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Live Oaks, Killing me Softly...
Sep. 13th, 2015 11:01 amI am staying at my sister's house since yesterday afternoon, with her older kids and a few of mine, while she and her husband stay at the hospital with their youngest. Isabella (3) had been acting lethargic and uncomfortable, with a distended belly, for too many days, so they took her in. She has some kind of non-mechanical bowel obstruction - apparently that's something that can happen after a stomach bug, when swelling or twisting of the intestines caused by inflammation from the illness won't let anything through.
The good news is that's usually treatable with a resting period of not eating for a couple of days. So she probably doesn't need surgery or any other radical intervention - just IV fluids and observation, along with some meds to make it hurt less and lots of probiotics.
Since I am basically The Princess (and the Pea), I don't sleep well at other people's houses, on couches. There is a very precise confluence of events, involving nudity and too many (specific) pillows and a lot of room and a blasting fan, that all have to transpire for me to only suffer my normal level of insomnia. But after I cleaned the kitchen from dinner and made Elizabeth giggle until she wasn't sad and otherwise acted responsible, I did manage to get really excited and start longing for a new kind of roadtrip.
I found this picture on tumblr, of a 350 year old oak tree (verified via other sites):
To say I love it is not saying enough. These trees make me ache in the chest. I can't drink them in enough.
I go out of my way to drive through tunnels of "old" live oaks in the Gables pretty regularly, and those are babies by comparison. This is one of those, that I've been using as my facebook cover photo for awhile:
I mean I accidentally found myself among live oaks at sunset on my last roadtrip and almost lost my damned mind.
Last night I learned there are various individually named and dated live oaks that are hundreds of years old. Angel Oak is in Charleston, and more than 1500 years old. <--DO YOU HEAR WHAT I'M SAYING?
The Angel Oak tree:
(from tumblr user rorybore)
(from tumblr user nottheleaningtowerofpisa)
(from tumblr user gregfoster)
(from tumblr user cgawel)
I would like to encourage you to go find more angles to view this tree from ;) There are endless streams of pictures of it in the "Angel Oak" tag on tumblr and on Instagram.
You can also visit "Oak Alley Plantation," where movies like Interview With the Vampire (and many others) were filmed...
Though they are sad places, with slave quarters intact, and a lot of sordid history. I suppose it's all kind of dark.
I found this image last night - the "Tree of Redemption."
It's a lot to take in. The South as a whole is so awful, and lovely, and weird, and haunting, and ultimately my opinion is something like "It's not the trees' fault! They were here, first!"
Hopefully they'll be here after us. And I'll get to hang out with some more of them soonish.
(Angel Oak again, this time by tumblr-er leahdeleah)
The good news is that's usually treatable with a resting period of not eating for a couple of days. So she probably doesn't need surgery or any other radical intervention - just IV fluids and observation, along with some meds to make it hurt less and lots of probiotics.
Since I am basically The Princess (and the Pea), I don't sleep well at other people's houses, on couches. There is a very precise confluence of events, involving nudity and too many (specific) pillows and a lot of room and a blasting fan, that all have to transpire for me to only suffer my normal level of insomnia. But after I cleaned the kitchen from dinner and made Elizabeth giggle until she wasn't sad and otherwise acted responsible, I did manage to get really excited and start longing for a new kind of roadtrip.
I found this picture on tumblr, of a 350 year old oak tree (verified via other sites):
To say I love it is not saying enough. These trees make me ache in the chest. I can't drink them in enough.
I go out of my way to drive through tunnels of "old" live oaks in the Gables pretty regularly, and those are babies by comparison. This is one of those, that I've been using as my facebook cover photo for awhile:
I mean I accidentally found myself among live oaks at sunset on my last roadtrip and almost lost my damned mind.
Last night I learned there are various individually named and dated live oaks that are hundreds of years old. Angel Oak is in Charleston, and more than 1500 years old. <--DO YOU HEAR WHAT I'M SAYING?
The Angel Oak tree:
(from tumblr user rorybore)
(from tumblr user nottheleaningtowerofpisa)
(from tumblr user gregfoster)
(from tumblr user cgawel)
I would like to encourage you to go find more angles to view this tree from ;) There are endless streams of pictures of it in the "Angel Oak" tag on tumblr and on Instagram.
You can also visit "Oak Alley Plantation," where movies like Interview With the Vampire (and many others) were filmed...
Though they are sad places, with slave quarters intact, and a lot of sordid history. I suppose it's all kind of dark.
I found this image last night - the "Tree of Redemption."
It's a lot to take in. The South as a whole is so awful, and lovely, and weird, and haunting, and ultimately my opinion is something like "It's not the trees' fault! They were here, first!"
Hopefully they'll be here after us. And I'll get to hang out with some more of them soonish.
(Angel Oak again, this time by tumblr-er leahdeleah)
