Author: Diane Griffin

Diane is a writer of Fantasy, an intermittent blogger, and a generator of nonsense.

Memorial Day Memory

My Grandpa and Grandma Matthews raised peonies for Memorial Day as a cash crop.

They had two one-acre plots that they would plant with peonies in March. They’d harvest at the end of May, cutting the blooms for bouquets, uprooting the plants and wrapping the roots to replant the next year.

Then he would plant his vegetable garden in the same soil — corn, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, beets, summer squash, peppers, etc, which would get et when fresh, but which Grandma would also put up for the winter, in the same cellar where they stored the peony plants.

Such bounty from the earth! Those two plots will always be the configuration of my fondest Memorial Day memories.

Personal Blog #203 Part 11: Sunny Southern Colorado

Why the Mountains Are Always to the West.

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This is me riding shotgun through what was once called The Great American Desert, though it’s really a steppe, the eastern slope of southern Colorado. Much of my childhood was spent in this country, though I have not lived there since my freshman year of high school.

Sage, cactus, and grasses are a threadbare cover to the land I grew up on. The mountains are a grand presence in the west, impressed upon me to the point that any time I encounter mountains, no matter how they are actually oriented, the lizard part of my brain automatically labels the direction of those mountains “West.”

I still have family there, so I still go back. I’m glad that I do, because I love Colorado. I love its clear night skies and summer thunderstorms. I love being in the mountains south of Florence, where my Mother spent part of her childhood, in a dirt floor cabin, going to school in a one-room schoolhouse. My very favorite wildflower in the world grows in meadows around where my mother grew up. It’s called Indian blanket, and its ragged beauty is extravagant.

Indian Blanket

My roots in the Arkansas Valley run deep. My grandparents are buried there in the Fowler Cemetery.

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My brother and mother live there now. Though I haven’t lived there in decades, no place on Earth better deserves the appelation, “home.”

Byzantium, the Lost Empire (National Geographic Special)

Low-res version; Two episodes; 1 hr, 44 min.

This is the two-part National Geographic special about the Byzantine Empire. The first part is a laying of the groundwork, an answer to the challenge of condensing a millenium plus into a forty-five minute television show. Not bad.

The second part is for the Byzantium buff, and is full of little tidbits I’d never heard before. Worth your time, if you like history.

Documentary: Conservation of the Mosaic of the Transfiguration in the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai

This religious icon/mosaic, commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th Century, is one of the few remaining examples of pre-Iconoclast Byzantine art still in existence. I find it breathtaking, even before the restoration. The restoration work documented here makes me happy and proud to be a human.

 

That Went Well

Not only was I not able to keep up a daily schedule, I stopped blogging for a month and a half, with a couple of relapses. It’s more complicated than the above makes it sound, but it’s also true that I had an ADHD moment. (ADHD people often have no conception of time, so sure, a month and a half can be a “moment” from my perspective!)

Part of what I did was turn my attention to the film festival I program for. I needed to commit to that as a project, and I dithered about it, as I am wont to do, because I felt like it was keeping me from my writing, and that my writing was keeping me from doing my job for the film festival as well as I should have.

But I’ve figured out this compromise, and I think it will work. I am going to put all of my creative energy into taking this memoir as close to a complete first draft as I can this spring, and then I will channel that energy into the film festival,

I am about to commit to a project that will make it impractical to blog on anything like a daily basis. I’ve got about 30,000 words of memoir done, I think I need 40,000 more. That’s what I’m going to be concentrating on until the first of July, when Wicked Queer starts up again.

I will try to post a couple of times during the next three months, but most of my writing time this spring will be spent on something you can’t see yet, sorry.