Farewell Party

Last weekend, The Texan hosted a farewell party for HomoDommi, FemmeDommi and the children, although the move itself will not officially take place for another two weeks. Fifty of their nearest and dearest friends showed up to wish them the best (you build quite a few friendships after 21 years in a town, 35 years for HomoDommi, and whole lifetimes if you ask the children).

It was potluck, although we had covered the bases, providing grilled meat of many kinds (and veggie burgers, which we forgot about until the next day, but no vegetarians complained), condiments, two salads, two desserts, liquid refreshments, and a couple of appetizers. HomoDommi decorated the back yard splendidly and the weather cooperated by being cool and sunny.

The party went very well -- everybody stayed for as long as they could, departing on schedule according to the age of their children (those with no children stayed very late, which was good, too). There were guests from all aspects of the family's life in Oregon -- law school friends (since the 1980s), soccer friends (since perhaps earlier in the 1980s), graduate school friends (since the 1990s), and more recent friends with children corresponding in age with Boy- and Girl-child (since the 2000s).

The children as it happened were all boys (except for one baby girl). Ten boys, aged 7 - 13. Their entertainment was a protracted watergun fight, unintendedly mimicking the history of war by evolving from face-to-face duels, to semi-organized sides (with snipers), to guerilla ambushes involving buckets of water rather than squirt guns. Girl-Child (whose best friend couldn't make it) bonded with a long-lost boy-friend from babyhood, and then happily played with the rest, dainty enough to avoid even getting damp. When night fell, all of the children were cocooned in blankets and pillows spread across the floor of the studio, and watched a movie (The Triplets of Belleville).

We entirely forgot to take photos. We left up all the decorations, and the photo is from Sunday morning. The paper lanterns gave off a marvelous festive light after dark.

Passion Flowers (Passiflora)

I've talked about our brick patio in the back, and shown how HomoDommi managed to mask the neighbor's ugly decrepit garage with a frame of wood and several climbing plants -- clematis, honeysuckle, mandevilla and passion flower.

The passion flower won, clearly, this year, covering the north lattice and stretching out over the fence along side. The other plants are all still alive and growing, just without the abundance of the passion flower. Over winter, the greenery will die away (not what we intended) and the race will be on again next summer.

I am not familiar with passion flowers -- either they don't survive in the Midwest, or I hadn't noticed them in all the years I was there. Indeed, the flowers (at least, of our genus) are mild and retiring as a whole, against the background of thick dark green trifoliate leaves and curlicue graspers. According to wikipedia, early Spanish Christian missionaries "discovered" the flower (Europe is about the only place on earth where they don't grow natively) and named it for the passion of the Christ: the radial filaments represent his crown of thorns, and the sepals represent the ten apostles, the three stigmata are symbols for the three nails, and the five anthers symbolize Christ's five wounds. These missionaries were true Christ-geeks, for I can't imagine seeing such a horrific, bloody and physical analogy in this delicate and subtly-scented flower.

Apparently in Israel and Japan it is known as variants on clock-flower -- a more literal interpretation given the petals like clock "spokes" and the blossom's life cycle of one day. But that name doesn't capture the unearthliness of the flower -- at least the missionaries sensed something less mundane about the blossoms. To me it looks like something from another planet (just as cleome looks wonderfully alien, too).

Writing this entry, I discovered I have taken over 66 photos of the vine, trying to capture its true essence. I still haven't quite captured it. (These photos were all taken in mid-September. It's done flowering now, except for some late stragglers, blooming to spite the cold and rain of October.)

A Vision and its Outcome

HomoDomi has these visions of the way things could be -- for instance, he thought he could imagine a day when the back garden was not edged by the neighbors' decrepit ugly green garage on one side, and, behind a chain link fence, a compost heap, which stinks in high summer. (Composting is a great ideal, but for small lots in urban areas, the realities can be unpleasant.) So he built a pergola, of sorts (strictly speaking, a pergola would have a "roof", too) -- fencing for vines to grow up over and mask the ugly walls put up by our neighbors.

I cannot find any photos of the truly Before, when the whole northeast corner of the yard was literally a heap of yard waste on bare weed-strewn dirt, half hidden behind a huge old rhododendron. We cleared out the yard waste, and I pruned the rhodie into a more tree-like form, in 2006. In May 2007, HomoDomi installed a brick patio and the twining fence.

Here is the corner as it looked about a month later, with a new brick patio and planted with jasmine, honeysuckle, clematis, mandavilla and passion flower, two plants at the base of each column. We wanted evergreen vines, with all scented flowers, which would bloom at different times of the summer, to mask the compost smell. It turns out only the clematis is truly evergreen, and the passion flower has no scent.

Here is the corner as it looks this morning (above and below, yesterday afternoon). We moved the rhododendron to the front of the house in July (exactly the wrong time of year to transplant a rhodie, I was told later by someone at the nursery, but it's doing fine), and carefully added rich soil and grass to the resultant hole and the dead patch around it. Now we have a large stretch of luxuriant lawn, where not long ago it was broken up by bushes (we moved a rhubarb, too). The globes are solar-lights, which glow nicely for a few hours after sunset, and we have a firepit, which is perfect for making s'mores on a cool night.


Next summer we are going to extend the fence another 10-12 feet, obscuring the neighbor's driveway in addition to the garage. But for now, the original vision has led to a comfortable improvement.