Last Days Of The Iris

This iris has a story, too.

One day a few years back, I visited a friend in Tiverton RI. She was renting an apartment in a house that had been there for decades upon decades, perhaps as long as a century.

It is next to Fall River, MA, which is mostly a dirty, litter strewn city struggling with poverty and pointlessly unprofitable political corruption.

It is the kind of place with lots of broken windows and boarded up multi-story stone mills interspersed with soon-to-be-bankrupt and empty "renewal projects" financed with loans and grants.

The soul-less decrepitude of the longtime dying mill town and its population overflows across the border like a backed up storm drain burbling sewage into a green park after a long and heavy downpour.

My friend's home and apartment was in a neighborhood just yards from the border. The overflow is heavy there.

She had some items to sell to be photographed. We decided to use the sun for lighting so we set ourselves up outdoors in the sunny, open yard beside the house.

In the side yard was a garden, as old as the house... or nearly so.

The garden was partly overgrown and had seen times when more care had been lavished upon it than had been lavished then.

Irises were blooming... and some other flowers, too. They had been planted long, long ago, had endured many years.

My friend went back inside to swap around items. I had a few quiet minutes in the yard near the garden.

I looked and took a few pictures of the blooming royal-purple iris that had been there for so long.

They had a quiet nobility to them.. to quietly stand so strong, so long, yet to seem sincere and unassuming.

We finished up our photo session and soon I went away.

A few weeks later I returned to visit.
The garden and the iris were gone.

The lot next door had been sold and had been harshly bulldozed to make room for a cheaply-manufactured box intended for human occupation.

The yard was grass in turf squares, poorly placed and soon to brownly die. The green-dyed and dying grass was imprisoned by a shiny, chain link fence.

The yard of this over-sized crate was full of mass-produced, garishly colored, gimmicky ornaments of the sort broken-souled humans tend to fill their sterile, plastic yards.

The iris garden had been churned into bulldozer-tracked mud.
The garden was not even in their lot.

They had heedlessly run across the boundary while plowing up their land with absolutely no care nor clue an overgrown garden would be appreciated or missed.

It was a tiny heartbreak
to see the iris garden
simply was no more.

Noble purple iris,
roots and stalk and blooms
replaced by flashy, trashy gore.

Visiting Two Maine Museums

There are some nice museums in Maine. Two are the Maine State Museum and the WW&F Railroad Museum. I've visited both recently.

In two vists, I spent about six hours in the Maine State Museum. it is next door to the state capital building in Augusta.

It is a great museum, well laid out and full of interesting exhibits.

The entry fee for an adult is only $2 with discounts for senior citizens and kids. But at $2 who needs a discount?

There are four full floors of exhibits covering a wide range of Maine topics. Lots of old cars, old machinery, logging and sardine and textile industry stuff.

An exhibit of civil war flags is impressive as is a roomful of exhibits about Maine setting itself apart from Massachusetts after Massschusetts about gave it away in the War of 1812.

The Maine Museum has a truly excellent section on Archaic and post-Archaic era Native Americans in an exhibit that takes us from 12,000 BC to the near present. I went back a second day.to explore this section more closely.

After visiting the museum in Augusta I felt the pull of museums in general.
The WW&F railroad museum in Alna stands beside my home.

I went next door to the WW&F Railroad museum and took a ride on its steam driven passenger train that runs about three miles out and three miles back on narrow gauge 2 foot rails. The fee was $6 which goes to restoration of the railroad and its equipment.. It is all-volunteer staffed.

I rode in the open car on the way out to the stop at Alna Center and in the enclosed car out to the end of the line.

On the way back to the museum... I was asked if I wanted to ride in the cab of the engine and I said an emphatic "Yes!".

It was hot near the firebox. and, strangely enough.. it was a bit dirty in the coal-fired engine cab..... who woulda guessed, eh?

But it was really fun.. and informative to see the engineer and his assistant running the steam engine and blasting the whistle and ringing the bell as we approached RR Crossings.

It was a nice little ride down tracks I have walked pretty recently.

A link to the WW&F Railroad webpage:

http://www.wwfry.org/

A link to the to the Maine State Museum webpage:

http://mainestatemuseum.org/

My Friend Thelma Is A Hen.

My friend Thelma is a hen.

Thelma's one of the egg-layers here at the homestead.

She's the last of the oldest group of hens. 

The others are all younger hens.

Thelma has lighter colored feathers than the youngsters who stay in the henhouse out back. She has seen all her first coop-mates pass to the great henhouse in the sky. Her sister and companion was Louise who died of old age at the end of the cold season this year. Louise got hospice care in my living room. We gently communed while she quietly passed away in a comfy little box.

They were "Thelma and Louise" but now it is just Thelma.

Thelma has been granted permission to stay overnight, every night on the steps leading up to my second floor apartment. She ascends to the fourth or fifth step toward sunset each day and hunkers down for the night. I pet her on my way by up or down the stairs.  Sometimes I sit a step or two below and pet her for a few minutes.

Each morning she makes her way down the steps and heads out into the yard to chow down on some bugs and some grass seeds and some plants. 

Sometimes my next door neighbors... who technically own Thelma....

... toss out some corn cobs or other treats for Thelma and the five other hens who prowl the yard.

Thelma... after taking a breakfast jaunt....

... almost every day

... comes back into my stairwell...

 ...climbs all the way up to the second floor landing,

 ...hunkers on down and lays an egg on my doormat

   ... right in front of my door.

It is not the easiest thing in the world for a hen to climb stairs yet Thelma goes out of her way to lay her egg before my door.

Ya know.... it is things like this that make me cry, the good kind of crying....

A simple little hen
climbs up some extra steps and gives me an egg almost every day.
Maybe its because she is my friend.

Yup. Thelma, the hen, is my friend.