Granny Smith

Flora tries to take over our house (exterior) and yard. Ivy climbs and insinuates itself beneath our roof tiles. Small weedy things, such as the white-flowered one above, find cracks in the brick stairway and enlarge them. Otto's trumpet vine (which will be glorious a few weeks from now) stretches tendrils in all directions. The green branch above is one example.

Above is a larger view of the stairway down from the street to our front door. The pink geraniums are rampant. A few minutes ago I looked at a Google satellite view of our house and found that our roof is almost entirely obscured by trees.

After the massacre at Virginia Tech, I read the profiles of the dead students and professors in Newsweek, each a (an?) unique personality. I teared up a bit, but then I began a wonder. Why is each of these individuals more worthy of national notice just because they died together rather than one by one? According to This Week, 29,000 Americans a year are killed by gunfire. (By comparison, the annual toll in Britain is about 100, in Canada, 168). Every one of those 29,000 people was as unique, as precious to someone, as the victims at Virginia Tech. Automobiles kill 32,600 each year, but does any victim of an automobile accident rate the media attention of, say, a victim of 9/11? The moral, I guess, is that one should choose to be killed in a newsworthy catastrophe rather than alone.