It's Alive!

Wisteria blossoms

Our wisteria vine has revived and there is photographic evidence to prove it - If you look hard enough at the picture, you can see some anemic blossoms hanging on the ends of the dry twigs above the pergola.  Kirk has been telling me that something is happening up there and I finally got up on a chair to take a look yesterday afternoon.  Lo and behold there were flowers indeed, which Kirk didn't see just a couple of days before.  The tired, decrepit vine finally woke up from its long hibernation.  Maybe our gentle prodding did have some effect, after all.  All the green you see in the photo is from the tall trees above the vine, not from the vine itself.  However, this morning it is clear, from what we saw with the binoculars from the kitchen window, that leaves are coming out as well.  

Farmer's Market

Downtown Farmer's Market

I was, by mistake, an hour early for my hair appointment downtown this morning.  As this was a Saturday, I walked over to the Farmer's Market just a few blocks away.  We haven't been back to the market since last summer and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.  The Farmer's Market in Bloomington is without doubt a favorite place for locals to hang out on Saturday mornings, and it's the first thing all newcomers are made acquainted with. Locally grown, organic vegetable and dairy products seem to be de riguer and the local Co-op, BloomingFood, is the grocery store of choice for most academics here.  In addition to the hippie farmers, we also have traditional Amish family farmers nearby. The little Amish girls with their demur bonnets and pinafores sitting behind the stalls are adorable.  They seem to take the people and things around them quite comme ils faut, however at odds they may appear with their own life style.

Another quirky thing about the food sources here is the irregular Tuesday gathering of people in a corner of the Co-op's parking lot.  It's a bit mysterious if you are not in on the secret cult.  These are "friends" of Fabian who receive e-mail notification from him a couple of days before he is expected in town.  He (I'm not at all certain that Fabian is a real person) and his crew apparently drive a refrigerated truck all the way here from Galveston,Texas, bringing fresh shrimp, oysters, crab meat, and red snapper, etc., to the poor land-bound folks along the way.  Even though his e-mails always say that the truck will be in the parking lot at 2 p.m. on a certain Tuesday, the faithful here don't take any chances and generally start queuing up at noon.  You are out of luck if you happen to be the next in line when what you want is sold out.  People stock up on fresh seafood and try to make it last until the next time Fabian is back in town, which, unfortunately, follows an occult schedule of its own and is not predictable.  As the shrimp boats don't operate in the winter time, we don't see Fabian from mid November to mid April. It was a long, lean, five-month period without shrimp!  The line was twice as long when the truck showed up on 4/19/11, the first time this year. 

All the preamble above was but a prelude to my confession - after giving all the aisles at the Farmer's Market a once over, I ended up carrying a tray of blooming annuals to my car! I must also confess that I have previously scouted out a couple of spots in the front yard that can use some colors.  The power of instant gratification is irresistible!

At the market

Transplanted

The Lure of Annuals

My perennial bed on 5.23.11

Compared to what it was like about a month ago, my perennial bed is filling out vigorously, albeit in a somewhat disorderly fashion - those I planted last fall jostling for space with the natives whose existence I was not aware of, elbowing one another unceremoniously.  Though I keep a pretty good record of what I planted, it will be nice someday to be able to identify each by name via the shape of its flower and leaf.

the same bed on
4.14.11

I was slightly miffed when I was told by our gardening expert, Greg, that our front yard lacked interest as it was mostly green, before the rhododendrons bursting on the scene, that is. I felt that I needed to defend it by saying that "but there are different shades of green!"  I am not enamored of those artificial-looking, ready-made, showy annuals which are popping up in the token flower beds in front of so many commercial establishments and on the aisles of gardening centers right about now.  And the idea of flowers which are disposable in a season is not very appealing, not to mention "unsustainable", so it seems to me.  Still there is no denying a certain allure in having clusters of colorful annuals lining the borders of one's gardening beds. Perhaps I may succumb to the temptation of putting in some annuals when summer arrives. 

Swept under the rug

I recently discovered a website called "Over 50 and Out of Work" which is devoted to documenting stories of people in that particular affliction.  It's not a topic of conversation in polite society but it's almost unavoidable in today's economic reality.  So instead of sweeping it under the rug, I thought I would bring the subject up in sotto voce, of course, and see if I can get some conversation going.  I contributed a piece to their blog recently, prompted by a remark made to me by somebody at the gym after she learned that I did not work.  I was concerned that my piece might not fit the story lines of the website so I sent a copy of it to the editor to have it "vetted".  I was quite surprised when she e-mailed me back to tell me that my writing was beautiful and powerful and asked me to post it on their blog!  So far I've not received any cyber missiles and I thought I'd share it with y'all as well.  

Rhododendron in bloom

As if by appointment, all the rhododendron bushes in our front yard bloomed simultaneously, lending to the mostly green landscape a lively splash of color. I'm embarrassed to admit that for the life of me I could not remember what it was called and had to stop my neighbor, Kay, on her driveway to find out.  Not knowing the names of trees and plants puts one in a very disadvantageous position; it's a little bit like traveling in a foreign country and not knowing the language, either written or spoken, or worse, like an illiterate person missing out on all the printed treasures of knowledge.  I can't wait for an app to come out which, by my snapping a picture of a plant, will instantly identify it for me, like one of those nifty music-recognizing apps, such as Shazam.  

Blood Iris

Under one of the rhododendron bushes I discovered some purple (though they look blue in the pictures) iris flowers with "exotic" looking veins, called Blood iris or Iris sanguinea.  It's mind-boggling to learn that there are so many different species of iris.

An update about our wisteria vine: It was pronounced dead by our "resident", International Society of Arborculture-certified arborist, Mr. Gregory Peters of the Souring Eagles Horticultural Service.  He speculated that its having been confined all these years in a tiny corner of the mostly paved pergola and the severe drought last year probably contributed to its demise. The bottom of the trunk had been withering and dying; large chunks of the trunk had fallen off and not enough of nutrient was able to reach to the branches above the pergola.  Not to belie the name of our house, we are considering planting another wisteria vine on the other side of the existing wisteria behind the trellis where there is more ground to grow.  But I don't know if we will still be living in the same house when the new vine grows big enough to bloom.  

Spring Awakening Take 2

I took a picture every day for the past five weeks from my office window of the scene across the street from our house to document the awakening of spring.  Here is a movie I made with 10 of those still images in chronological order from 4/5/2011 to 5/11/2011. How quickly one forgets what one's environment looked like just three months ago - it's like contrasting a black & white world to one that is multi-colored. 

The black & white world
on 1/11/2011

Happy Birthday, Kirk!

Kinsey Confidential

Another claim to fame for Indiana University and the quiet little town of Bloomington is that it was where the controversial Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his Kinsey Institute hailed from.  For people who reached adulthood in the 50's, the Kinsey Reports created a sensation in the American society that would be inconceivable today.  As part of the IU New Faculty Orientation program, earlier this year we were taken to visit the venerable institution, located on the 3rd floor of the Morrison Hall.  Since that visit, we've also seen the PBS documentary, Kinsey, and a movie by the same title starring Liam Neeson as Alfred Kinsey. 

the Kinsey Reports

Scene Board

Kinsey's Home

I've been meaning to write something about the Kinsey connection at the University.  For this purpose, I went back to the K.I. this afternoon to take some photos and also to see their new exhibit, and on the way to campus I walked past the house which Kinsey built in 1927 and where his family lived until 1983 when it was transferred to the current ownership.  If the stories in the movie were to be believed, this house on the quiet little street saw a lot of action during Kinsey's tenancy there.  

Morrison Hall

The K.I. is housed on the 2nd & 3rd floors of the Morrison Hall.  Visitors are given a badge and are free to wander around the hallways and the gallery.  The prints, photographs, art, and objects you can see there are extraordinary and not for the faint of heart, some examples of which can be found in a visual tour video located on the bottom of the next link. They also have an extensive Library and Special Collections for research use with restricted access.   

Kinsey and Wells

What's remarkable, and there are several things, about the life and work of Kinsey are that 1) when the first report regarding human male sexual behavior first came out in 1948 it captured the public's imagination, despite doubts in the university community, and became an instant best seller, 2) when the second report regarding human female sexual behavior came out in 1953, however, it caused an uproar, was denounced as "an indictment of American Womanhood", and led to the investigation by the Reece Committee for possible links to the Communist Party, and to the subsequent cut off of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and 3) throughout its controversial history, the IU President at the time, Herman B. Wells, a demi-god-like figure at the University to this day, stood behind the research work done by Kinsey and defended the importance of academic freedom. 


Sixty years since the publication of the Kinsey reports, one wonders whether, despite the wind of the sexual revolution which swept across the country in the 60's, American society's beliefs and phobias about sexual behaviors have fundamentally changed from those of Kinsey's time, as witnessed in the current debate about gay marriage.

The House of the Singing Winds

T.C. Steele

Last Friday we went on a tour to see paintings by T.C. Steele (1847-1926), the best-known member of the "Hoosier Group" of American Impressionist artists, at the IU Memorial Union and then visited "the House of the Singing Winds" which Steele built in 1907 in nearby Brown County, about a 20-minute ride from Bloomington.  Steele was commissioned by the IU graduating class of 1907 to paint the portrait of IU's 10th president, William Lowe Bryan, while his house was under construction.  He later became the first professor of Fine Arts at IU, which is said to be the first Fine Art Professorship in the country.  IU has a large collection of his paintings, on display scattered all over the sprawling Memorial Union building.  His oeuvre consists of paintings of two distinct types - the one portraits, in the classical academic tradition, the other landscapes, en plein aire, in the Impressionist tradition, many of which were painted on the IU Campus and around his 200+ acre home site.  Both styles of his are incredibly good and sophisticated. 

The House of the Singing Winds

He built the House of the Singing Winds for his bride-to-be,  Selma, who was his second wife and 23 years his junior.  Originally conceived as a vacation home, the house became their main residence all year around till they died. The house grew through the years and they also added several other structures on the site, most notable of which is the large, 20+ foot tall studio, which presents a conventional barn facade on the south side while the north face is mostly glazed.  The house got its name from the sound of the wind singing through the metal screens of their sleeping porch at night.  He apparently painted everyday, rain or shine, while he lived there and one can recognize several of the scenes of his paintings on the site.  

Wisteria Pergola in Painting

Wisteria Pergola Now

Wisteria in Bloom

Wisteria Porch @ Guest Cottage

Peacock at Window

Main room

Sleeping Porch

North Facade - Large Studio

South Facade - Large Studio

This is the Log Cabin
that Kirk talked about