#chrysanthemum Sheffield

[mmwm]

NOVEMBER BLOOM DAY

[ollieofthebeholder]

to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 97: February 1996

Red banners hang from every building and street pole, cheerful gold characters shouting their message to the skies. Lanterns are strung across the streets, their tassels fluttering, with kites hanging in between. The smell of good food fills the air. Children are laughing, people are cheering, and it’s overall a wonderful time.

And Melanie is miserable. Or at the very least she wants to    be. She wants to scream at everyone to stop celebrating, to make the laughter turn to sobs, to turn the cheering into silence, to change the red to black or even white, to make all the flowers into chrysanthemums. It’s not fair that the celebration should still be going on.

Normally this is her favorite time of year. It means two whole weeks—sometimes three—that she gets to spend with Gunggung and Popo, and all her aunties and cousins, a big family reunion with lots of good food and laughter. It also means excitement and joy and fun. It means red envelopes full of money and firecrackers    and riddle lanterns, and it means spring is coming soon. She likes the music and the dancing, the games and the parades, and she likes getting an extra birthday, even if she does have to share it with everyone else—not just in her family, in the whole wide world.

This year, though, she wants it to stop.

It’s a big crowd, but that’s not why she feels lost; she’s alone, but she’s not lonely. Still, there’s a cold spot next to her no matter where she goes, and she keeps squeezing her hand reflexively, wishing for the soft but strong fingers that always hold hers when the dragon comes by. It’s not really a New Year festival without her mama.

She begged hard, so hard, for the doctors to let her mama out for the festival, at least for one day. The hospital is so far away from this part of town, she can’t even see it from her window—surely they can let her have one teeny little day that she can get out of bed? But the doctors said no, and her dad explained that her mama is very sick and being out of hospital might actually kill her, and her mama smiled and touched her hand and told her she would see the lanterns. That’s not for two whole weeks, though, and Melanie doesn’t want to wait that long.

This isn’t even home, not like they usually go home. Popo and Gunggung are here, and Jima Ellen and Uncle Ben, and everybody else is coming this weekend for Renri, but it’s not Sheffield, it’s London. Her dad says she needs to be in school for right now, and since her mama can’t leave her bed, it’s obviously better not to go away without her, because Melanie won’t do that. But it’s not the same and she probably wouldn’t like it even if they were up north.

Jima Ellen is taking a turn visiting her mama now—grown-ups can stay after hours—but she brought Melanie here first; it’s a community, after all, so Melanie will be perfectly safe, she declares. Gunggung was just opening the Mahjong set when they left, and Melanie knows Jima Ellen wants her out of the flat before Gunggung starts using the words he’s not supposed to use around the cousins and demanding to know how he’s being beaten so badly by a pair of sai yan, which he does every time they play because her dad and Uncle Ben are very, very good at Mahjong because it isn’t that different from Rummy. Melanie is learning, too, and she’s hoping her mama will be well enough that they can play with her dad and maybe Jima Ellen tomorrow after school, but for now she’ll let the grown-ups play. So instead she wanders along the streets and looks at the festivities.

She’s trying. She cleaned the house all by herself yesterday, or tried to until Popo picked up the broom to help her, and she said all the right things. She wrapped all her pennies in red paper and tucked them under her mama’s pillow yesterday morning to ensure health and good luck. She even let Popo do her hair, which hangs almost to her butt, and wore the new red hanfu Jiji Ellen made for her to school even though she tries not to be too Chinese when she’s there (she’s only half, and she has her dad’s eyes instead of her mama’s so she doesn’t really look it, but the people who bully Sze bully her too and she’s not supposed to get in fights at school anymore). She wanted to stop and show it to her mama, but school starts before visiting hours and her dad said she was sleeping when Melanie tried to visit after, so she’ll have to wear it later. Maybe she’ll wear it when she and her mama go to see the lanterns.

There aren’t a lot of people wearing traditional dress, although everybody is wearing their very best clothes. She sees Sze with his family, all of them smiling and happy; he waves to her and she waves back, but then he laughs at something his mama says and she has to hurry away so she doesn’t get angry. It’s not his fault his mama is here and hers isn’t, but it’s still unfair.

Nobody is telling her what’s wrong with her mama, why she’s so sick. She’s heard the word cancer a few times, but that can’t be it, because that’s a very bad thing and people die from cancer and her mama’s not going to die, she isn’t. Anyway, they can cut cancer out of people and that fixes it, but nobody’s even talked about cutting anything out of her mama, so she can’t have cancer or they’d be trying to fix it. Surely they would do everything they could to fix her. Surely they won’t just let her die.

It doesn’t occur to Melanie that there might be other kinds of cancer, kinds that aren’t easy to cut out—like in the blood—or that her mama might be too sick for it to work, because she doesn’t want to even think about the possibility that her mama could die. It also doesn’t occur to her that there are worse things than cancer.

She walks, and she gets more and more upset as she does. Everything is wrong. The people around her are talking the wrong kind of Chinese, the words just different enough to be difficult or impossible to understand, and there are people talking in English just a little too loud like they think the people around them can’t understand it even though most of them were probably born or at least raised right here in London. The streets don’t turn and bend the way they do in the Sheffield area, and the buildings look different under the banners. The fu characters are all upside down, too, and that’s wrong because it’s pouring all the good luck out and it’s going to make bad things happen. On an impulse, she stops and reaches up to try and turn one right side up, but she’s too short and she can’t reach.

She wants to cry. She wants to scream. She wants to blow up like a firecracker. She wants to be one of the drummers in the dances so she can hit something and not get in trouble for it. She wants to know who, what, is responsible for her mama being sick so she can fight it and make it stop and let her mama get well again. Why can’t it be something like the nian or the sui, something that touches people and hurts or make them sick, something she can actually go after for real?

As the thought crosses her mind, the drums and gongs start up, getting louder and louder. The lion dance must be starting, and Melanie definitely doesn’t want to miss that. She turns towards the sound of the drums, picks up the hem of her hanfu, and runs. At least, she starts out running; the crowd gets thicker and thicker, and soon she’s having to squirm and elbow her way through so she can get to the front. She has to be able to see.

She squeezes between two people and unexpectedly pops into an open space. She’s stood just in front of the crowd now, just off the curb, in front of a big open space, and sure enough, here come the dancers. They’re all banging their drums and clanging the gongs, clashing the cymbals and skipping around, and prancing towards them—

It’s not just one lion, Melanie thinks with a sudden thrill, and she wishes again her mama was there, both to see and so she could squeeze her hand very tight, because as much as Melanie loves these dances the lions are very big and can be very scary, and this is the first time she’s seen more than one at the same time. In the lead is Lau Pei, the eldest, the first emperor of the Shu-Han kingdom, striding masterfully and scanning the crowd; beside him, and a little behind, is Kwan Kung, the Duke with the Beautiful Beard, stretching lazily and shaking his head. The crowd murmurs in surprise and delight, and Melanie wonders if they’ve ever seen two lion before either.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion and a cry, and from the other direction come three musicians. One is banging very fast on his drum, not in rhythm; the second is clashing his cymbals; the third frantically clangs the gong. Melanie’s blood sings, and she wonders what’s going on, why they aren’t playing the song, why they’re—

The man with the cymbals is shouting, yelling for everyone to beware, be careful, to run, but nobody seems to be looking at him or listening. They’re all laughing and clapping for Lau Pei and Kwan Kung, and the musicians that came with them are still playing like everything is normal. They don’t even seem to notice the men running towards them. Lau Pei turns his head, though, and looks where the runners came from, so Melanie looks too, just in time to see a third lion appear on the scene.

At first she thinks—or maybe assumes—it’s the third brother, Cheung Fei, the Fighting Lion, but she quickly realizes that isn’t right. His face is black, but his body is white—white like a funeral—and his feet are stained like he’s run through paint…or maybe blood. More blood drips from his jaws, and they open and close, the great red eyes rolling as they look around. This isn’t a lion Melanie has ever seen before, ever, and she wonders where it comes from and why it’s here…and if the other dancers knew this one was coming.

The man with the gong trips and falls to the ground with an almighty crash. The new lion roars—actually roars—and sprints forward. It’s going to attack the man on the ground, and this is a really weird way of doing the dance…

This isn’t a dance, a voice says in the back of her mind, full of horror and fear. Melanie tenses all over as she realizes it’s true. This isn’t…right. It’s not any story she’s ever heard. It’s—

It’s real.

The man with the drum is suddenly in front of her, and he falls to his knees. For the first time, Melanie realizes he’s hurt, he’s bleeding—the blood on the new lion’s paws are this man’s, it’s torn his back all to pieces, and he can’t move anymore. Gasping and panting, shaking with the effort, the man holds up what he’s been using to beat the drum.

It’s not a stick. It’s a knife.

There’s a scream from the man with the gong, abruptly cut short, as the lion rips out his throat. Blood sprays everywhere, and still nobody seems to notice but Melanie…well, and Kwan Kung, who shakes his head and nudges his older brother. Lau Pei dips his head, stretching like a cat, then straightens and roars, too, and the new lion roars a challenge back.

The musicians play on, seemingly oblivious that the dance has changed, going over the same steps as always, but Lau Pei and Kwan Kung are ignoring it. Lau Pei stands calm and steady in front of the challenger, which is gearing up to attack, and it can’t do that, Lau Pei is the emperor, he can’t be defeated…

But Lau Pei isn’t the fighter, he’s the old and wise brother, the one with sense. Surely he can fight…but what if he can’t?

Lau Pei dips his front end again, either submitting or getting out of the way, Melanie isn’t sure. And then he speaks, which never happens, but which Melanie isn’t surprised by because of course he can. In a voice very like Gonggong’s but much, much older and more fragile, he cries, “Help me, Little Moth!”

Nobody knows that’s what she’s called. Nobody except her mama and her dad. Even Popo and Gunggung don’t know. Melanie is the only one of her cousins who didn’t get a Chinese name too because she’s the only one who doesn’t have a Chinese last name—only Jima Ellen married someone who wasn’t Chinese and they don’t have any kids—so her mama secretly gave her a name, Sai Ngo, Little Moth. Her dad calls her that in English sometimes, since he still can’t speak Cantonese very well. But they never do it where anyone else can hear, so if Lau Pei knows it—well, of course Lau Pei knows it, he’s the emperor, he knows everything.

But he’s asking her to help. And she knows what to do.

It’s bad luck to give knives on the first day of the new year. She takes the knife anyway, and the man falls dead at her feet.

The music is still playing, and even if the lions aren’t dancing, Melanie does. The music seems to become part of her, to travel into her feet, her spine, her whole body, as she dances forward and puts herself between Lau Pei and the new lion. The lion seems to laugh at her, shaking his head from side to side, and then leaps towards her, lunging for her throat. Melanie dances out of the way and slashes at the lion with her new knife. She misses, or at least she thinks she does, but the lion roars and she sees blood on its shoulder and she knows she got a little of it, anyway.

The sight of the blood, and the knowledge that she put it there, fills her with strength and confidence. And the sight of the lion still laughing at her, still thinking she’s as nothing, that she can’t stop him, fills her with anger. She can stop him, and she will.

“Nei dim chingfu a?” she shouts at the lion. What is your name?

The lion laughs scornfully at her, rearing up on his hind legs, and there’s supposed to be a performer, but there isn’t and that’s not right.

“Ngo hai Ngaam Sei Mong,” he sneers. His voice is like fingernails on a blackboard. Melanie shudders at the name he gives her: Ngaam Sei Mong, Cancer Death. It’s like he knows, and that just makes her angrier.

He comes at her again, teeth wide. Melanie dodges, moves with the music, and the great teeth of the lion snap where her head was a moment ago. It bites her hair, bites through her hair, and it falls in a jagged bob around her face, and she realizes that this lion cut her hair, the hair that is her mama’s pride and delight, the hair that Popo took such care of, the hair that she has never, ever cut in her whole life.

She screams, not in fear but in rage. How dare he? How dare he take a moment that should be happy and turn it into one of fear, how dare he attack a festival, but most importantly, how dare he take something of hers that she didn’t tell him he could have?

The drums and cymbals and gongs get louder and faster and more frantic, and Melanie takes it and uses it, dances with the music, whirls on her heel, ducks under the lion’s mouth, and, still screaming, buries the knife deep in its heart.

Blood and black ichor gush from its heart, and the lion roars and screams, throwing its head back, its whole body back. The movement is so sharp and severe that it wrenches the knife from Melanie’s hand, and she stumbles back, hair tickling her chin, breathing heavily. Her hands are stained, deep, deep red like the hanfu, but at least the blood doesn’t show on her dress, at least…

A hand grabs her and pulls her hard, and she stumbles and jerks her arm free and whirls around to find herself face to face with Sze, who looks wide-eyed and also worried. Nobody else seems to be looking at them. Everyone else is watching the lion dance, which…

…is still going on like nothing happened?

Melanie balls up her hands into fists and scowls at Sze. “What?” she demands.

Sze shakes his head, still looking worried. Loudly, he says, “You almost got stepped on.”

He tugs her arm again, and Melanie wants to hit him, but she follows him anyway to an alley a little way away.

“What?” she asks again, still angry but less loud.

“I saw,” Sze says in a half whisper. “I saw the lion, the bad lion, and I saw you stop it, and then it all went away. You saved us all. You’re the hero…but you took a knife. That’s bad luck.”

Melanie stares at him, then turns back towards the street. Everyone claps and cheers as Lau Pei and Kwan Kung dance between the musicians, the steps just the same as Melanie has always seen them, and they’re…costumes. They’re just costumes with performers inside. There’s no blood. No dead bodies. No third lion. Everything is normal. She could almost believe she imagined it.

But Sze saw it too.

Turning back to him, she tilts her chin up defiantly, and there’s more evidence that it was real. Her hair still hangs, rough-cut and free, between her chin and her shoulder.

If no one else believes us, she thinks, looking at her classmate, at least we know the truth.

Out loud, she says, “Dying is bad luck, too. At least we’re alive. And I won’t ever let something like that hurt anyone ever again.”

“Melanie!” Jima Ellen’s voice calls from somewhere in the crowd. “Melanie, it’s time to go!”

Melanie starts to leave, but Sze grabs her arm again before she can. She jerks it away harder this time. “What?”

“Be careful.” Sze’s voice is serious, and at the same time, he suddenly sounds much, much older than eight. “Remember, it wants to hurt you, too.”

Melanie stares at him. Sze only turns away and disappears back into the crowd, heading towards his parents and the lion dance. For a moment, Melanie considers following him, but then Jima Ellen calls her again and she turns to leave. There will be time to ask him about it the next time she sees him. For now, she just wants to go home.

She’s suddenly very, very tired.

[clairehoneybee]

Garden Mums for a Last Blast of Color

Garden Mums for a Last Blast of Color

Garden mums should be in every garden for that last blast of color before the first freeze withers everything.  One of the last plants to bloom before frost, I savor the blowsy colorful flowers that come in a range of reds, oranges, and pinks. Attracting many pollinators as they are the few things that are still blooming, I always expect the bees and butterflies to cover them. Florist Mum Forget…

[horsfields]

Looking to change your summer bedding?

Hardy Chrysanthemums look fab in pots and baskets. They give great colour to Autumn.

We also have lots of six pack bedding too

Pansy

Viola

Trailing

Pansy

Bellis

Dianthus

Hardy Chrysanthemums

Forget me Knot

Cineraria

Wallflowers

All our hardy for planting now.

We’re here to help with garden and planting advise, just ask.

We are open seven days a week 10am - 4pm

Horsfields Nursery Tel:- 01226 790441

Info@horsfieldsnursery.co.uk

Horsfields Nursery

Pot House Hamlet

Silkstone

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S75 4JU

Like to keep in the loop & receive helpful hints & tips on gardening?

Click the link to sign up to our news letter

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Beautiful plants in a beautiful place

#plantnursery

#pothousehamlet

#horsfieldsnursery

#horsfields

#shoplocal

#shopsmallbusiness

#silkstone

#gardencentrebarnsley

#gardencentrepenistone

#gardentips

#gardencentrenearme

#gardencentresnearme

#denbydale

#upperdenby

#stocksbridge

#gunthwaite

#autumnbedding

#beddingplants

#chrysanthemum

www.horsfieldsnursery.co.uk

[wdcgardener]

Sheffield Pink mums are my favorite of all the chrysanthemums - and looks like the tiny pollinators love them too. #gardendc #mums #perennials #sheffieldpink #fallflowers #gardendc picoftheday #nofilter (at Washington D.C.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkODhyNu529/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[stephensheffield]

A lone Sheffield Chrysanthemum. . .. ... #bwphotography #blackandwhiteart #blackandwhite_perfection #flair_bw #bnw_captures #bnw_life #bnw_planet #bnwmood #bw #bandwart #bandw #bnw ‪#PhotoRTG‬ (at Cohasset, Massachusetts) https://www.instagram.com/stephensheffield/p/BqFUmmmAmjm/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=rfibndm3xi03

[sensitivefern]

[The] lemon is a cross or hybrid of the citron. That fruit, which resembles a large lemon with rough skin and has a weak lemon flavor, originated on the Arabian peninsula and was brought to Persia, where the Romans first encountered them in about 500 BC... After the citron reached China around the fourth century AD, a freak variety developed in which the fruit separated into five lobes that resemble the fingers of a hand. In China, it was considered a symbol of happiness and eventually earned the name ‘Buddha’s hand’. The Jews cultivated this unique variety intensively for their religious festivals...

[Lemons: Growing, Cooking, Crafting]

===

BALTIMORE, JANUARY 9, 1946. In Baltimore, at the moment, there is not a single decent beer-house. The last was Schellhase’s in Howard street, which still survives as a restaurant but began to close at 8 PM when the war razzle-dazzle began... His place, both before and immediately after Repeal, was a very pleasant place, and I went there many an evening at 10 o'clock and sat until midnight. He served the best beer obtainable, both imported and domestic, and offered very good light lunches at moderate prices. But now he has only the Anheuser-Busch beers on tap. Budweiser I can’t drink, for it is so hoppy that it gives me heartburn, and Michelob sells at 25 cents a seidel. Whether or not he will ever have German beer again remains to be seen; probably not, for most of the German and Bohemian breweries seem to have been destroyed in the war, and the imbeciles at Washington may be trusted to lay prohibitive duties on the beer of those that survive.

[H.L. Mencken]

===

Live like a bourgeois, and think like a demigod.

There are two kinds of literature: one that I would call ‘national’ (the better of the two), and the other, ‘individual’ – works produced by gifted writers. For the first to be realized, there must be a fund of opinions shared by the mass of the people, a common bond such as does not now exist; and for the full development of the second, there must be liberty.

[Flaubert]

===

Bin Ladin reportedly discussed the planes operation with KSM and Atef in a series of meetings in the spring of 1999... Bin Laden considered the basic idea feasible. Bin Ladin, Atef, and KSM developed an initial list of targets... No one else was involved in the initial selection of targets.

Bin Ladin also soon selected four individuals to serve as suicide operatives...

[The 9/11 Report]

===

spider plant, mother of thousands | Chlorophytum ‘My rallying cry for using houseplants as container plants outdoors can easily be made here. Here’s a genus of classic houseplants that perform superbly outdoors’... the ‘spiders’ can be seen on the elongated inflorescences – ‘everyone takes delight in the baby spiders that hang from the mother’... spidie may be cut off and pinned down in a potting medium in a pot; keep it moist and exposed to bright light, but not direct sunlight... Chlorophytum amaniense ‘Fireflash’ simply ‘holds me spellbound every time I see it’ – looks like a spider with orange legs... Chlorophytum comosum is all green...

Chrysanthemum Out of all the thousands of varieties, the first choice for a container should be Chrysanthemum ‘Sheffield Pink’ (= ‘Single Apricot’, ‘Sheffield’)... ‘You might also find and like “Sheffield White” and “Sheffield Yellow” (which might arise as sports on your Sheffield; try rooting the sported shoots, but keep your fingers crossed)’... Also: ‘Cambodian Queen’, ‘Clara Curtis’, ‘Duchess of Edinburgh’, ‘Emperor of China’, ‘Mary Stoker’, and ‘Mei-Kyo’... ‘Cultural tips: one pinch early in the season can’t hurt. i feel that staking these robs them of much of their charm’...

[Encyclopedia of Container Plants]

===

Aug 21 [1853]. 6 AM – To Island by boat. Aster macrophyllus. Appear not to blossom generally this year. [...] That which I had mistaken for Mentha Canadensis at Mrs. Hosmer’s brook is apparently M. piperita, or peppermint, naturalized. It may have been in bloom a fortnight... What I take to be Aster patens is a handsome light-blue aster, not abundant on the hillside by J. Hosmer’s pines. The choke-cherries, which are now, and have been for some time, as ripe as they will be, actually fur the mouth... They are a rich, fatty-looking fruit.

[Thoreau, Journal]

===

western dwarf mistletoe | Arceuthobium ‘Unlike common mistletoe, which is spread only by birds, it has an “explosive” seed, which is shot out of its casing as far as 50 feet’... dwarf mistletoes have been found as far east as Connecticut...

===

❚Harry Shearer What ever happened to creepy clown sightings?

Ringling Bros. circus to end 'Greatest Show on Earth' after 146 years

Fragile Internet Racists In Turmoil Over Black Lady Liberty Coin

How the World’s Oldest Computer Worked: Reconstructing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism

[tattooart247]

Freehand Chrysanthemum by Brad Leander at Vaudeville Tattoo and Piercing, Sheffield, UK

[aileenmcgraw]

9.24.2017: PLEASURE

Ring around the rose 

Obsessions are easy.

 Obsessions are crippling.

 They’re the thing, the beat, the craze to focus on in the most stressed, sustainable way.

 Obsessions are an almost-circle. I began my almost-circle with flowers. Flowers are easy because they are objectively beautiful. If I’ve read it once in The Botany of Desire I’ve said it an annoying number of times:

 “Psychiatrists consider a patient’s indifference to flowers to be a sign of clinical depression.”

 I am anything but indifferent to flowers. I wear them, Instagram them, poorly doodle them, sleep on duvets adorned with them, hold onto old shower curtains printed with them, buy an on-sale, two-sizes-too-big trench coat embroidered with them, etc. I just don’t buy the actual, living them – that takes too much time, care, attention.

 But then I pay some—attention, that is. There seems as much research as there are lived experiences of women being flowers. From purity to desire, from innocence to fertility in full bloom, if you take a (far too) simple idea of womanhood, you can map a flower to it all, every part of her. Me.

 When I was in middle school I had a notebook full of my flower drawings. Fine, they were binders full of fashion designs, but nearly every wedding dress and pair of jeans I drew had painstaking pen-and-ink flowers (mostly peonies) on them. Now whenever I draw roses I find myself scribbling down a rabbit hole, ink turning deeper and deeper inwards until petals fold into dark circles, and finally they stop. I can’t keep drawing after the center point. I reach a singularity. A seed, or an end? When writing about flowers, I get distracted (they’re gorgeous, after all, so I get lost in my mind). And so I keep talking about them – the what – and not my why.

 And so I return to a quote from that book by that dude (The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan):

 “It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”

 That’s exactly it. I look at flowers, I love flowers, because they give me easy access to the garden. I can stave off nature, almost. Let’s take my outfit for example. I wear that wisteria, daisy, rose, what-have-you dress and without saying a word or thinking a thought I say and think and know: I am fertile; I am blooming; I am beautiful. Only recently have I realized this acts as visual code for something else: I am sexual. I desire. I love. I fuck. I am a fucking flower, spreading my everything, everywhere. And if that means nothing, it’s because I’m still doodling that rose, focusing on the linework instead of the life itself.

 A flower is easy because it does not feel pleasure. Oh, it gives it, though. It’s like basil in its sensory perfection: looks amazing, smells amazing, feels amazing, tastes amazing (and here I’m extrapolating to honey), sounds amazing (say it with me: chrysanthemum). The Guardian has an intriguing query thread about whether or not plants can “ow!” or “oooh,” and suffice it to say flowers cannot feel. They can respond – grow towards sun, close over a fly – though only to stimuli. Pain? No such luck. Pleasure? Nope. One commenter – Susan Deal from Sheffield, UK – captures the so what? in a single sentence:

 “It is also hard to see what purpose pain could serve for the plant, since they can hardly run away.”

 Damn, Susan. You get my conundrum. Equate pain and pleasure, and you’ll see I’m in love with, obsessed with a metaphor for me that cannot run, feel, do. It’s that classic gender studies quote that I thought was from Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project until I Googled it to no results:

 “Women don’t act; they appear.”

 Imagine a flower reaching full bloom, opening her bold petals in brilliant fashion, and then turning to you and saying, “I like that.” Or, “I want you.” Or, “More.” You want to ascribe human tendencies to her now, though they’re words less like gorgeous and more like selfish, extra, hungry. And suddenly Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” is stuck in your head.

 And so, as Susan so aptly shows, I want it all and I want the impossible. To be delicate. To desire. To feel, and to run to and from pain and pleasure. To be an ornament and to orgasm.

 Obsessions are easy.

 Obsessions are crippling.

 My obsession is an almost-circle. It starts with the flower, goes up and around just how close to womanhood it gets, and then resists a full embrace because I am and want and want to give more than something pretty. I am and want and want to give pleasure.

 In fact, by now I’m feeling rather Georgia O’Keeffe, the famous flower painter. As she once fiercely said: “I hate flowers.”

[wdcgardener]

The ‘Sheffield Pink’ mums are my favorite of the daisy-like chrysanthemums. #gardendc #flowerreport #mums #fall #picoftheday #nofilter #autumn #flowers (at Silver Spring, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGhwgqFAh09/?igshid=1l9zqkh1y2cd5

[wdcgardener]

Mums 'Sheffield Pink' in a local #garden #gardendc #fall #flowers #autumn #chrysanthemum #mum #picoftheday #nofilter #instagarden #sheffieldpink #instaflower