MY BROTHER DIED LAST WEEK

My beloved brother died last week.  We were born nearly four years apart and even after both our parents died, Tom stayed close to his Oklahoma roots while I radically pruned, discarded and moved away from that place and sad history.

After adulthood, with two thousand miles separating us, we rarely saw one another but I am grateful for the late-night hours of conversational therapy we had on rare face-to-face visits and that he found Cindy, the perfect foil for his curmudgeonly facade.

Mostly, I am grateful for the computer age that allowed us to continue sharing: reviews of books, movies, music sometimes and always politics! How will I keep up with the insane goings on in Oklahoma without his wry reports? And which books to read next? Whom can I ask “Remember the neighbor down the street who gave us popcorn balls at Halloween? Remember that actor who was in that play we saw that one time when you were visiting? Remember when we rode the train from Montana to Texas and I was 13 and in charge and you were 9 and didn’t listen to me?…” 

“Remember?”  That’s the question I can never ask anybody again because nobody was there besides Tom.

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“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Kindness”

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Spring! Greenery and flowers and sunshine…and elderly men in Washington D.C. making decisions to curtail medical care for women here and abroad. What’s wrong with this picture?

I grimace to think of the options left to women when professional medical care is beyond reach but it’s nothing new. Women since the time of Eve turned to plants for remedies for menstral pain, barenness, abortion.

New Zealand photographer Ann Shelton, after reading extensively about the organic world of female medicine, co-ordinated efforts with ikebana masters who used medicinal plants in beautiful floral arrangements which Ms. Shelton then photographed.  These are lush with color, elegant in every respect and sometimes, as deadly as a direct knife to an unborn embryo.  The exhibition is titled “Jane Says.” I don’t know exactly what the title means.  More research required?  We may need to know more - a lot more!

I am leaving plants unnamed for your own protection.

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Meanwhile, half way around the world in Dallas, Texas, Norm Diamond goes to household sales.  (Doesn’t everybody?) And just like the rest of us sale-goers, he was struck by the intimate objects left for strangers to paw through, consider and take away as their own regardless of the meaning or history embued by the former - and rightful? - owner.

Mr. Diamond began taking photographs (leaving behind the flotsam and only taking away the photographs - there’s a deep moral message here!). The results are in an exhibition and book titled “What Is Left Behind.”

(Again…I consider photography to be a truly democratic art form.)

(Doesn't this picture break your heart?)