Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, author and statesman, b. 1829. I don’t know what he wrote or much about him, but what a wonderful name! Could there really have been a baby given such an impossible name? The “sir” probably came later.

Wystan Hugh Auden, poet, b. 1907. (Wystan is a funny name, too. “Wystan, you come here right now!”) I read some of his poetry, and I liked this one best: As I Walked Out One Evening. He says that despite the lover’s song about love that endures forever,

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

I pray that my life will not vaguely leak away. The hope of heaven is a wonderful hope, but time here on earth is precious and short.

Ansel Adams, American photographer, b. 1902. Adams is famous for his many photographs of American landscapes, especially our national parks. He was not succesful in school, so he was homeschooled, or tutored as it was called then, by his father and his aunt. He taught himself to play the piano and to read music, and then took lessons with hopes of becoming a concert pianist. However, he also began taking photographs as a teenager, and eventually photography became his life’s work.

It was supposed to rain this afternoon here in Houston. No rain, however, and no one is disappointed. We can always count on having rain sometime soon, probably more rain than we want. It rains frequently in Houston.
In San Angelo where I grew up, it was a different story. We appreciated rain. Not far from the house where I grew up, there was a huge billboard with this message: “Pray for rain.” There may have been a Scripture reference, too. The one I always heard in church when we were asked to pray for rain was 2 Chronicles 7:14:
.

. . if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Sometimes we had so little rain that water was rationed. You could only water your yard on certain days of the week, and after a while, all the yards started to turn brown in the scorching summer heat. Droughts always seemed to come in the spring or the summer for some reason. A few people had wells, and they put signs in their yards so that no one would think they were cheating with their green grass: “Well Water Used Here.”
So we’d pray for rain, and the city would spend money to hire an airplane to go up and seed the clouds, if there were any clouds. But as often as not, the clouds that San Angelo paid to have seeded would move on to Big Spring or Midland or Abilene and pour down all that rain on one of those undeserving towns instead of raining on our parched lawns. The ranchers would start talking about how they were having to bring in feed for their goats or cattle so they’d have enough to eat. Then we’d have a day of special prayer for rain, or maybe even a week of prayer meetings, asking God for those showers we knew we needed.
And when it did rain, we knew that our prayers had been answered. We knew that we were dependent on the grace of God and His provision, day in and day out. One rain wouldn’t last forever; we’d need God to provide over and over again, every year.
In Houston, we take the rain for granted. It rains all the time. We complain because it rains too much, and it messes up our soccer game or spoils the picnic we had planned. We need the rain here, too, but we don’t know it. God provides in abundance, but we don’t appreciate it.
Maybe everybody ought to live in West Texas for a while. I’ve been in Houston for almost twenty years, but I still love the rain. I like to go walk in the rain and soak it into my skin. I like to watch the rain come down in my backyard and see the drops bounce off puddles and plants. The showers are still a blessing.

Thomas Robert Malthus, b. 1766. “Population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio.” Some still consider this ratio problem to be insoluble, a conundrum of impending doom for humanity; others have come to see an opposing problem.
Anne Manning, English writer, b. 1807. Wikipedia says she wrote a book called The Household of Sir Thomas More, “a delightful picture of More’s home life told in the form of a diary written by his daughter Margaret.” Eldest Daughter, who detests More, should get a copy of this book for April Fool’s Day.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, American author and essayist, b.1879. For children, she wrote Understood Betsy, the story of an orphan girl who lives with her relatives around the turn of the century. You can read it online with illustrations here.
Robert Newton Peck, author of Soup and others in the series, b. 1928. At his website, Peck says that the character Soup was based on his best friend, Lester Wesley Vinson. Soup grew up to become a minister. Peck also says a lot of other things that indicate to me that he’s read and agrees with Malthus. (“Earth, our beautiful planet today has only one problem. Excess human population. This dreaded disease, human pregnancy, is the mother lode which spawns disease, poverty, litter, crime, animal annihilation, and war. Not to mention traffic, or din. Because of this mire of people, which I dub peoplution, our animals are dying.”) It sounds just like the propaganda I heard when I was in high school. Nevertheless, the Soup books are lots of fun.

I’m trying to decide whether or not to plant a garden this year. Right now our backyard is a mess. We have a broken down, but still functional trampoline in the middle of the yard, a lot of shrubs and weeds in the corners, and various and sundry items around the perimeter that we wanted to get out of the house, but someone just coudn’t bear to get rid of completely. There’s very little grass because of the trampoline, and the picnic table I forgot to mention, and because of the building project that finally got finished last fall which made a shambles of what was left of our yard. The building project, a small house/room for my brother-in-law, was erected right on top of my old garden. (Don’t worry; it wasn’t much of a garden, really.) So, in order to have a garden this year, we’d need to start all over again.
First, we’d need to get rid of the weeds. I haven’t ever figured out an easy way to do this. Maybe the problem is that I’ve always been looking for “easy.” Pulling all the weeds out of the clay soil by hand just doesn’t sound like fun, and I’m not very good at it. However, those herbicides don’t really work very well, do they?
I live in Houston, and the soil’s clay, so the next part of gardening is preparing the soil. I have spent a lot of time in past years trying to break up the clay in my garden space and bringing in dirt to mix with it. (I can’t believe I’ve actually paid money to buy dirt, more than once.) I can grow tomatoes if I bring in soil, but if I’m not careful to pick them while they’re still green.the tomatoes literally burn up in the heat, cooked on the vine or they rot from an over-abundance of rain. I get beautiful squash plants–until the squash bugs get them. I have grown some small, but pretty bell peppers, not very sweet. Blackeyed peas will grow wild. As you can see, I’m a vegetable gardening girl. That’s mostly because I like to feel as if I’m doing something productive when I garden, and I can’t usually tell the flower plants from the weeds when they’re first growing. So I end up weeding out all the flowers. (Is there a parable in there somewhere?)
In Phase Two of my past gardens it gets too hot in Houston to garden or to weed the garden. Houston’s hot, by the way. (The city of Houston used that phrase, “Houston’s hot,” as an advertising slogan for a while, but I think they gave it up. It was much too obvious, and I doubt if anyone ever thought past the primary meaning of the word hot to consider having a “hot time in the old town tonight.” It just made me think about sweat.) I have good intentions about getting up early in the morning and weeding and harvesting, but my intentions usually pave the road to garden hell. The garden turns to chaos full of squash bugs, rotting tomatoes, strawberry plants that never produced, blackeyed pea plants running wild, and many, many weeds. Also in there somewhere are all the plants and seeds that the children begged to buy and plant that never grew or got weeded out with the weeds or buried by the weeds that didn’t get weeded out.
Maybe if my past gardening attempts sound pitiful enough to some of you, I’ll get some comments that tell me what I’m doing wrong. Why isn’t it easy? A curse on the ground, you say, what curse? And should I plant a garden or give it up?