The Peaceable Kingdom

 The morning glories are blooming.  Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago I remember noticing a peculiar weed among my tomatoes and peppers.  It was a peppy little plant, seizing on a railing and twining around and around and around and scaling the top and rolling over and spreading all over and then one day, about this time of year it sprouted its first flower, a purple blue morning glory.

I didn't have my regular complement of finches and pigeons that I now have, but there was the occasional feathered stranger who appeared on my balcony looking lost and I'm guessing the primal seed dropped from one of them.

And Uncle Ken looked upon it and called it good.  It spat out blooms like an AR-15, each one lasting but a day and then became a seed so that by autumn my balcony was littered with them, and it was fine with me when the next year a thousand flowers bloomed.  And every year in The Peaceable Kingdom they came back.

And then one summer, maybe five, ten years ago, I was taking a short cut through an alley and there was a cyclone fence ablaze with pink morning glories.  I returned there in the fall and gathered a handful of seeds and the next year I had pinks as well as purples, and so it has gone, about half purples and half pinks with neither side gaining the upper hand.

It is the pinks that are blooming now.  The purples will come later and last longer into the fall.  

And this year I have also sunflowers, and eggplants, and catnip for the kitty, and tomatillos, who it turns out are garden warriors like the tomatoes and morning glories with fat yellow flowers.  I spotted them on a shelf at Gethsemane Gardens and what the hell.  They are supposed to be good for making sauces, but I don't know, I am not a scientist chef like Old Dog, and I am wondering if I can eat them just as they are, with maybe a little salt.  Well I expect we shall find out down the road.

Anyway, that is what is going on in The Peaceable Kingdom in the summertime.  Peace out.