BERGIE AND HIS MANDEVILLA EMERGE FROM HIBERNATION

My last post was September.  It was the end of ten years of blogging and I’m very glad to have done them all because I and others can enjoy them again and again.  I am a Facebook fan but the postings there are limiting and ephemeral.  It doesn’t lend itself well to extensive treatment of a subject, nor is it easy to go back and review an earlier work.   My ten years of work is indexed and  readily at hand:  241 posts which included some 1600 images, six song tracks (e.g. Patti Page doing Old Cape Cod at the end of the post), and several miscellaneous videos.  It was fun but it was demanding and stressful.  Denise Bush got me started blogging and also somewhere along the way nudged me to think about poetry.  So, I started to do an occasional Haiku and one that I wrote was:

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To blog is hard work

And the results pay no bills

But the words will out.

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But the problem is that you can run out of words and that happened to me last fall.  I felt that I had emptied the hamper of both words and worthwhile images.  Also, I was finishing up my eBook, “Shooting For Better Images” and that took a lot of my words, and the technical tasks to publish it were a struggle for an old brain.  But I prevailed and the book is available at BetterPix.net for downloads or from Amazon’s Kindle Service.  Also my social life for the past year seemed to gravitate to doctors and labs as I continue to struggle with a medical issue. It is spring, however, and my Mandevilla just produced its first blossom for 2019.  In fact we’re two-thirds of the way through spring; maybe it’s time for me to get back to work, too.

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The plant was an $8.95 acquisition from Home Depot and wound up on Grampa’s shore deck for the summer.  I was pleased to come across it as most varieties are either pink or red, and the white appealed to me.

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The plant did well and threw off enough blooms to make me wonder if it could brighten my sun room for the winter.  It did.  On the left below we see it settling in last fall, sending runners up some twine to a ceiling hook while continuing to bloom below.  As late as December it featured seventeen blossoms but then it looked at its calendar and muttered something like “C’ya” and stopped blooming … but not growing.  On the right below we see the abundance as of this week including the first bloom, with the plant trying to escape through ceiling and windows.  I frequently cautioned visitors not to get too close to the vines.

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I’ve noticed a couple other spring scenes.  Here’s Mrs. Cardinal wondering where the snow went from her safe perch surrounded by Oriental Bittersweet.  She and her mate were around all winter along with eleven other bird species which I enjoyed from the sun room every morning.

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And only a couple nights ago (after the rains) I was taken by the twilight sun’s golden backing of the leafed-out trees.

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I wondered what had turned on the signs of spring.  Maybe they were motivated by my electric forsythia.

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