Category: Words

  • “Oh, for showers we plead”

    “Oh, for showers we plead”

    Mercy-drops… Do you realize that last month, in less than a week, we got two inches of rain? And the weather cooled, as well. Wasn’t it delightful? The animal world, the plant world and humankind here in Nacogdoches all breathed a sigh of relief. We’ve been having terrible weather of late. Last year we got…

  • The Last Fig Leaf

    The Last Fig Leaf

    The last fig leaf fell from my fig bush this past week, a sure sign that winter and a weather change is upon us. It’s as if the plant world is undressing to clothe itself in the gray nightclothes of winter. With the recent cool, wet weather, I think we can safely say summer is…

  • Hope – Despair not!

    Hope – Despair not!

    Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary of 1747 defines hope as “the expectation of some good; an expectation indulged with pleasure…hope is that pleasure in the mind which everyone finds in himself upon the thought of a profitable future enjoyment of a thing which is apt to delight in.” Gardeners do all they do (and I stress…

  • My husband is a ‘putter-er’

    My husband is a ‘putter-er’

    Jeff is on vacation, so today’s gardening column has been submitted by his wife who he coerces into filling in for him periodically. By Leabeth Abt   My husband is a ‘putter-er’. Now, lest you double check the section of the newspaper you are on (thinking you’ve somehow wandered to the sports page), let me…

  • Merely Words: Deceased Sylvan Giants

    Dead trees. I suppose it is a horrible combination of words, but that is our subject this fine spring morning.  Of course spring is “otherwise”. It is the very essence of life. The world struggles, foments, surges with life this season of the year. Bulbs buried, forgotten in the earth, are not dead. They, by…

  • Inventors of CCD honored with Nobel Prize for Physics  

    Inventors of CCD honored with Nobel Prize for Physics  

    In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology transformed light is into electric signals. The invention changed the world: digital photography was born!

  • Photographers… Trouble Makers?

    A question from “a Photo Industry Blog” http://blog.melchersystem.com/2009/04/15/the-trouble-makers/

  • Words: Sweet Fragrance and Slow Strangulation

    Words: Sweet Fragrance and Slow Strangulation

    Few vines have more romantic connotations than the sweetly fragrant wisteria. Take for example Elizabeth Von Arnim’s novel Enchanted April. The novel begins with two Victorian English ladies who, unbeknownst to each other, read the same advertisement in the London Times: “To those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine. For rent: small medieval, Italian castle on…