a privacy hedge that had a bunch of chinaberry trees as a fence row. I've never known the scientific name of the chinaberry tree until just now when I realized I could easily Google it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melia_azedarach

Somehow the pictures in this Wikipedia article doesn't look like the chinaberry trees we have here in the Southeastern United States, but the pictures of the yellowish/golden berries do. I have a grove of them here on my own lot beside my driveway that leads out to the nearest paved road here.

The fruit of the chinaberry tree has played a role in my life from childhood when we would use them as ammunition for our homemade bamboo popguns. We used to use wild black cherries when they're green for the same reason. The trick was to find the right sized reed for the green china berries to fit into in order for a vacuum to be created between two chinaberries.
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