Dahlias

Dahlias.  You can't say their name without saying, "ah".  Their abundance of petals, circling symetrically around a sunny centre, may draw you inward, and, like the mandalas of India, encourage meditation, and thoughts of yoga.  Dahlias, however, are from the New World.  Early in the16th Century, Spanish Conquistadors "discovered" them in Mexico, and brought them back to Spain.

The dahlia is Mexico's national flower.  Painter Frida Kahlo, the daughter of a gentle, German photographer and a Mexican mother is an iconic modern figure, with black braided hair, often decorated with dahlias.  She once said, "I paint flowers so that they will not die", and dahlias are in many of her self portraits and still life paintings.     

Dahlias are part of the Asteraceae family of flowers which includes sunflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and daisies.  Think of the word, astral.  These flowers have a starlike appearance, with rays extending in all directions.  Hardy, and gorgeous, they are stars of the garden.  There are more than 40 varieties of dahlias, ranging in width from two inches, to dinner plate size.  The colours range from cream, to yellow, pale pink, lavender, and fiery salsa red.  Dahlias radiate energy! 

These long lasting flowers are lovely in any arrangement, and work especially well with snapdragons, lilies, and deliphiniums, which bloom at the same time of the year.  Dahlias are showy, and dramatic, although they can be old fashioned and demure, depending on the softness of the colour.  To paraphrase Frida Kahlo, bring dahlias into your home, and make the Summer last longer.     

Portrait of Frida Kahlo Fiery Dahlia of Mexico, by Oksana Gruszka Sanaj
Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Vitamin D, Sunshine and Dahlias

It's mid October, and big, fat Dahlias are still brightening Toronto gardens with their vivid colours.  A Sunday afternoon walk with my camera (okay, the Samsung phone), is so beautiful, I don't even notice the cold wind. 

It's quiet.  The park next door is undergoing a major multi-year reservoir reconstruction project, and only a few of us seem to know the secret path to the Volunteer Garden.  The bees are still softly buzzing from blossom to blossom.  It's an afternoon of blue skies, sunshine and pretty pink flowers!

It's known as the Sunshine Vitamin.  Your body produces vitamin D when your skin is directly exposed to sunlight.  Actually, the ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays of sunlight do the trick.  Black people absorb more UVB in the melanin of their skin than whites, and need more sun exposure to get the same amount of vitamin D.   

In parts of the world where the hours of sunlight nearly disappear for months at a time (think of Canada from November to April), where sunlight is obscured by heavy air pollution, or people live and work indoors from sunrise to sunset, lack of vitamin D is a real issue. An estimated one billion people have vitamin D deficiency.

Almost one hundred years ago, a link was found between vitamin D, and the prevention of rickets (a disease which causes bone deformaties).  Six years ago, the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, part of the US National Institutes of Health, published a report by the Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics, that vitamin D "may play a role" in preventing "cancer, heart disease, fractures and falls, autoimmune diseases, influenza, type-2 diabetes, and depression".  For the past several years, many Canadians have been supplementing their diet with a daily dose of 1,000 units of vitamin D, or more.

Then, earlier this month, a controversial review of 81 vitamin D studies showed the vitamin had no effect on increasing bone density, or preventing bone fractures.  In New Zealand, Aukland University's Associate Medical Professor, Mark Bolland reviewed nearly 54-thousand cases, and found that even in higher doses, vitamin D had no preventative effect.  His conclusion is that if you are healthy, you don't need extra vitamin D to prevent fractures, however, if you are seriously deficient -  take vitamin D.  

The review did not cover vitamin D and cancer or heart disease.  Right now, more than 100-thousand people around the world, are in vitamin D trials, including research into cancer and heart disease. 

The weather forecast shows sunshine most of the week, and I plan to be outdoors enjoying the UVBs!  Although, midweek could see thick clouds of smoke covering the sunlight in many Canadian cities...October 17th, marijuana becomes legal, and this country's skies could be a little hazy.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated

Thank You 25-Thousand Times!

Another milestone in the brief history of my little blog, Widow's Endorphins:  WE has just reached 25-thousand views!  This really should read:  WE have.  This is something that we have done together, dear readers.  I am grateful.

 Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Paper for the First Year

Paper for the first, then cotton for the second year, and leather for the third.  Wedding anniversaries have their own traditional gifts.  A couple's 25th wedding anniversary is known as the Silver Anniversary.  Couples exchange gifts of silver between themselves, or perhaps family and friends present them with an engraved silver tray.  The Golden Wedding anniversary celebrates 50 years of marriage, with a gift of something gold.  The rare Diamond Anniversary, celebrates 60 years together.  If you survive to celebrate a near-impossible 90 years of marriage, an ominous gift of granite is appropriate!

There are no gifts for widows, observing what we call an angelversary.  No lists of what every widow may wish to give herself.  No suggestions for her friends looking for just the right little something.

Why reinvent the wheel?  Traditional anniversary gifts, work just as well to mark each year of widowhood.  Paper for the first year anniversary, is perfect, because you go through a lot of Kleenex that first year.  Cotton pillowcases for the second year, because while you're still crying, you mostly do it into your pillow, and not at the supermarket (as much).  Leather boots for the third year, because you have to, "stand on your own two feet", and "stand up for yourself", on this grief journey.  No one would want to walk a mile in a widow's shoes. 

Truly, the greatest gifts you can give a widow, are the gifts of love, friendship and kindness; listening without judgement; time; and laughter.  There's no need to wait for an anniversary, either.

I am so blessed to have people in my life who include me in their lives.  The love and kindness of family and friends means so much.  Being remembered throughout the week, or on special occasions gives me a sense of belonging, and being appreciated.  What a wonderful gift! 

Widows grieve each in their own way, and all need time.  One of the worst things you can say is, "get over it".  Some of my widowed friends have been told this, less than a week after the death of their husband!  Although the gut-wrenching pain and terror, and the zombie like days ease after the first several months, no one is ever quite the same.  You don't get over such a great loss.  You live with it. 

Widows like to say their husband's name, without watching someone wince, or look away.  So many of my widowed friends want nothing more than to talk about their happy memories with their husbands, and are stifled, or forced to change the subject.  Speaking your husband's name only once a day, when he is ever-present on your mind, shows real restraint.

I don't know a widow who doesn't enjoy a good laugh.  In fact, healing often begins the day you realize that you laughed for the first time in weeks, or months.  Laughter really is the best medicine, and lightens up even the saddest of days.  Every day, my sister, cousin, or dear friends send me a funny video, Facebook meme, or email that makes me laugh out loud.  What a difference that makes!

I'm off to the jeweler.  The leather strap on my husband's watch - the watch I've worn every day since he died - slipped off my wrist a few days ago.  I'd say it was just in time.  Today is our leather angelversary.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Sizzling Last Days of Summer

What do you mean, Summer is almost over?  It's only just beginning in Toronto!  August turned to September, and the hot and humid weather has kept Toronto sizzling for nearly three weeks.  Finally, what we longed for through the frozen months of December, January and February arrived with a Tropical blast of heat.  I feel like a wet kleenex, but the balcony flowers are thriving in the sunshine!

Autumn officially arrives in the Northern Hemisphere on September 23rd.  The Fall foliage will just have to find room alongside the sweet Summer blossoms!

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

A is for @

Flowers for teachers, who'll be teaching everything from computer cursors to cursive writing...maybe. Children are growing up in that transitional time between handwriting and texting.  Many school boards have removed cursive writing from the curriculum.  There's much debate over what needs to be learned, and therefore what needs to be taught.

I was shocked to read recently, that many Canadian teens do not know how to sign their own name. They've never been taught handwriting.  After all, there's a font for that!  Hundreds to choose from. Until they have to sign their own name for a driver's license, or a passport, many teens have hand printed or texted their way through life.

My contemporaries joke that cursive writing will be our own secret code!

My and my late husband's family trees are deeply rooted in Quebec, where the Catholic church kept detailed birth, marriage and death records of everyone in the parish.  My heart leaps whenever I discover a document containing the signature, or signatures of our ancestors.  It represents education, literacy, and great opportunities.

Priests were educated.  They not only had to be able to read the Latin bible, they had to read and write in French, in order to document the lives of parishioners.  Often the names of the bride, groom, and witnesses are written in the priest's handwriting.  It is rare when the bride signs her own name.  I have one document of the burial of a family patriarch, inwhich all of his children have signed their names to the church record.  

For illiterate parishioners, the priest would sign for them, and the groom, or bride, or parents of a newborn child, would mark an "X" to indicate that they were present.  Sometimes their X is so close to the ending of their name, it looks like part of the name.  This is often the explanation given for names ending with the letter X.  It is also how one tiny branch of my family went from Devereau to Devereaux to Devericks (I have a theory, that the Irish who settled in Quebec and Ontario, thought the "X" was pronounced "icks").

Each person's handwriting is uniquely theirs.  A hand addressed envelope in the mail, announces the sender, even before you've opened it.  There's an energy in a person's handwriting that crosses the barriers of time, even death.  Reading old letters, or stained recipe cards handwritten by a loved one, brings back memories as powerful as a photograph.

What young romantic didn't write her name in her best script, over and over on the inside cover of a notebook?  Mrs. Paul McCartney, Mrs. Paul McCartney.  Handwriting made it look possible.

While I love handwriting, I spend hours a day on the computer, or, should I say @ the computer!  As modern as the symbol @ is, it is really ancient!

The Smithsonian's researchers trace the first documented use of the symbol back to 1536, when a merchant in Florence, Italy - Francesco Lapi - used the symbol to list units of wine, shipped in large clay jars, called amphorae.  (Amphorae is from the Greek, amphi-phoreus, meaning carried on both sides.  Each amphora -with a handle on either side - carried 20 to 25 litres of wine, or 20 to 25 of our modern bottles.  The larger amphorae held 36 litres of wine...I digress).

After Francesco Lapi (a name with so many flourishes, it would be a joy to write by hand), other merchants began using the symbol.  We even use it today to mean, "at the rate of", as in, three dozen eggs @ $4.69 per dozen (and they're not even the organic ones!).

Not all of us are merchants, however, everyone in the world with an email address or twitter account, uses @ in their address, and they have done so since 1971.  We have computer scientist, Ray Tomlinson to thank for that.  While working on an early form of the internet, he was looking for a way to send messages to specific destinations.  He came up with @, because the equal sign, "wouldn't have made much sense".  Tomlinson's first email left one teletype in his room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, went through the system, and arrived at another teletype in the same room.  That's been where it's @ ever since!

The Italians call the symbol for @, "chiocciola", which means snail, because the symbol looks like a little snail in its shell. Ironically, in Francesco Lapi's homeland, even email is snail mail.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

The Grapes of Ruth

The Dustbowl.  The Dirty Thirties.  The Great Depression. Whatever you call it, the economic and ecological catastrophe that destroyed the livelihoods of many of our parents and grandparents over eighty years ago, haunts us to this day.  

For those who've never heard about it, the stock market crash of 1929, led to worldwide bankruptcies. Almost overnight, businesses and factories in both Canada and the US shutdown, closing their doors to workers.  Families lost their homes. Shopkeepers no longer had shoppers, and soon lost their businesses, putting more people on the street.  This was before government assistance, and those who lost their jobs, were on their own.      

At the same time, the worst man-made ecological disaster in North American history, turned the prairies, from Canada, down to the hard-hit Southern US states of Oklahoma and Texas, into a dust bowl. 

In the 1920's, combine harvesters and small gas powered tractors, made it possible for farmers to convert grassland into cropland.  It was called The Great Plough-up, and removed the deep rooted grasses which normally would have held moisture, and stabilized the soil during droughts. Then, severe drought in 1934, '36 and '39 led to blinding dust storms, which removed the topsoil from farm fields. Skies were black with dust.  Crops were lost.  Banks foreclosed on farms. Families moved - mostly westward, to British Columbia, and California.

     

Although they were not in the dust bowl, my Mum knew poverty.   Life was so hard that almost everyone in her tiny, impoverished village near Montebello, Quebec was moved to Northern Quebec, to homestead and establish a mining town. The men went first, and the women and children followed a year later.  My Mum was the eldest of a family that would eventually number ten children, and she left school at a young age, so that she could help out the family.  On her own, she learned to speak, read and write in English.  

On the Westcoast, my grandfather thought life would be better if he moved his wife and son to Ireland.  They sold everything, and moved across the country, and across the ocean to his birthplace. Things were worse.  A year later, they returned to BC, and survived the remaining years of the Depression by being as self sufficient as possible, growing their own fruits and vegetables, and raising chickens. That my Dad was one of few men of his generation to go to University, is a testament to his commitment and determination.

My parents didn't talk very much about their childhoods.  They did instill a spirit of generosity, and a pride in self that had nothing to do with material wealth.        

Sanora Babb left her Oklahoma town for the fast paced life as a big city reporter in Los Angeles. When the stock market crashed, she lost her job, and was homeless for a time.  By 1938, she was working for the US Farm Security Administration. Travelling with her boss, Tom Collins, they would let migrant workers know about programmes which would help them.  She interviewed workers from the Midwest, and began taking notes, which she hoped to use for a book.  Without her permission, Collins gave her personal notes to a San Francisco news reporter, who was writing a series of articles on the plight of the workers, The Harvest Gypsies.

The San Francisco reporter spent months living with migrant workers, even travelling with an Oklahoma family, on their journey to find work in California.  He too was writing a book.  John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning 1939 book, The Grapes of Wrath was an instant American classic, and led to a Nobel Prize for Steinbeck.  Steinbeck dedicated the book to Collins.

Babb's publishers told her there was no room for another book on the same subject.  Her book, Whose Names are Unknown, was finally published in 2004, a year before she died.   

There's a scene in The Grapes of Wrath, where food is being destroyed to keep prices high. Steinbeck writes, "...in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.  In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy for the vintage..."

This Labour Day weekend, the start of the Fall harvest season, my thoughts are with those migrant workers in both Canada and the US, who work long, hard days to put food on our table.

My thoughts are also with the hundreds of thousands of Canadians and Americans who have been displaced by massive fires and historic floods.  Those of us with a roof over our heads, and food on our table are called upon to help in whatever way we can.


Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Postcards from Balconville!

It's the August long weekend.  While many are heading to the cottage for BBQ's and lake swims, others are vacationing in town.  Montrealers have an expression for it:  passer ses vacances a Balconville.  In other words, a staycation on the balcony!  There's nothing quite like being on a balcony, surrounded by flowers!

Having a wonderful time, wish you were here!

Photographs Copyright of Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.