Eight Years Later & Harvest Moon

Eight years ago today my sister & I saw our last movie together, in town at the Paramount.  We had no idea...she felt well.  Days later she was in Emergency at the hospital, didn't know her own name, but she knew me as her sister when I visited.  Details aside, she knew Mom & me.  Months later my sis died from complications of brain cancer.  I really miss her, especially today.

The Paramount is gone, the travel agency next door to it is gone, where I worked after going back to college for a new career.  Pizza Hut where we went before the movies - gone.  Ruby's for Chinese food - gone. Two local high schools where her children went to school and we went to watch music concerts and sports events - gone.  Not just the buildings repurposed but the entire structures demolished to make way for prime real estate in this city of nonchalant proportions. I wrote a poem years ago "Gone - the whispered word sounds hollow.  Gone, one word, no others follow."

So what does a person do?  I asked my sister, on her deathbed, to give me some signs of where she was in the future, and she has done so.  They're not all beautiful signs in the traditional sense, although a Monarch butterfly suddenly appearing, yellow and black, on my hanging basket of bright flowers is a pretty sign.  Another sign of what I'm supposed to learn on this Earth can be from another direction entirely...but I am being taught every day.  Sister was a teacher of young children in a primary school.

I learned to recognize a black widow spider web a few years ago, a few this season at the resort, some around my place.  The web is not smooth and on one plane, but rather like a multi-level web house of rooms, and around the house or hanging in it, lurks lady black widow, glossy black like a button, shiny black long black legs and the red marking on her underside...which I don't really have to see to know she's a black widow.  A beautiful but deadly guardian of her domain, but I had to kill a few of these dark creatures as they are just too dangerous if a person puts a hand or foot too close, and the venom could kill a small pet...or worse.  It's like the spiders were guardians of my place in the most obscure way possible.

Same with the snakes.  I'm always startled when one, striped brown and yellow, or striped blue, slithers in the garden, making haste to get away from me, their Kermit the frog face looking innocent, almost cute.  They are little helpers, not big, less than a foot long mainly...and they eat the slugs.  No need for some synthetic slug bait.

People disconnect with their food.  I always thought "is this food?" before I put something in my mouth, to eat.  Ever since I was a little kid I thought about these things.   No wonder I don't eat meat.  When I worked in hotel kitchens for years as chef, I kept it hidden.  I couldn't come out of the meat closet, but oh my Lord, we have such a disconnect...I just couldn't do it anymore.  I tried my best to implement modern, ethical menus, even back in the 1980's, when basically California, where I had my culinary training, was the only place in North America to be advanced along these lines of food items, thanks maybe in part to the hippie era originating on the west coast.  Even if I said to myself I was doing my best to pay last respects to the animals sacrificing their lives for the table, the blood ran onto the floors sometimes and it was emotionally difficult to mop it up. But I try to be kind to those people who are with me at restaurants etc, if they want to eat meat I don't make a deal about it...unless they order fois gras or veal, then I can't sit by & say nothing.

What are we supposed to know?  Why are we here?  Why, now, with all the world's information at our fingertips, due to this computer age - why don't we pursue what we should be learning?  I'm tired of the clatter sometimes and nonsense sometimes.  The poor get hungry and try to keep their spirits up...the rich take more and try to keep up with the guy next door.

I really find solace is looking for the truth, and happily I believe I'm on the right track.  I find comfort in star patterns and imagining why the Harvest moon on Friday the 13th and Neptune are in the constellation Phoenix, the myth of a bird rising up from ashes every 500 years.  The myth had to start somewhere...but people don't want to look into it.  The could if they wanted to...but they don't want to get their minds around it.  I do.

https://frostydrew.org/stars.dc/constellation/constellation-64/

Happy Harvest Moon...and look for me.  I am from an ancient family where we had to really use our best instincts and be responsible...but aren't we all?  Some more than others it seems.