Confessions of a serial plant killer

 

Call me Lizzie Borden of the Lobelias.

I love plants and flowers and never intend to do them harm, but alas have some penchant for spelling their demises. Cacti, which apparently are very difficult to murder, have lapsed and sagged under my attentions. Ficus have browned. Spider plants have woven their own webby cauls and collapsed. However!

I have had good luck recently. I have not one but TWO success tales underway.

Tale the First. This narrative involves an orchid that was (!!!) $5.99 at my grocery store, and I figured even if it died within days, it would be the same as purchasing a low-cost bouquet. But I brought it home thinking, "If only I could keep it alive..." I googled how, and learned that the orchid requires, get this, "benign neglect." That is so up my alley! I calendared two week increments to soak it in boiled-then-cooled water, then ignore it. I faced it by the eastern window as the internet directed.

It has thrived. It actually opened up two blooms. I was incredulous. It has also lost two of its existing blooms, but I am given to understand that may be natural? At any rate, the losses have equaled out the gains and I feel pretty proud of my orchidal accomplishment.

Tale the Second. The same grocery store was offering bulbs in boxes for 25 cents. I figured at these bargain basement prices, the bulbs were already dead, but what the heck. So I planted the dinner plate dahlia in a cracked white cereal bowl and watered it casually when I was in the kitchen and thinking about it. In disbelief, I have watched a green shoot emerge from the brown woody stem, and get bigger each day. I did that. Me.

I'm scared to transfer it outside, especially given our 100-plus temps this summer, but eventually I will usher my fledgling to the real dirt outside. Wouldn't it be wild if it worked, and I actually grew those blooms that are the size of dinner plates? I would faint.


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Contentious attorneys in Lizzie Borden case

Reading through trial transcripts in the Lizzie Borden case (1892) can be mildly entertaining in terms of the touchy interactions between defense and prosecution attorneys. They were trying to get to the bottom of a horrible and upsetting crime, yes--the murder of an older man and his wife--but that didn't stop them from getting frustrated with each other.

Not only that, their formal language was sometimes so obfuscated that witnesses pled confusion. Here's an interaction I was re-reading yesterday that made me laugh out loud. This follows a long and complex description of the individual hatchet wounds: where they were placed by the assailant on the victims' heads, and their measurements:

I laughed at Mr. Knowlton's spunky, "I submit whether the questioner himself understands the question." Hosea Knowlton was attorney for the prosecution, trying to get the jury to find Lizzie guilty (they didn't).

Adams rather defensively replies, "I do. I understood one of yours a little while ago, that you had trouble about understanding yourself." Adams then returns to the witness, asking, "Well, do you understand the question now?" although no explanation had been offered, and the witness meekly asked, "If I may be permitted to state what I think the question is?"

It's Laurel and Hardy, practically. Who's on first? What's the question?

A few lines later, Adams inadvertently insults the witness, Dr. Dolan, by referring to his "attempt at an autopsy," which phrasing Dolan calls attention to.

At any rate, a bit about the book. It's a lovely bound version of Edmund Pearson's Trial of Lizzie Borden, with incredible paisley end papers, gilt page edges, and that wonderful red ribbon you see above (blocking the rest of the testimony) which provides a built-in bookmark. It's a treasure of a book and there's a bit of a story behind it that I'll blog about later.


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Anniversary of Lizzie Borden double murders

Today, August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, a middle-aged woman named Lizzie Borden called out to her maid to come downstairs. The cause of the alarm? Her father had been killed. Bridget Sullivan came down and thus proceeded the strangest of mornings, with contradictory tales told of what Lizzie had been doing at the time her father bore the brunt of multiple hatchet marks to his head and face.

With the alarm raised and neighbors and a kindly doctor surrounding her, Lizzie then reacted to the question where her stepmother might be during all this commotion. "I thought I hear her come in," she said vaguely, asking Bridget to go upstairs to check. Bridget quite rightly refused to go alone, and neighbor Mrs. Churchill climbed the stairs with her. Towards the top of the stairs, as they turned their heads, they could see under the bed in the guest room where Mrs. Borden lay on the other side, also hatcheted to death.

Lizzie Borden was acquitted, but history has wondered for over a century if those jurors did right.

In the 1970s, a made-for-TV movie starring Bewitched's Elizabeth Montgomery did a very decent job of telling the tale. It's called The Legend of Lizzie Borden. The movie set features a floorplan replicating exactly the Borden household (for those who follow this story, the floorplans play an important role in untangling the who-was-where-when stuff, replete with locked doors and doors blocked by desks). Elizabeth portrays Lizzie quite well, despite being younger and more attractive. They shared an ancestor in common, it turns out.

Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden

The movie is worth watching. It's out of commission, but I found a DVD through my library. One of the scenes I found the most interesting I will link to here. When Lizzie's lawyer tells her she faces the possibility of death by hanging for the crime she's suspected of, she reacts with such horror that it literally made my heart leap.

And of course, what is most telling about that moment is that at no other time does Lizzie show horror in the film. Not when she sees her father's body--disinterestedly lifting up the sheet in the middle of the night where his body rests in the dining room, awaiting its autopsy, a brilliant choice on the part of the filmmakers, for those bodies did indeed rest in the house with living occupants... Not when she discovers it, not when she worries (as one would) that the murderer may yet lurk in the house. Mr. Borden's head was so destroyed that his eyeball was cut in half, and yet the only moment Lizzie shows horror is when her own fate is endangered.

Was that Hollywood license? No. The court testimony has repeated witnesses testifying to Lizzie's remote character within moments after the murders. "She was cool," said a police officer. Lizzie never cried, never screamed, never showed distress. To me, most importantly is that she never showed fear. If some intruder came into the house and murdered her father and stepmother, why was she not running into the street in terror that she might be the next victim?

One answer: she knew there was no intruder.

Here's that clip. It's ten minutes, and the moment of her realizing she may hang for the crimes comes around 4:00.

The credit for it: Bos, Carole "Lizzie Borden - No Longer Believed" AwesomeStories.com. Oct 07, 2013. Aug 04, 2016. .

Doing what we can...

 

Two pleas today, and both cancer-related. Yeah, the C word, the thing that makes us enraged because we're helpless and don't know how to fight it.

Well, here's two meaningful ways to help.

Anyone who's read my blog over the years knows about Jennifer L. Kranz, the sweet, cute six year old who died of DIPG a mere 3.5 months after diagnosis. Her parents created the groundswell Fluttering movement, in which people purchase a Fluttering kit of lawn-ornament dragonflies and commit to moving the dragonflies yard to yard throughout September, with official Unravel paperwork that requests a donation to the nonprofit foundation in return for selecting where the dragonflies go next. Today there is a flash sale of the Fluttering kits. Fluttering is a good thing to do with your own kids--talk to them about how to use our bodies to help others, that the daily task of moving the dragonflies is raising money to help researchers figure out kids' cancer. You can Flutter in the name of someone you know who is fighting now or in memory of someone. It's a meaningful, intense, beautiful thing to do. Purchase your Fluttering kit here.

And here's a silly video from Jennifer's mom explaining the "flash" part of the sale.


The other way to help: my friend Nanea Hoffman is the founder of the popular and wildly-clever blog Sweatpants & Coffee. She was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She has created the "Anxiety Blob" to squeeze at moments when the world seems too much. These blobs are for sale now here. Also, subscribe to the blog and follow her caffeinated story!

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