May 14

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My sister was in town.  We spent the morning of the 14th in old haunts.  This is the house our family lived in from 1959 to 1967.  It looks very different now.  The people that bought it from our parents have changed it a lot.  The front used to be flat, for one thing (level with that now-recessed front wall).

My sister parked the car across the street from the house, and we walked up to Wines (the elementary school we'd attended).

An excellent garden on Hillcrest.  I don't think I'd ever seen a fritillary in person before  (that exotic orange thing at left).  I remember seeing them advertised on the back of Parade magazine, back when we had a newspaper and got Parade magazine on Sundays....

But when I googled fritillary, I didn't see anything like this.  Butterflies, mostly, and what they used to call "checkered lily," on the backs of those Parades.

So I googled big orange spring flower, and I started to see some images for this, but no one else knew what it was, either.  "Flower in my neighbor's yard."  "Big orange bell flower."  I had high hopes for Листья бадана смотреться потрясающе as a caption for an image of this sort of flower, but Google translated it as "Bergenia leaves look awesome," and when I googled bergenia, well, this is clearly not bergenia.

Digression:
It is EXCELLENT!!!! that I can find out everything I can find out!  First, to be able to find other images of this sort of flower, pretty easily, and then that I can get translations of not only another language but another alphabet!  Totally excellent!  What a great time for a curious person to live!  !!!!!  One day I'll do a post on a list of the things I've looked up in one day.........
End of Digression.

I kept looking at images for "big orange flower" and finally found myself looking at Phoenix Perennials' October 2007 newsletter.  The very last plants in that newsletter are Fritillaria imperialis Crown Imperial, and the images are clearly this sort of flower.  So I guess my memory didn't let me down, and this is a fritillary.  Yay.

Fancy tulips.

Calla lily!  I'd never seen one of these growing outside.

Looking down into the calla lily.

More fancy tulips.

Tearing myself away from that garden.  One of their neighbors has a lot of similar maroon colors -- and a statue.

To get to Wines from our old house, you walk around to the other end of our block, cross the street, keep going up the hill, jog a little to the left, where there's a path, between two houses, that leads north.  Beyond the houses and yards, the land is owned by the school district.  Forsythe (the junior high school I attended) is out of the pic below, at right.  These are the playing fields (and tennis courts, upper right) of the junior high.

Elementary kids from this neighborhood walk this path to school.  I was in second grade when we moved into this neighborhood.  I was big; I don't remember thinking this was daunting.  I'm told it was, for a kindergartener.

Those low brown buildings near the top of the image are the elementary school.  They built the junior high while I was in elementary school......  The elementary school was new, too.  My class was the first to go through it from kindergarten (though I only joined them in first grade).

White redbud, in the yard that used to belong to my piano teacher.  And maybe she still lives there, I don't know.

More tulips.

Looking at our old house from a slightly different angle.

The house is different, but the pine trees are still there.........

Someone else who goes to Ann Arbor School of Yoga lived in this house before we did.  I don't know why I recognized her when I saw her at yoga, but I did.  She recognized me, too, after I told her who I was.  My mom says our families did not have contact other than when we were buying the house, so for Kathy and me to recognize each other, 55 years after we met, once, at age 7, is sort of amazing.  (I think I remember encountering her once or twice in the intervening 55 years, but she doesn't remember that, so who knows.)

Kathy told me that one time, when the people who own this house now were having a garage sale, they let her look in the house.  She said she didn't recognize anything (with all the changes that have been made to the house).  I wonder if I would.....................  The front of the house looks totally different now.  I can imagine the inside does, too.



My sister and I had lunch at Zingerman's Bakehouse, and spent a little time at the University's exhibit museum.  Then she dropped me at my house, and went on to join her husband at the conference he was attending.  A pleasant, if whirlwind, visit!



Walking to yoga.  Azaleas.

Ducks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  (at West Park)

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