Spike Buck Through Fig Leaves

So much to savor this July — starting with temperatures that make it a pleasure to be outdoors. Downward comparison seems to make that pleasure more intense. Today it is 76 degrees at 2PM, but I’m mindful that it could be 96 to 100 degrees, far too hot so sit outside with pleasure. When we are outside, there are so many interesting things to feel, see, hear, smell, and taste.

• Homemade peach ice cream. My husband makes ice cream at least once every summer from a well-thumbed book of recipes, many stained with use. He cranks it by hand with whatever help he can muster from children and friends.
• A deer drinking out of the bird bath. We’ve been visited several times by a young buck with two velvety spikes. There are weeds that the deer are welcome to eat, but when they start into the fragrance garden, we run them off. It’s easier said than done. They no longer run when we bang a stick against a garbage pan lid. When I run down towards them, I wonder what I’ll do if they don’t run!
• One bird sitting on a limb waiting for another bird to finish so it could have a turn in bird bath. The first bird splashing great arcs of water out of the bath, the second splashing itself much more daintily.
• 

  Hummingbird on Feeder

  A hummingbird dive bombing a swallowtail butterfly that tried to land on the Monarda over and over again until the butterfly gave up. We knew hummingbirds were territorial with each other, but is this the way to behave in a butterfly garden?
• The fragrance of magnolia blossoms and of gardenia blossoms that remind me of our wedding more than a quarter of a century ago


Buddleia up to the porch





Silver Streak on Buddleia

• The buddleia grown so tall that the blossoms are almost up to our level on the porch. On the 4th of July, we had an American flag butterfly garden with Monarda (red), Brazilian sage (blue), and Buddleia (white) all blooming at once.
• Four or five silver streak butterflies on the buddleia at a time, sharing it with bumblebees. Two flying off, fluttering together, landing almost in tandem. I wonder how butterflies mate?
• At night after it is dark, fireflies lighting up all around the yard and the almost deafening orchestra of evening bugs. I think they are cicadas. My mother once rode on a bus with a single cicada which sounded the same note over and over again. She found it rather tedious. The complexity and slow pulsing of the sound we hear comes from many many sounding together.

Just to reflect a little, my summer savoring is particularly piquant because of

• Fleeting wonders. Most can’t be captured in photographs because they disappear so quickly. Try taking a picture of a hummingbird chasing a butterfly! Or of a hummingbird doing anything but resting on the feeder. I am constantly aware that this pleasure will soon be gone. The monarda and magnolia are done for the year, and the gardenia are almost done.
• Downward comparison to other years, so much hotter and muggier. We’re having rain, which always seems like a miracle in July, and it’s keeping things green.
• Family traditions so that today’s pleasures carry echoes of past pleasures
• Family possibilities. When I see the green caves under the fig tree, I imagine children playing there. The tree was not big enough when my children were small, but maybe someday their children will enjoy hiding there.
  

I just had to add this picture of a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly that spent several hours yesterday in the buddleia, flittering from one flower stalk to another. I was in the middle of a business call when I saw it out my window. I put my phone on hold and hollered at my husband, thinking he’d want to see something that large and tawny. He stalked it with the digital camera.

Great Spangled Fritillary on the Buddleia

I have to close with the last magnolia blossom of the season.

Last 2009 Magnolia Blossom

My nomination belongs with the virtue Courage, which currently includes Bravery, Persistence, Integrity, and Vitality. I believe it should also include the strength of Endurance — the way people respond to things they cannot change.

One of the criteria for a character strength is ubiquity, that it is recognized in different cultures and over long history. I had collected the following examples to illustrate endurance, patience and acceptance across time and place. They don’t fit in the PPND article, so I’m including them here as an appendix.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “When Allah desires good for someone, He tries him with hardships.” [Sahîh al-Bukhârî] … In fact, the many afflictions that may beset a person are incalculable. …All of these afflictions, if endured patiently by the believer, are a means of attaining Allah’s forgiveness as well as His reward.

“The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” John xvii.11

Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes. – Buddha (Gautama Buddha)

Ahimsa or non-violence is the most important virtue. That is the reason why Patanjali Maharshi has placed it first in Yama. Practice of Ahimsa must be in thought, word and deed. Practice of Ahimsa is not impotence or cowardice or weakness. It is the highest type of heroism. The practice demands immense patience, forbearance and endurance, infinite inner spiritual strength and gigantic will-power.

He conquers who endures. Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus)

This suffering is all part of what God has called you to. Christ, who suffered for you, is your example. Follow in his steps. 1 Peter 2:20-21

It is better to be patient than powerful; it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city. Proverbs 16:32

Endurance is patience concentrated. Thomas Carlyle

Not in the achievement, but in the endurance of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite God. Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Wounds and hardships provoke our courage, and when our fortunes are at the lowest, our wits and minds are commonly at the best. Pierre Charron, French philosopher and theologian, 1541-1603.

I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured. Dean Acheson, American lawyer and statesman, 1893-1971.

Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty. John Ruskin, British art critic and social thinker, 1819 – 1900.

Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Caesar, 17 2 … but that he should undergo toils beyond his body’s apparent powers of endurance amazed them, Nevertheless, he did not make his feeble health an excuse for soft living, but rather his military service a cure for his feeble health, since by wearisome journeys, simple diet, continuously sleeping in the open air, and enduring hardships, he fought off his trouble and kept his body strong against its attacks.

“Woman has suffered for aeons, and that has given her infinite patience and infinite perseverance.” – Swami Vivekananda

I also found a poem by David Wagoner that illustrated one reason why Endurance may not come swiftly to mind when thinking about strengths — it is often quiet and retiring.

In a bad year, my father went away
A hundred miles to take the only job
He could find. Two nights a week he would sit down
In his boardinghouse after a hard shift
In the open hearth and write a duty letter.
He hated telephones, being hard of hearing
And hard of speaking and just as hard of spending
Now that he had to save our car and our house
And feed us from long distance. He knew words
Of all kinds, knew them cold in Latin
And Greek, from crossword puzzles and cryptograms,
But hardly any of them would come from his mouth
Or find their way onto paper. He wrote my mother
Short plain sentences about the weather
And, folded inside each single page, for me,
In colored pencils, a tracing of a cartoon
From the funny papers: Popeye or Barney Google
Or Mutt and Jeff or the Katzenjammer Kids.
The voice-balloons hanging over their heads
Said, “Hope to see you soon” or “Hello, David.”
And those would be his words for months on end.

I thank him now for his labor, his devotion
To duty and his doggedness. I was five,
And he was thirty-five. I have two daughters
As young as I was then (though I’m twice as old
As my father was). If I had to leave them
In a bad year, I’d want them to be good
To their mother and to love her as much as I did.
I’d miss them, and I’d want them to be happy
With or without me and to remember me.
If I could manage, I’d even write them love
In a letter home with traces of me inside.

David Wagoner (1999)

Endurance also affects the way people look, as illustrated in this passage from Anne of the Island, by L. M. Montgomery who frequently writes about duty patiently borne.

She finally concluded that this man had suffered and been strong, and it had been made manifest in his face. There was a sort of patient, humorous endurance in his expression which indicated that he would go to the stake if need be, but would keep on looking pleasant until he really had to begin squirming.

Based on my own 28 years of experience being married, I nominate shared memories and frequent strong hugs.

My husband has a much better memory than mine, so he’s the one who can refresh me with stories about what happened when our children were born or what what the food was like when we splurged and ate lunch at the Tour d’Argent in Paris in 1981. I do remember the service there being like something out of a fairy tale — invisible hands anticipating every need.

I attach memories to things, which is why I’m sometimes loath to give them up, even when they are worn out. We have a couch we bought together about 30 years ago — after 18 months of searching through D.C. area furniture stores and sitting on a lot of surfaces that one thought were great and the other thought were either ugly or uncomfortable. We agreed on a Flexsteel model with soft, slightly fuzzy, dark russet upholstery. My husband says to this day that the salesperson said the fabric wasn’t suitable for small children, but I have trouble believing I would have agreed to that. I do remember right after it was delivered, when our old really really ugly couch needing a cinder block to support the middle was hauled away and we both had trouble sitting casually on something so new and pristine. We also felt we were so far apart — our old couch was a bit smaller, so we could each nest on one side and easily stretch out a leg to touch the other.

Since then, our couch has absorbed so many family memories. I lay on my left side on it for the last 3 months of my first pregnancy — doctor’s orders. I rested on it with baby daugher and broken ankle (another story!)

Baby and Broken Ankle on couch

I have learned not to attach too much importance to objects. I made my wedding dress myself out of cream-colored wool challis that we found in an enormous fabric warehouse in Alexandria Virginia. It held memories too, for example, of the Thanksgiving when I put in what seemed like miles of hem while watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Wedding dress hem

I have a collection of books that I re-read, like eating comfort food, when I need to spend time around people who are cheerful, brave, persevering, humorous, tolerant, wise — that is, in addition to the time I spend with my husband, children, and real friends.

I’ve been re-reading D. E. Stevenson’s series about Mrs. Tim for the last week or two. Mrs. Tim is an army wife in England from the late 1930’s through the late 1940’s. The first book actually grew out of the author’s diaries that she lent to a friend who wanted to know what life as the spouse of an army officer was like. The friend and her husband found the diaries so interesting and entertaining that they urged her to publish them. She pepped up her first set of diaries to make a book about a fictional character, Hester Christie — married to Captain then Major Tim Christie. The second book was based on her war-time diaries and required almost no pepping up because as she puts it, “there was enough pep already in my diary for half a dozen books.”

The last two books occur after the war when Major Tim was stationed in Egypt and Hester was left to manage alone — her children are both in boarding school except for holidays. In the third book, she works as a general dogsbody in a hotel, where she observes and participates in several stories of life being put back together after the war. In this book, Hester has an interesting discussion with her good friend, Brigadier Tony Morley about immortality. Tony had just finished a long conversation with a minister who had given a good sermon.

“Mr. Weir knew at once that I was really interested and came halfway to meet me. When people go halfway to meet each other something happens — something important.”

“Yes — but what is it?” I ask with interest.

“You give a bit of yourself and receive a bit of the other fellow, and you are both richer. … That’s one reason why it’s worthwhile to be alive,” continues Tony. “It’s a sort of immortality we can all achieve.”

“Immortality?”

“Yes. We all want to achieve immortality. We all want to leave our mark upon the world. What use is it to have lived if we leave nothing behind us when we die. One way to achieve immortality is to have children, another is to write or paint — but not everybody can achieve offspring or works of art.”

“I’m beginning to see.”

“It’s easy,” declares Tony. “if we go about the world giving bits of ourselves to people we meet . . . it’s worthwhile having lived . . . we leave something behind us which goes on–and on.”

I love these books because they are about the ordinary heroism of everyday people, finding ways to get along in their own particular times. Their times included all-out war, but they still squabbled about how to spend the money allocated to the officer wives to run the Christmas party — how much should go for decorations, how much for children’s gifts. Hester is observant and laughs kindly at herself and others.

These books may still be on the shelves of your public library or through Inter-Library Loan, and in a pinch they are available from Amazon.

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, also titled Mrs. Tim Christie,

Mrs. Tim carries on: Leaves from the Diary of an Officer’s Wife in 1940

Mrs.Tim Gets A Job

The discussion of arguments did make me think of one ongoing conflict that the two of them resolved in an absolutely brilliant way.

It happened when we got our first family computer. They both wanted to use it, and had the predictable arguments, “You had it for two hours yesterday…” “Yeah but you had it more over the weekend…” “But I need it more because…” “But that’s what you always say…”

Here’s what they finally worked out between them.

If one was using the computer, the other could come say at any time, “I want to use it in 30 minutes.” That started the clock, and possession turned over at the 30 minute mark. The one giving it up could say, “I want to use it in 30 minutes,” in which case the clock started again.

What made this so effective is that there was no more reference to the past, no accounting for who had used it more, no squabbles about who needed it more. The solution was absolutely simple, in the best interest of both, and they stuck to it.