No longer spring, but not quite summer – it’s Sprummer in the garden! Emerging as the last of the spring bulbs are fading, and the first of the summer perennials are starting to bud, Sprummer is that liminal time between seasons, populated florally by a few choice plants with roots in spring and tips in summer.
“Queen of Rock” Tina Turner passed into the celestial firmament on 24 May 2023, to the sorrow of her many fans globally. A literal rags to riches, to rags to riches, American success story, Turner’s music galvanized the 1980s, becoming the soundtrack to our lives, and her personal saga of rejection of a life with an abusive spouse gave hope to millions of women. Already on her way to becoming a music icon by the early ‘60s, Turner’s career slumped after her separation from Ike, but an amazing comeback in the mid-‘80s inspired all performers of a certain age.
A number of moments, before and during the coronation of Charles III, deserve special mention and analysis. Here, then, is my personal journal of the events surrounding the occasion, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Climate change continues apace, and this has been one of the oddest springs in my experience. After a ridiculously warm early winter and the earliest recorded blossoms in my garden, Mother Nature seems to have taken a step back, realized how overextended she was, and called a halt to the whole thing. Weeks of below normal cold punctuated with hot stretches that flirted with the mid-80s created a “two steps forward, one step back” mentality in the garden, with nothing blooming in season, and unique bouquets of cut flowers that would normally never blossom together. Drought vied with torrential downpours, and a late freeze crushed the star magnolia blooms at their peak.
At 11:24 AM EDT on March 21, 2023, in Nazareth, PA, my dear girl Ashes passed peacefully into eternity. We had been together 15 years, with never a cross word between us, a wonderfully close and affectionate relationship. I brought Ashes in off the West Philly streets in 2007, along with two of her kittens, one of the first beneficiaries of Leo’s Cat Rescue, which I ran with my friend John Mignone for over ten years.
The 95th Academy Awards are now history, and it was a night of firsts and record-setting nominations. Angela Bassett was the first actor to be nominated for work in a film from the Marvel Comics franchise (for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), and sixteen of the twenty nominees in the acting awards were up for the accolade for the first time. Michelle Yeoh became the first performer of Asian descent to win Best Actress, Ke Huy Quan became the second to win Best Supporting Actor, after a gap of nearly forty years, and Daniel Kwan won for Best Director (all for “Everything Everywhere All At Once”). Composer and conductor John Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever, at age 91, though he failed to take home the gold statuette.
