Opuntia cactus found around my office building. Most people call it prickly pear but this is the spineless variety so no prickles. I've tried to figure out the Latin name for it but it could be several different varieties. This particular spineless variety grows a lot as a landscape plant in Austin. It has yellow blooms.

I love plants and have been interested in them since I was a little girl. My father gardened a great deal and my brother and I were always drafted as manual labor. I have memories of sifting dirt through screens to get the particles in uniform pieces and weeding the vegetable garden when we had one. My grandmother grew geraniums in the back yard and they loved the California weather, growing to huge shrubby borders. I was often drafted to pull some and help her tame the pile. The smell of geranium plants are a pleasant childhood memory for me. I am guilty of going to nurseries and plant shops and squeezing the random leaf just to get a whiff of childhood.

As an adult, I have far less inclination to have a perfect yard though I do dream of it. Every spring I get out there and dig for an hour or two, plop in a stray rosemary or lavender bush and hope for the best. Last year we had a terrible drought (we're actually still in it) so most everything died because I refuse to water more than the suggested watering schedule says.

I have three fairly happy rosemary bushes and a few lavender which have managed to survive. I have a couple of oregano and a stray sage or two but nothing really happy and full and as green as the plants I remember from childhood. The yard is a giant patch of dry weed stalks. I feel that I have betrayed my heritage of gentleman farmers.

But things do grow here and there. I have taken to painting plants or taking photos of other people to compensate the lack of my own green thumb.

my mysterious grandmother

My family is full of mystery which is very frustrating because most of them are going to remain unsolved. This is hard because I'm pretty curious and can't stand mysteries which is why I generally read the endings to books about three chapters into the story. At any rate, my family has stories that have no endings which really can be maddening.

One of the big ones is who is my grandmother on my dad's side and what was she like? I know very little about her. I know her name was Frieda Angermeier (though I have seen it spelt Angomier, Angirmeier, and Angermeier) and that she was probably Jewish. She was married to my grandfather sometime around 1914 (when my dad was born) and they had three boys. In 1920,Frieda and Randy (as he seemed to have been called back then) lived in Dallas (according to the US Census) but later that year had deposited the three boys in an orphanage and disappeared after separating. Who was she? What happened to her? Where did she go? No one ever spoke about her. I did a lot of digging and found her entry to the United States through Ellis Island. I found small clues on the ship's passenger manifesto.... that she had a sister name Kathi Hauerwas who in 1910 lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico (before it was a state!) and that Frieda originally was from the Augsburg area in Germany. Her father's name was Frederich (who my father was named after) and the street that he lived on there was listed. She was 17 when she came to the US and it appears from the manifesto she might have traveled by herself. (No one else on the list is from the area she is.) and she was visiting - not immigrating.
I also found an earlier ship's list that included a Julia Angermeier also from the same area and was slightly older, who was a maid so I have conjectured that she is a relative as well. But nothing else. Vague rumors from and old conversation with one of my aunts (from my mom's side) that Frieda lived in El Paso Texas in the '60's.



One of my cousins I met when I started doing this research sent me a xerox of a photo of her. He doesn't know anything either. We think it's Frieda and her mother and it's dated 1906. Was this the young Frieda? Very faintly written in pencil (among others in Swabish) is Mrs. R. Wederstrandt. My grandmother.

This is the Wederstrandt cemetery in Saint Francisville. It's behind a baseball diamond. Most of the people buried here died from a yellow fever epidemic in the mid 1850's. It's pretty overgrown and the faces of the markers are pretty worn. Some no longer have markers.

Baton Rouge

I've been trying to move things around on my old lap top to my new lap top and ran across these photos I've taken on my trips with Hal. He's a curator of a museum and used to go to these conferences. I went along with him to two different ones - and while I didn't really get to do the whole conference, ran around and took a vacation. The first one was in Baton Rouge a couple of years ago, near where part of my family lived from the 19th century until the 1940's when my dad moved to California. I still have family that live nearby Baton Rouge but I've never met them. My family moved there from Maryland where they had lived from the 1700's. My big dream is to go to Maryland and find where they lived there. Genealogy is a wonderful way to learn history.

These trips are wonderful. I have the freedom of just looking and seeing things. I generally wind up doing normal day to day stuff, going to the store and getting lunch - I generally vacation on a shoestring. I sit in parks and eat and people watch. I found ruined plantations, full of cows, gravestones of relatives in nearby St. Francisville and part of Louisiana State University's Rural Life Museum. Baton Rouge is a great city to visit - I felt really at home..

I'm up in chilly Dallas where it is a brisk 35 degrees. No snow, no ice, just grey and over cast. It's quiet in the house. My friend is taking a nap with his dog after his treatment this morning he gets really tired. They are comfy cozy under blankets and I am updating things on the computer. I'm off to make a cup of hot tea (something minty sounds good) and then find my book and read.

It's a perfect day for being warm and reading. I miss my cats and my fellow. They are in Austin along with my current art project. Currently I'm reading quite a bit about northern European prints during the 15th and 16th centuries. Really interesting about what they know and how they did things. (more later).

The New Year

Back at work after being off for two weeks for Christmas holidays. Yesterday, I awoke to rain and slightly chilly weather for us in Austin. It looked like rain most of yesterday but today it's pretty sunny . I had to use my trusty green umbrella while waiting for the bus. I love using umbrellas - maybe it's because we use them so seldom here.

I started working on a new art piece over the holidays. It's a slightly assemblage-type altar that I am trying new tools and some new techniques. So far it's a hole with some thin wooden feathers that are going to be attached around the hole. I also am planning on using a milagros for part of the inner altar. I'm slowly discovering several things about how to construct things since I generally don't do constructions or sculptural forms so I've been enjoying it. I will try to take a photo and do a work in progress. I also thought of another altar while doing this one. We get the cigar boxes from a tobacconist that has a private cigar sampling place. Most are made of wood, generally something like mahogany or teak. It's pretty dry wood, when I was sawing the wood chipped easily. I'm using hand tools as opposed to power tools. I'm going to try to work on it some tonight when I get home.