Happy Halloween

I hope it’s dry in your neck of the woods, for the kids will be on the streets tonight with costumes and baskets in hand hoping for that mother lode of candy. It’s looking like pouring rain and low 40’s here, so not a pleasant fall evening for the festivities. We really don’t ever get trick or treaters here at illahe, the rural setting makes it less than ideal for filling those big bags as quickly as possible.

So I celebrate the autumnal ritual with a few friends and the carving of art into those winter squashes we call pumpkins. The Cucurbito pepo ssp. pepo makes for a rotund canvas in the creative hands of a skilled knife wielder. This wonderful fruit of the Pumpkin vine has a rich history, the seeds of it showing up in the archeological record of indigenous cave dwelling societies in what is today Northern Mexico and Texas, some 8,000-10,000 years ago. I wonder if those buckskin clad humans of the bygone era took the flint-edged obsidian to the fruit and if they perhaps threw an ember from the fire to watch the glow on a fall evening in the fading light?

The results of the 2024 Illahe pumpking carve off

A few flowers remain in the garden showing the true grit to the shrug off the variability of this season, In the rock garden, the Bidens ferulifolia, aka the Apache beggerticks, another plant that may have adorned those cave systems of the early cultivators of the pumpkin, seems to hit it’s full stride with the fall rains and the autumn damp. From the same Northern Mexico to Texas region as our cultivated pumpkins, this is one great choice for adding late season color to your rock garden.

An annual, but one I have long heralded as a great addition for any rock garden, Bidens ferulifolia reseeds itself, each year to grow with little to no care or notice and then pop into bloom just as the rest of the garden is saying it’s farewell for the season. 

So a Happy Halloween, Dias de los muertos, All Hallows day, Hallowmas, Samhain, Calan Gaeaf, Guy Fawkes Day, or whatever you celebrate this time of year.

Political opinion stitch incoming:

I got my ballot into the drop box this week, I support our system here in Oregon where we can sit in the comfort of our own home and read about the issues and the candidates, and do research to make our own educated decisions about who we want representing us in this current affair of mayhem and disorder we call a political system. I can post it in the mailbox, or just drop it in the county drop box at the local grocery store on my daily errands. I recognize that I’m free to make these accusations against tyranny and oppression from the safety of my home, and that some people will have to fight through long lines, and potential acts of dissuasion and potentially violence to take part in the freedom of choice we call voting. If the candidate on the right wins, he promised that it’s the last time any of us will have to vote, and that significance is not lost on me. I was born in West Germany at a time when there was still an East, my parents were zealots fighting for religious freedom in the Soviet Bloc during the apex of the Cold War. I learned pretty early on what oppression and tyranny really look like, when a government has absolute authority over its publica. As communism dismantled and Russia withdrew to it’s native homeland, they handed out the contracts of Oligarchy, to create a monolithic type control state, where power, privilege and most importantly money is shared by only a few.

The Billionaire egotist Elon Musk, is paying people to vote in his favor, because he has said, along with Trump they will wreck the US economy in order to rebuild the same Oligarchical monolithic state that Russia has, and the poor working class will forever live in servitude to them but now without the power to vote for change, without fair housing regulations, without social security or medicare, without legal representations. This has been tried in the past, many times through history, and eventually the poor rise up, and crumble the system of oppression and start the cycle again. Trump supporters have said that he will just claim victory no matter what the outcome of the voting populous and in that coup a dictator could be borne in the land of the free, the potential for conflict at the most civil of wars again is on the brink and all while the world sits on the verge of the third version of death and mayhem at the global scale. Only a few a mere days to savor what is left of freedom and social order, or hope for the changing of the winds of hate to those of hope and peace. I’m left to consider this passage from that tale of democratic values in contrast to the superstitious ineptitude of a feudal monarchy to which we may be heading…….no pun intended with the be-heading.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court.