Pigs, bananas, and Harry, oh my!

Breaking news--the sun came out in Minnesota today. And the temps are expected to reach to nearly 70 by Wednesday.** That means green shouldn't be far behind. In anticipation of said color, here are some shots I took at my last visit to the botanical garden, in particular, the Palm Dome and Fern Room. I don't have names for this collection mainly because I turn into a mouth breather (read: agog) when I enter this building but some are fairly recognizable. For added enjoyment, listen to Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat song.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

** I woke up one day recently and realized I'm way too invested in the mercurial weather here in the Twin Cities. Not only do I blame everything on not enough sun, or too much snow, it is now a unmistakable part of my conversational repertoire and I'm boring mySELF to death. Lately I've been devouring the book 'The Florist's Daughter' by Patricia Hampl-- a memoir of growing up in St. Paul. What a wonderful writer she is! If I could ever write as good as her I'd die a happy woman. Anyway, as she holds the hand of her dying mother, simultaneously writing the woman's obituary on a yellow legal pad, she's recalling the gentler time in St. Paul that her mother had lived in. . .

What a romantic city it was, full of believers, wrapped in pride and insecurity, those protons of provincial complacency We pulled the blanket of winter around us, we clicked shut the wood blinds of summer against the killing heat. But our drama was all just weather, the swatted mosquitoes of summer, the dripping ice dams of winter. Our lives were little, our weather big.