Tulips in California-the winters are not cold enough. But the obsessive among us, the true lover of flowers, of garden, earth, and growth persists. Women mostly, women like my mother, know that tulips will not bloom unless they have six weeks of cold, yet they persist. My mother simulates the growing conditions: she places the tulip bulbs in a special drawer in the refrigerator. A drawer empty but for tulip bulbs, resting, maturing for six weeks long. During these six weeks, my father is periodically chastised for placing softening apples in the refrigerator so they will not rot on the kitchen counter. Chemicals released by apples stunt the maturation of tulip bulbs and prevent blooming.
"How many times do I have to tell you? The bulbs will not bloom with apples!" my mother screams at my father, when she discovers a bag of apples in the adjoining drawer. He knows this-he has watched the thwarted growth of her tulips time and time again. He refuses to waste good fruit, and he will sacrifice a year of tuliping for the sake of saving.
And my mother goes to the nursery and buys another bag full of bulbs. "I have to be on constant look out for those goddamn apples," she says to me over dinner. It amazes and befuddles me, that my mother, who does all the grocery shopping, who chooses all of the fruit, buys apples and only apples, apples in great numbers and different sizes. It is a war they play over and back to each other-wasting money by saving money, wasting fruit by saving tulips, buying more apples to replace the lost fruit, wasting tulips to save the fruit. And so the battle goes-sacrificing to save and saving to sacrifice.
It is like this with everything, with everything with my parents. They love each other very much. They are furious in their love-it is an uncontrollable, full-blown process, like the blooming flower, one I will never fully understand. My father goes into fits of depression; he furls his brow, he turns inward, and goes crazy over things like overflowing garbage cans, unfolded laundry, shoes left in the center of the living room floor. His head shakes and his eyes muddy-you can see the pressure and smell the mood. Then he explodes.
She stands there and watches him, my father burning like a branch, with her finger pressed to her temple.
Morgan played on Danny, was, they gave gave him a bud in the beginning. That day, he told his plant a joke and watered it. The next day, his plant had branched out! He did the exact same thing thing he had done the day before. Watered it and told it a joke. When he woke up the next morning it got even larger. Danny was getting more and more excited each day the plant grew more, which meant Danny’s mom’s trick was working! By the third night, Danny’s mom suggested they should put the plant outside. He ran outside the next morning only to see that his plant had grown into a flower bush! He took plenty pictures to show his class. After he had gone to school and showed the pictures to his classmates, Mr.Morgan took the class outside. Danny saw all his plant, he also saw the ones he had on each day! To his surprise, his mom popped out from behind the bush. They told him about their plan. Danny was not mad at his mom, and he still got the last laugh. He also got the new music tape that he was owed. Danny should’ve done some research, because the article “Probing Question: Does talking to plants help them grow?” states that “ people would have to speak to their plants for at least several hours a day to enhance photosynthesis enough to influence plant growth”. He could have figured out his was all a
After reading and annotating Marigolds by Eugenia W. Collier, I learned that there are some things we don’t know or realize when we are a child. When we become a woman, we have a different perspective on things. That is what Eugenia learned by the end of the story. Once she ruined all of Miss Lottie’s marigolds, she immediately felt guilty. Miss Lottie stood there with no anger on her face, just disappointment. Eugenia said that was when she saw her childhood fade and womanhood start to begin. Once she began womanhood, she learned that those flowers were precious to Miss Lottie and she was tying to make some beauty out of her shanty house. She viewed Miss Lottie as “… only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness
her that he died instantly and she doesn’t believe him, “You lie. I know better. I have felt
So who has been manipulating who? The tulip in its part has given us the desire of beauty, while we in turn select for the most beautiful. We have instead been living a relation of co-evolution as explained by Pollan. Nomadic hunters relied on distinguishing flowers to get to future fruits before others. Also the vibrant colors tulips produced genetically, favored us to choose certain strains. Flowers in some way have been domesticating us to choose their strains. Plants related their flowers beauty to successive reproduction and thus evolved its flower to adjust to human desire. Flowers indeed have manipulated humans to fit their pollination needs.
Imagine a world where if the Senate did not like the President, they murdered him. In some years there would be up to five different rulers in a year. What would it be like to have murder mixed in with the craziness of politics? How would your life change if people were murdered by the Senate because they did not like the person? This was the way of life in many ancient empires. Murder was a just a way of life in ancient Rome. The Roman Senate would be so fed up with losing power that they killed several Emperors. However, there were five good emperors in a row who became known as The Five Good Emperors. These Emperors were Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. They were mainly considered good for gaining the support of the Senate (Encyclopedia Britannica). After gaining the support of the Senate, these Emperors brought in and improved the tradition of adoption, doing different public works; the way they died also showed many truth about how these Emperors Ruled.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063.
“At the end of the rainbow waited the pot of gold. But rainbows were made of faint and fragile gossamer-and gold weighed a ton-and since the world began, gold was the reason to do most anything.”- V.C Andrews. The book that is being evaluated is Flowers in the Attic by V.C Andrews. It is about a family who goes to live at their grandparent’s house after the death of their father. They do this because their mother must win her inheritance back after she does a disgraceful thing. While there, the children must live in one room and the attic as to not be seen by their grandfather. The mother hides them because her father does not know she has children and if he finds out he will remove her from his will. In the attic they suffer from lack of sunlight, education, and malnutrition and soon are forgotten by their mother. The mindsets that will be evaluated are of the two older children, Cathy and Chris. They start with a general growth mindset in which they have a general positive outlook on life and always hope for their father’s return.
WWOOF. (2013). The history of WWOOF. Retrieved from World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms: http://www.wwoof.net/welcome-to-wwoof/
...g by the fire, and thinks about him and their past together, and how she didn’t accept him.
her son and to do so she feels she must shelter him from the truths of his father. “I
NSW. (2002, September 24). Domestic Violence and it’s impact on Children’s Development. Retrieved from http://www.community.nsw.gov.au/docswr/_assets/main/documents/dv_paper.pdf
Home education is one of the fastest growing alternative forms of education to public schooling (Cook, 1999; Withrow, 1999). Approximately one million children or more are being educated in their homes because of the success of homeschooling. (Two Takes on Homeschooling, 1997) The increase of students does not seem to be slowing down, and with growing concern over the public schools, the growth of the homeschooling movement is inevitable.
...d, for the fruit trees gray limbs do not provide much ammunition in their battle for their children s future. The mothers will not be able to earn enough money at such menial jobs to provide escape for their offspring or for themselves. Escape will in the end hang on the aptitude and resilience of the children.
Today, many parents are homeschooling their children. A U.S. Department of Education’s report shows that approximately 1.5 million children were being homeschooled in 2007 (Lips & Feinberg, 2008). This is almost 3 percent of all school age children (Lips & Feinberg, 2008). A private researcher, the National Home Education Research Institute, estimates 2.5 million children were being homeschooled in the 2007 – 2008 academic years (Lips & Feinberg, 2008). By either count, homeschooling is growing exponentially.
“ Know your farmer, know your food” goes the slogan by organic farmers to promote the consumption of locally grown food through organic farming. Subsequent to the clear distinction between organic and conventional food, there is an increase in focus towards organic farming. The “silent spring” that represents the seemingly solitary voice of the science writer Rachel Carson, 1962 ushered in the organic farming movement to counter the green revolution industrial-scale use of pesticides and fertilizers back in the 1960s. However the use of the term “organic farming” started with Lord Northbourne (aka Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne) (Pogash, 2008), which he derived from the concept of “the farm as organism” as, explained in his book titled