The very concept of awards and movies seems alien this year, after a twelvemonth of pandemic restrictions and closed theaters, but the Hollywood Dream Factory grinds on, and though it’s been delayed a month from its normal airing, the 93rd Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, 25 April 2021, starting at 8 PM PDT in Los Angeles. And that means it’s also time for my annual Oscar asteroid prognostication!
I love flowers. Not just the blooms, their whole process of unfoldment. Spring flowering bulbs really embody this, as we watch the first tentative emergence of their leafy tips, often while winter still holds sway, giving way to graceful stems and swelling buds held aloft. Starting off slowly at first, at some point critical mass is reached, and the bud bursts into a full-fledged bloom, sometimes within hours. For many varieties, the transformation continues, as the blossom’s initial hue alters over time, deepening, fading or blushing, requiring a daily viewing if the full effect is to be absorbed. In that way, spring flowers teach us a lesson of paying attention, mindfulness, being present, lest any precious stage in their development escape our notice.
On April 9th, 2021, Buckingham Palace announced the death of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, at their home in Windsor Castle, just two months shy of his 100th birthday. Prince Philip and the Queen were married 73 years, and he was the longest-serving consort in British history. The couple have four children, eight grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, with another on the way, due this summer.
Although, as a pagan, I don’t celebrate Easter per se, Christianity’s secular arm has appropriated so many pagan symbols of the season that if you look around the house, it appears that I do. Even the English name for the holiday itself derives from Eostre, a Teutonic deity, goddess of spring, who could transform herself into a rabbit and was fond of handing out colored birds’ eggs to her devotees. That probably sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
AAA kicks off a new department this month with “Garden Glimpses”, a photographic memoir of life here at what I affectionately term “Pokeberry Farm”, after our most prolific vegetative output (the pokeberry, AKA pokeweed, is a large native plant, sometimes up to 6 feet tall, with spreading branches bearing pendulous, almost grapelike bunches of purple-black fruits; birds prize these, and their droppings proliferate this invasive species all over the yard). Over the past year I’ve chronicled each sabbat, or pagan festival, and have integrated my horticultural adventures within that seasonal framework. But I have only so much to say about pagan holidays, whereas the garden is the gift that keeps on giving, so we’ll be morphing the original “House Diary” column into a more flora-focused one. After all, with asteroid Gardner just a degree off my natal Sun, I’m only an “e” away from being the real thing!
Let’s stipulate up front that I am not Irish! I’m Pennsylvania Dutch through-and-through, all the way back to emigration from the Palatinate in Germany in 1751. But for some odd reason, the very Protestant PA Dutch have embraced St Patrick’s, a day to honor a medieval Catholic saint. At least, that’s how it was in my youth. The “wearing of the green” was de rigueur at school on St Pat’s, and if you were caught not so attired, you were legally subject to all sorts of petty physical reprisals, most typically pinching. I had one green shirt in my wardrobe, which was duly trotted out every March 17th, to avoid falling subject to infraction of the rule.
