… Without Cancer. Yeah!!
My One Year Anniversary
Category Archives: Around home
Our Agave Is Blooming
Asparagaceae Agavoideae Agave americana, the full name of our main backyard Agave (also known as a Century Plant).
I have no idea why we have a huge agave in our backyard, except that – I’m guessing – we thought the plant would not grow very big. But it just kept growing until it dominated our yard. I want to say garden here, but as a friend replied when Michele complained about how difficult it is to maintain “her” garden with the quail and rabbits eating all the sprouts, “You don’t have a garden, you have a habitat”.
Whatever the backyard is, the agave dominates it, and we’ve grown to like its sculptural quality. Then, at the end of last year, it started growing a huge, asparagus-like stalk. In the hot spell we had in early March, it seemed to be growing a couple of inches a day. Then, in late May, it started branching out. Last week, it started blooming, and we are thrilled.
Well Shit! I Didn’t Expect That
I thought about the possibility of death, but that wasn’t what bothered me the most. It was the feeling of helplessness. I just couldn’t see myself lying in bed, not being able to help myself. That, to me, was worse than the fear of death. John Wayne after beating “The big C”.
I found out at the end of last week that I have cancer of the bladder. More accurately, I most likely have cancer. The conversation went something like this: Dr. Sean Berquist, “You have a tumor in your bladder, and it might be cancerous. Well, it most likely is cancer. Actually, for a person of your age with a history of smoking, I’ve never seen it not be cancer.” Steve, “Is there a chance it could be benign?” Dr. Sean Berquist, “If you were eight years old, I would say ‘Yes’, but not at your age.”
The good news, the great! news is that the tumor is pretty small and can most likely be removed by fishing a cystoscope up my dick into my bladder and, according to Dr. Berquist, “scooping out the tumor and treating the inside of the bladder with a chemotherapy solution”. It is a simple procedure and almost always successful. The operation is late next Wednesday afternoon.
I know I have had a lot of medical problems, but counterintuitively, between medical emergencies, I feel fine. As far as the bladder cancer goes, I’m very optimistic and pretty upbeat about this whole thing. Still, I feel like this post is too short and too blunt. On the other hand, I don’t want to pad it, so I’ll just leave it at that.
A Couple of Blooming Mammalarias
There are flowers that bloom in gardens
Under a gardener’s care,
And their lavish beauties charm me,
As they flourish in luxury there.
There are flowers that blow in the meadows,
Kissed by the rain and the dew,
In a riot of happy blooming,
And I love their loveliness too.
But the flower that fills me with comfort,
And makes Life’s meaning sweet,
Is the flower that blooms in the desert,
In the midst of sand and heat;
Whose roots draw strength and beauty,
From a land forbidding and wild,
Whose face turns bravely skyward,
Nor pines for lot more mild…To a Desert Flower by Hattie Greene Lockett, American writer, rancher, and clubwoman (whatever the hell a clubwoman is).
Our results showed that from 4.5 million years ago, the arid regions of Mexico were the locations for abundant cacti speciation. From these lands, cacti have colonized most of the Mexican territories, the southern regions of the United States, as well as the Caribbean. Delil A. Chincoya, Salvador Arias, Felipe Vaca-Paniagua, Patricia Dávila, and Sofía Solórzano, Phylogenomics and Biogeography of the Mammilloid Clade Revealed an Intricate Evolutionary History Arose in the Mexican Plateau
Our garden is in full bloom, or, at least, as full a spring bloom as we are going to get this year. It got warm early, and everybody started growing, stretching, seeking the sun’s warmth, then it got cold, and everybody hunkered down, confused, including me. I left out several plants I had taken from the greenhouse where they had spent the winter, and they were especially unhappy. One, a Pachypodium – a very succulent member of the Oleander family – even committed harakiri.
Even with everything else blooming, like Hattie, the clubwoman from Arizona, I am most fascinated by the small cactuses in pots on a table on our deck.
Cactuses like the Paraodia, below, which grow at about 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet on the eastern slopes of the Andes in northwestern Argentina and southwestern Bolivia.
And Mammalarias, which grow primarily in Mexico but have spread to Central and Southwestern United States, to Colombia, and the Caribbean.
A Gratuitous Lithop Picture
