National Cupcake Day

Did you know that December 15th is celebrated as National Cupcake Day?  I wonder who makes decisions about food holidays.

      Since we're coming close to the Winter Solstice why not make snowmen cupcakes?

November 22

Saint Cecilia with an Angel

 Orazio Gentileschi,  around 1618 - 1621

Autumn Arrives

"Divinest autumn! who may paint thee best, forever changeful o'er the changeful globe?"

R. H.  Stoddard

(1825 - 1903)

Richard Henry Stoddard, a nineteenth century American critic and poet, originally trained as a blacksmith and later worked as an iron moulder.  In his leisure time he read poetry and he acquainted himself with other men interested in literature.  In 1853 Nathaniel Hawthorne helped him to secure a job as customs inspector for the Port of New York.  He held this job until 1870, making a living and also advancing his literary pursuits.  His poetry is elegant and erudite and his lyric poems, set to music, earned him a reputation as a writer of songs.

A Story in Pictures

Mommy Sparrow Delivers Breakfast

but there's a problem...  "I was expecting muffin crumbs or soft and chewy white bread crumbs and you brought me INSECTS to eat?!!!"

Seen on City Sidewalks

A juvenile House Sparrow or English Sparrow is begging to be fed.  Their chirps are heard all over city streets at this time of year.

Memorial Day and Poppies

Memorial Day was established in 1868 as a day of remembrance honoring those who have died in service to the United States of America.  It was first called Decoration Day for the practice of strewing flowers on the graves of veterans and draping homes and monuments with red, white, and blue.  Originally celebrated on May 30th the date has now been moved to the last Monday in May.

Moina Michaels is credited with creating the idea of wearing red poppies to honor veterans who died in service to their country.  She was inspired by and responded to John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields."  In 1915 she wrote her own poem about poppies.
           
            "We cherish too the poppy red
              That grows on fields where valor led.
              It seems to signal to the skies 
              That blood of heroes never dies."

  

In 1948 the United Post Office honored  Moina Michaels for her role in founding the National Poppy movement.  Today artificial poppies are manufactured by disabled veterans and worn as a symbol of respect and remembrance for our honored war dead.

"Vase with Red Poppies" by Vincent Van Gogh (1866)

"You know how it is with an April day"

In 1936 Robert Frost published his poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time."  Here is stanza  3 of that poem.

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March."

     Robert Frost,  1936

Rosa Bonheur

     Rosa Bonheur was born on March 16, 1822.  Her parents were followers of a movement that favored the education of girls alongside boys.  Her father was a painter and her mother was a piano teacher.  Rosa was taught to paint by her father and by the age of 14 she was making copies of paintings in the Louvre - a traditional way of study for artists over the centuries.  Before setting out on her own path as a painter and sculptor she copied the works of well known artists including Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul  Rubens.

     Today she is regarded as an 'animaliere', an artist whose primary vision is the presentation of animal forms in painting and in sculpture.  Critics of her work complain that she did nothing to expand the boundaries of art and essayists seem more interested in her non-comformist clothing than in her paintings.

    I see in her work a traditional understanding of the shared landscape of animals and humans; she represented animals as she saw them in in the surrounding countryside.  Her work is skillfully executed and shows an understanding of the animals themselves.  Her representation of beauty lives on in the twenty-first century.

                                             Pictured above is her painting "Noonday Rest."

     Rosa Bonheur was the first woman decorated Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
   

Happy Groundhog's Day!

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning and thus predicted six more weeks of winter.  The picture below (courtesy of Wikipedia) is of another groundhog (also called a 'whistle pig'  or a 'woodchuck') in warmer weather. The Latin name is Marmota Monax.

In 1921 Robert Frost published his poem "A Drumlin Woodchuck."

A DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK

One thing has a shelving bank,
Another a rotting plank,
To give it cosier skies
And make up for its lack of size.

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack
As one who shrewdly pretends 
That he and the world are friends.

All we who prefer to live,
Have a little whistle to give,
And flash, at the least alarm 
We dive down under the farm.

We allow some time for guile
And don't come out for a while
Either to eat or drink
We take occasion to think.

And if after the hunt goes past 
And the double-barreled blast 
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because though small
As measured against All,
I have been so insistently thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

Robert Frost  1874 - 1963

Wassailing the Apple Trees

A winter landscape can look bleak and barren but it may contain the promise of plenty in the year to come.

Much has been written (and refuted) about the benefits of talking to your plants, singing to them, and even playing music to promote their healthy growth.  This clearly isn't a new idea, as an old English custom involved singing and toasting the apple tree and other fruit trees on the Eve of Epiphany.  In wassailing the apple trees, workmen went from farm to farm with pitchers of cider.  Following the farmer into the fields and orchards they encircled the trees and sang their toasts to the trees.

"Here's to thee, old apple tree,

Whence thou may'st bud, and whence thou may'st blow!

And whence thou may'st bear apples enow!"

*****

"So well they might bloom, so well they might bear,

That we may have apples and cider this year!"

 A new  field of scientific study is called 'plant neurobiology.'  It seeks answers to questions of plant intelligence.  Are plants capable of their own type of cognition, learning, communication with other plants, memory, response to environmental input, and information processing?  The wassailers would answer with a definitive 'yes.'