Singing Our Laws

July 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

People have often used songs and rhymes as memory aids. In fact, I still have to run through that ditty we learned in grade school when I need to know how many days in a month. You know the one:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February at twenty-eight,
But leap year, coming once in four,
February then has one day more.

To be honest, I only remember the first four lines; I had to look up the mnemonic to find out the last lines because I never need them. I know how many days February has.

A memory song we learned was the alphabet song, though again, I don’t need to ever sing it (and the world thanks me for that small favor) because I do know the alphabet.

Something I didn’t know until just now when I read it, was that in a lot of previous societies, laws were written in verse so that they could be sung in public places to inform people of the rules, and also so that they could be handed down the generations without the usual tendency of people to unwittingly change what they heard.

This made me smile, thinking about doing such a thing today. Can you imagine? We are long past the days of Moses’ 10 laws and Hammurabi’s 282. In fact, we have so many laws, they are uncountable beyond a guess that they are in the many millions, which makes sense when you consider that the Federal government, state governments, and some city governments all have dedicated legislative branches that do nothing but make up laws to pass. Often, those laws become obsolete, such as any laws pertaining to horses and buggies, though they are seldom removed from the books. More frequently, laws are piled one on top the other, though the first law, if upheld, would do the job. Such as insider trading. There are laws against insider trading, but apparently, Congress excused themselves from those laws (how, I don’t know), so now, if they really want to ban insider trading, they have to create new laws to ban something that is already banned. In addition to laws (or under the heading of law might be a better phrasing), there are millions of statutes and regulations. And any ruling by a judge in a trial becomes law if only by precedent.

So, all those laws now extant in the United States. How long to you think it would take to sing that song? Decades? And if they were all etched in stone like Hammurabi’s code, how many times would the necessary stone tablets encircle the earth?

Enquiring minds are simply . . . enquiring.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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My Back Forty

July 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Usually at this time of year, my “back forty” is lying fallow. It’s really a “back twenty” — an area about twenty feet by ten feet, but who’s counting. Almost everything I ever planted back there has died off except for a couple of plum trees I planted a few years ago, which in six years have produced a grand total of four plums. The plants that were here when I bought the place are still going strong — a wild rose, a honeysuckle, and a trumpet vine, but those plants are obviously well adapted to their environment. I think it gets too hot in that section for most plants, with the sun reflecting off the white garage next door and then kept sandwiched in between the two garages. In the spring, the area is lush with larkspur, but once I harvest the seeds and clean out the dead stalks, I just let it be. It just never seemed worth trying to grow anything.

Last year, I’d planted a tomato plant, a pumpkin vine, a watermelon vine, and a cantaloupe vine in my raised garden, and those four plants so overwhelmed the relatively small garden that this year I decided to try planting them in my back section, thinking they’d have plenty of room to grow. And they are doing supremely well! Perhaps the trees have grown enough to provide a bit of shade, but whatever the reason, I’m delighted.

I transplanted self-planted marigolds from the raised garden to provide a bit of protection for my “farm garden.” (If four plants can be considered a garden, let alone a farm garden.) I also threw out some wildflower seeds I’d been gifted, and though in previous years, nothing ever came of the wildflowers, this year they are adding to the lushness of the area.

Going by old blog posts I’d written around this same time, this is usually a discouraging time for me. Not only are the heat and humidity hard to bear, but they deplete my energy and my desire to do anything. (I know you people who live in truly high humidity will laugh at my thinking that 40% is high, but when you are used to single digit humidity, that is a huge change. And anyway, that’s just the afternoon humidity — the early morning humidity gets close to 80%.) This year, although the heat and humidity are playing with me, I am managing to keep up a semblance of enthusiasm for the yard, and I tend to think it has to do with that back twenty. With those vines growing so long (the pumpkin vine is at least ten feet long right now, though the others are catching up), they are easily filling the area with a lot of green and some luscious blossoms.

There seem to be many pumpkins starting to grow, but oddly, that wasn’t my main reason for planting them. And anyway, I have no idea what to do with the pumpkings once they’re big enough to eat.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Technology in 2046

July 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
View all responses

I’m not convinced anything will exist in twenty years. In fact, I truly doubt I will exist in twenty years, so it won’t matter to me what, if any, technology will exist at that time. Chances are, technology will progress as it always has, with artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent and changing human lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Of course we can’t imagine — the changes will be coming from non-human intelligence, something so alien that it certainly doesn’t care about anything human. Any pretense at human emotion emanating from those ones and zeros will be just that — pretense.

Besides, we have no idea, really, when and if a cosmic catastrophe will happen. Over the billions of years the earth has existed, there have been many such events, events that seem to have changed the earth’s environment almost overnight. We all know of such events — the dinosaur extinction and the wooly mammoth extinction, to name two. The prevalence of flood myths, of the world standing still, of night becoming day all seem to reference other extinction events.

The truth is, despite all our vaunted science expertise, we really don’t have that much knowledge about how the sun — or any other cosmic body — affected the earth over those billions of years. Our human history is such a tiny fraction of the earth’s history. We live in a rather temperate and stable time, when we think the way the world is today is the way it always was and always will be. What else explains the prevalence of mobile home parks being set up in tornado alleys, towns being constructed on flood plains, and people building cabins in fire zones? When terrible things happen to people in these areas, it’s always a shock, though it shouldn’t be. What is, wasn’t always. A dry flood plain today wasn’t always dry, and it’s still subject to rare and not-so-rare floods.

And if the cosmos weren’t enough of an inimical neighborhood, we have the political situation, too. Here in this country, it used to be the goals were the same, the differences in political parties were due to differences in the means of achieving those goals. Now the goals are so widely divergent they hardly seem to be describing the same country. Most people want us to remain a constitutional republic, but a growing vocal and volatile group wants to tear the whole thing down, get rid of the constitution, the government, the entire criminal justice system, and let chaos and poverty take over. (Which I don’t understand. What do these people think is going to happen to them when they have destroyed this country? They will be living here, too. Or are they so stupid as to they think they will be the ones running things? Or so brainwashed as to believe the country will suddenly become a utopia with no crime and Kumbaya everywhere?)

Some people believe we’re headed toward a civil war. Others think we’re heading toward a world war, complete with nuclear weapons going off everywhere.

I don’t want to believe either of those scenarios, just as I don’t want to believe in a major cosmic event, but what I’ve learned during my many years is that the world does not run on my beliefs. If it did run on my beliefs, we would be living in a utopia because everyone would be spending a lot of time at home, working in a garden, reading, or writing rather tame blogs without a lot of emotion, and certainly no rage or outrage. Just kindness and smiles for everyone — well, almost everyone.

Still, let’s assume there are no major upheavals, civil or cosmic, and in twenty years, the world is more or less continuing on the same road to total technology as it is today. I still wouldn’t have an answer to the question because I’m not convinced of much of anything, though I’m pretty sure technology will have outpaced my need for it. To be honest, it already has.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Lily Forest Update

July 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

My lily forest is still going strong. Lush and vibrant, it’s at its peak, so I am making sure to enjoy the blooms every day.

And now, you can enjoy them, too!

It’s interesting that this tiger lily showed up among the more traditional lilies.

You can see it hiding among its taller brethren in the following photo.

As I’m sure you’ve figured, I have nothing much to say today.

Still, considering that a picture is worth a thousand words, or so I’ve heard it said, then this post is a good 5,000 words long. Well, 5,000 plus the 120 words of text.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Alien Invasion

July 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

If you think you’re going to be reading a blog about invaders from another planet or even from another country, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Though, truly, for all I know, this discussion of alienism could be about something from outer space. Spores, perhaps.

These plants are called hen and chicks because, I presume, of the way they proliferate. The mother hen grows multiple babies, then, when she gets tired of them clinging to her skirts, she gets ready for her end by flowering. Unlike other plants, when these particular genera of hen and chicks finish flowering, the worn-out hen gives up the ghost so that her chicks can have room to grow.

Although I like the plants, especially the way they create a lovely carpet of succulents that look like fallen blossoms, I find the flowers creepy.

The central portion of the hen grows and grows and grows, sort of like the alien in Kim Bassenger’s purse in the My Stepmother is an Alien.

Very creepy.

The flowers themselves aren’t really that bad, in fact, they’re sort of pretty in an otherworldly sort of way, like something you’d see under a microscope, but the whole thing — the base, the long stalk, the bundle of flowers at the very top — is . . . well, it’s just creepy.

Most years, my hen and chicks don’t flower, and if they do, it’s only one or two. Usually, when they start to become alienish, I pull up the mother hen. I figure, since it has to be pulled up after she flowers, I might as well do it before so I don’t get creeped out.

But this year, more than a dozen mothers all got to flowering. A veritable invasion! I let them do what they wanted, even knowing my reaction, for the same reason I do so much of what I do — it gives me a blog topic. (I used to do a whole lot of things simply to have something to write about, but I don’t do that so much anymore, so what goes on in my yard has to suffice.)

This morning, I took the photos, wrote this blog, and then I went out and got rid of my alien invasion.

Whew! Disaster averted.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Lifelong Learner

July 13, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Are you a lifelong learner?
View all responses

For sure! I have always been a dedicated learner. From complicated subjects such as quantum physics to simple subjects such as the etymology of words, anything new to me has always been grist for my mental mill.

A lot of this desire to know is innate. I tend to think most of us are born with such a desire — all you have to do is watch a baby explore his new world or try to answer a toddler’s non-stop questions, to realize how true that must be. I’m not sure why so many people lose that interest, nor am I sure why I retained mine. Well, I do know two reasons — one is that I have always spent so much time alone, that there was no one to quench that desire to learn. Another is that when I was very young, everyone seemed to know so much more than I did, things like names of streets and the different shapes of leaves, which left me always trying to catch up.

It turns out that the reason they knew more was that they could see. I still remember after I got my first pair of glasses, I was looking out the car window in total amazement, and then I saw . . . street signs!!! And I realized that’s how everyone knew so much more than I did — they could see.

That realization didn’t make a difference, though. I still learned as much as I could as quickly as I could so I’d catch up, but I only ended up tormenting myself. I was one of those weird girls who read her school books the first day of school and then sat there bored out of her skull the rest of the year. So my learning came outside the classroom from any books I could get my hands on. (I wasn’t as fanatic as my brother who read the encyclopedia from cover to cover, though I did leaf through them — and the dictionary — and read what interested me.)

Somewhere along the line, perhaps because of the Taylor Caldwell books, I discovered there was a whole world of history we were never taught, and that gave me another area of study. And then, of course, there was health, writing, traveling, and so many other subjects that encompass the whole of the world.

Today, I keep my learning to gardening. It’s more of a hands-on kind of learning — trial and error — rather than book learning, but still, it’s learning. Come to think of it, though, I do spend a lot of time learning about the current state of the world, though I tend to think that subject is going to end soon since there’s nothing much I can do about any of it. But isn’t that the way of learning? Much of what we — or rather I — learn is simply learning for learning’s sake.

I suppose eventually, I’ll mostly be beyond this learning stage, not just for current events, but all subjects — though since my desire to learn has lasted decades, perhaps not, but still, there comes a point in almost every subject where I reach the end of what can be known (or what I can know, anyway) and then there’s no real point in going on. For example, I no longer am as fascinated by particle theories as I once was. It seems that particles can be broken down further and further until they reach a point where they no longer act as particles but as waves. So perhaps everything comes down to thought waves, brain waves, all sorts of waves. And if, in fact, everything exists as a possibility until it is “seen,” then that sort of makes learning less about finding out what exists and more about creating what might exist, which, to me, is pretty much a dead end.

Anyway, that’s more about my desire to learn than you ever wanted to know, but there it is.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, books, history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

Being Noticed

July 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

It rained the night before last, enough rain that not only did I not have to water yesterday, it was too muddy to work in the yard.

So I went for a walk. It felt good being out and about despite the heat and humidity, though I actually did more visiting during that hour than walking. First, I chatted with a neighbor who was thrilled with the almost two inches of rain, and then we moved onto other topics, such as theft. Solar garden lights are disappearing around town. Both of mine outside the fence went first, then someone came into my fenced yard and took one of my expensive solar lights, so I put the remaining light in the garage, where it will be safe. Useless, but safe.

Apparently, kids are stealing them to use as nightlights on their bicycles. Even if they were caught, no one would do anything about it. The sheriff, of course, couldn’t care, and the new local police force . . . actually, I don’t know anything about them other than that this town decided not to rely on the county anymore. And that they have brand new vehicles. I guess I should count myself lucky I have no information about them — it means I have no need of their services.

I continued my walk, and on the way back, as I paused to look at a tiny rosebush, a woman came rushing out of her house and said, “I’m so glad to see you’re okay.” I’d been introduced to the woman once, and had never spoken another word with her, but apparently, she’d noticed I hadn’t been out walking for a while. She mentioned that another woman, one I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen, had also been asking about me. It’s nice to know people notice and care, but the truth is, by the time they realized I was missing, my corpse could have been moldering in my house for months. But still, it is nice. And weird, too, in a way.

It’s funny — every time I go walking, I realize how much I miss it, but then something happens, like the ground drying out and my needing to do yardwork as it did today, and I never get a chance to get back in the swing of daily walking. But maybe. Someday. When it’s not hot. Or windy. Or cold. Or snowy.

Oh, who and I trying to kid. There’s always an excuse. But yesterday, I did take a walk, and it was nice.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Keeping the Past in the Past

July 11, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
View all responses

The one habit that has improved my life the most is training myself not to look back. What is done is done, and cannot be redone, so it’s best to look to today — what exists today — no matter how I got here, and then go on from here.

This philosophy was described to me using a golf metaphor. If your golf ball lands in the sand, you need to concentrate on the shot as it exists, not how you got there. At the time of making the shot, how you got there is immaterial. Only the conditions existing now are what counts.

Sometimes, of course, I do look back, or else I used to, but only to figure out what — if anything — I did wrong so that I wouldn’t make that mistake again. (In the case of the golf metaphor, the golfer can critique the fatal shot after the game is ended if the golfer so wishes.) Otherwise, the sand trap I am standing in (or the green I am delighting in) are the only things that need concern me.

A problem I’ve always had is what I call roundaboutation. It’s when my thoughts continually replay the past, a mental loop, always trying to come up with a different outcome. Unfortunately, that outcome is always the same because that outcome is . . . today. Getting rid of that mental loop and accepting that today is what counts in going forward (as the old cliché goes, today is the first day of the rest of your life) makes for a much more serene life.

Also, any problems can be looked at as simply themselves, not as what created them, not as what I wish had happened, but simply the problem itself without any backstory or history. It makes focusing on a possible solution less complicated because there’s not a lot of murky shoulda/woulda/couldas clouding the issue.

I wish I could teach people this lesson, especially those who so often refer to ancient wrongs committed by forebears, who think that because this country — like all countries — had a bloody and immoral past, it negates whatever good exists in the present. Concentrating on the past makes it easy to teach people to hate this country. If people could ignore the past, take today as it exists right now, where most of those situations no longer exist, figure out the direst problems today, and go from there, people would be much more accepting of the good. But no . . . grievance is about the past even more than the present or future, and a grievance culture needs the past.

Thinking of that is part of the sand trap for me. I need to concentrate on my own sand trap, not anyone else’s, even though their position on the sand trap might affect me.

Still, for serenity’s sake, today is the starting point — what is actually present in my life and what I can do, not what other people do that might (or might not affect me).

This serenity was hard won. I wasn’t able to slough off grief as so many people do. For me, for many years, my present was my grief (or do I mean my grief was my present?) Either way, I had to deal with all the burdens that came from losing that one special person (as well as my parents and brothers) until I could let go of the past. In fact, it’s those years of grief, way more than any golf metaphor that helped me. No matter how many times I replayed those last days, weeks, years, of our shared life, it always came out the same — him gone from this world. Me alone.

And that’s what I deal with. My life today. And it’s a good life.

As long as I leave the past in the past, anyway, and don’t create — or recreate problems that don’t exist today.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 15 Comments »

All the World’s a Stage

July 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of politics as identity and identity as ideology. Somehow, I thought people were bright enough to stand apart from what they believed, to see themselves as a person believing a thing, not believing that they were the thing believed. But apparently not. When some people buy into a political ideology, they identify with that ideology, and when the ideology is attacked, they think that they themselves are being attacked, not just their idea.

I can’t imagine holding any idea so strongly that a destruction of that belief would destroy me, but that is not the case with a lot of people. Decades ago in a theology class, the teacher broke down everything we believed. His intent, if I remember correctly, was to make us rethink what we thought we knew. To get us to start building up a new way of thinking. Before he got to that point though, a student in the class got really upset, and told him he was destroying everything we believed without giving us anything to replace it. It was as if he had destroyed us, since those beliefs were the foundation of our lives until then, and most of the class were as upset as that one student, but it didn’t bother me. It was just something else to learn, is all. (As far as I was concerned, nothing I learned in school was ever about me. It was just the curriculum.)

To be honest, that’s the only thing about that class I remember. Well, there was one other odd thing that has stuck in my mind all these years. He taught that “Love is the movement of an appetite toward a recognized good.” (His exact words.) I think the discussion that day centered on the supposition that if this were true, then what we think of love is really like and vice versa. But the upshot of that class is lost in the shadows of time. Or rather, in the shadows of my mind. Odd that I remembered those two bits.

A more recent example comes from The Wheel of Time. In the books, there is a people, a warrior society, that takes their entire identity from their belief that they were always warriors, that what sets them apart from others and makes them morally superior is that they use spears rather than swords, their thinking being that spears can also be used for hunting while swords can only be used to kill other humans. When this ideology was proven false, a huge percentage of those people couldn’t handle it and ran away, not just from their culture but from themselves. (It often seems to me that these books are a brand-new allegory instead of a decades-old fantasy series.)

The odd thing is that the story of this warrior society helps me understand many politically motivated people today, while at the same time, these people today help me understand the people in this warrior society.

Another odd thing is that in the book, the chiefs of this society knew that the destruction of their beliefs and their people had been prophesied, but as a chief said, “It’s one thing to know prophesy will be fulfilled eventually, another to see that fulfillment before your very eyes.”

This statement certainly rings true to me. It’s one thing to spend a lifetime studying “prophesy,” aka history, both overt and hidden, and to know that one day we will be balanced on the knife edge of keeping our country a constitutional republic or turning into another sociologic cesspool, but seeing it happen before my eyes is . . . disheartening. It’s also weird to see all the political, global, and economic machinations that had been going on behind the scenes my whole life, suddenly appearing on stage as if it’s no big deal. I’d always presumed I’d be gone by the time this new world order would be put into effect, but it’s happening faster than I expected. I try to look at it as seeing history in the making — both the push toward socialism and the pushback of the republic — but it’s hard to continue to see it all as “out there.” It comes too close, at times.

Still, whatever happens, I will still be me. My identity is only as a truth seeker, not as a victim or oppressor. (And even “truth seeker” is only a surface identity. I am . . . me. Period. I am not my ideas. Not my writing. I’m just me. No further definition needed.) And, if I am being truthful, there is a chance I will never see the fruition of this current push since part of the “ideology” has always been to get rid of the old folks who are perceived by the young as using up too many resources without contributing anything.

But who knows. The curtain is up. The play is still going on, and we have yet to discover the plot.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Lily Tree Forest

July 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When I first started thinking about a garden, I came across photos of a luscious flower called a tree lily, a hybrid between an Oriental lily and a trumpet lily. (For obvious reasons, they’re also known as Orienpet lilies.) I’d always thought lilies were a rarified flower that only professional gardeners could grow, but apparently not. I loved the idea of a lily tree forest, so I decided to take a chance, even though the bulbs aren’t cheap.

Some of the original bulbs never came up, so the next year I planted a few more. And a few more after that. A couple of years ago, the lilies started to grow tall and to bloom. And oh, how lovely those lilies are! Large than my hand, on stalks taller than I am, they manage to deal with the weather extremes of this area very well. Even the late frost didn’t do much damage.

My one nitpick with the plants is that they need to be staked to keep them from growing in crookedly, but how does one stake a six- or seven-foot plant? I do fine when they’re young with my 2-foot metal stakes and the three-foot bamboo stakes, but after that, they’re on their own. I could tie them to the fence, but it would take a lot of plant ties or twine, and I’m afraid I’d forget it was there and trip on it or decapitate myself. Well, not decapite, of course, but something unpleasant anyway.

Although the forest looks as if it’s a narrow swath, the tallest lily and the one most needing to be staked is six feet from the fence. Still, leaning or not, my lily forest is awesome. The plants are just starting to bloom, and since each has multiple flowers that bloom at different times, I will have lilies to enjoy for over a month. (The flowers on the lower left-hand side of the photo are purple magnus echinacea.)

It’s amazing what an amateur gardener can do with no expertise but a head full of hopes. I’m still an amateur, of course, but after five years of gardening, I do know a few things, such as water them, remove weeds and weedy grasses, and let them do what they want to do.

Luckily for me, what they want to do is . . . bloom.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in gardening, home, life, photography. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »
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