My Dead Mother's Flowerbeds

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As sad as it may seem, I'm tired of the news consisting of the mideastern people's troubles. Some things never change. Tribalism causes horror stories. That's what Israel and Judaism means to me anymore. They're just another Aramaic tribe near the Mediterranean Sea that's ready to commit murder and mayhem in the name of their tribal god. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these types of tribes. They'll never stop killing each other. I have no need to know about it:

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

I'm getting tired of the news as a whole. The news isn't news anymore. At most, it's sensationalism drawn out to the nth degree as dictated by corporate policy. It's the height of the progression of Eisenhower's warning of a military/industrial complex gone mad. The media is now causing wars to have something to say on the six o'clock news, and the military has become a group of publicity seeking thugs.

Perhaps that's why I've started taking long walks to get away from it. A couple of days ago I walked over to where my parent's house used to be (before the local airport authority took it part and parcel to satisfy the local hog king's demand for a better place to land his Lear jet, and the military to use in order to play very noisy war games 6-8 hours a day), and stood on the spot where both of them died.

Spring is getting closer, the vernal equinox is only two weeks away, so my mother's flower beds are coming to life. The fruit trees that remain are blossoming. Behind the shed my father built to house some of his farm equipment (which is still partially standing to some degree) the rabbit-eye blueberry bushes are preparing to send out new shoots for new fruit to make their appearance. It seems so futile nowadays. If anyone goes to harvest them, they're trespassing on government property and breaking the law.

At least the dilapidated old home place has become a lover's lane where couples go to make mad passionate love under the pecan trees. There are piles of junk left from the construction company that did the dirt work to build the new and improved runway. A mattress lying right out in the open that the lovers probably use in frenetic desperation to wildly thrust their bodies at each other. No doubt even if it were wet from the rain.

I didn't exactly weep for the memories, although I confess to misting up. They bought the farm that had this house on it a couple of years after I joined the Navy when I was eighteen years old. I never lived in this house except for when I stayed over there when they were old and dying. By then I had hand-crafted this house I build, and it wasn't exactly like I was living there.

My younger brother, the second male child out of three, did live there along with my youngest brother, bought the rights to remove the house by either tearing it down or hauling it to another location. He moved it to a ten acre plot on the other side of my house. It took him two years or so to do it. It was a major project for one man to manage. The house had been added on to and bricked up, but he did it. Good boy!

I don't write much about this brother. We have some sort of emotional bias that comes into play when we try to be friends. We have tried to be friends and brothers, but it never has worked out the way either one of us seem to want it too. The fact that he moved that house instead of tearing it down for the materials intrigues me. I haven't thought that Sagittarius's would be that nostalgic, but he has Cancer rising, so that may account for it.

After I had visited the home site for a bit I continued walking down toward the creek that emerges from a good-sized, man-made lake some wealthy people deliberately created to put fancy houses around. On the way I came to a small pond my father built by damming up a spring to provide water for his brood cows, now long gone. He had another pond somewhat like it on the other side of the farm for the bulls. It's inaccessible now because of the new runway.

My middle brother took after my father in a lot of ways. He dug a long ditch down through some low land toward the river that runs through our property, and I went to cross his ditch to get to the road I've been using for my long walks. Another ditch from another pond just below my house drained into my brother's ditch, and the water flow had been impeded by a piling up of last year's tree leaves.

For some reason I halted my walk for a while, found a strong stick, and began clearing the leaves from the water flow to get it to run smoother. For a while I felt like a little boy doing that. I took my time playing around with opening the way for the backed up water to cut a new path through the sand bar that had found life there.

My youngest brother's dog kept milling around waiting for me to get a move on. They kept going on little forays to find something to chase and coming back to see if I was ready to go. After about an hour or so I had my fill of rerouting the water and we moved on. I'll go back and see how it developed. A big rain is on it's way, and the runoff could make my reconstruction a major thoroughfare. Well, sort of. It's still just a ditch.

I spent most of yesterday writing. Either composing the blog entry I was very pleased with. Writing about needing the additional shame of committing myself to the insane asylum to invoke my remembering vision was new to me. I'd never really understood why I committed myself to the State Hospital until I wrote it out yesterday. Now, for odd reasons, I understand. That's all I've ever preyed for.

You might have noticed that my editing is getting better. I've started using the text-reading feature that comes with the Mac operating system to read what I write back to me, and I re-read what I've written as I hear a fairly well-crafted digital voice say the words in front of me. These digital voices have gotten better over the years.

Basically, in regard to editing my own stuff, I rush though a perfunctory read through and let it go at that. I'm not very patient. Then, after I publish on my blogger.com website, I see some of the typos and omissions and fix a few of them for convenience, and never read the entry again. A couple of days ago I typed "the" instead of "than" and it obliterated the entire meaning of what I was trying to say. I gotta do better than that.

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