Today the color is orange. It's an upclose look of an orange rose. Yes, from one of the Mama's rose bushes. I cropped and enlarged a photo I took of the rose, then enhanced in Photoshop.  Nothing more to say. Until later.  

Hello Singular Live Oak Tree, So huge, so healthy, and so handsome! Thank you for helping make sweet oxygen for us as we walked through the Elkhorn Slough Reserve National Estuarine Research Reserve . It's the letter H at ABC Wednesday . Thank you, ABCW team!

I love the way the leaves cover our front yard this year. This may be the first year the yellow-and-red blanket is is thick.  The photos show how it looked today.  The Husband raked the leaves the day before yesterday.  While the Husband raked, I put up a few Christmas decorations around the yard to cheer up the Mama as she looked out the window as she ate her breakfast.  This time I did more than add red bows to the tree. See the green bough on the fence? That's new, thanks to the Godmother. She was downsizing her Christmas stuff, so she gave me the bough and a bunch of cool ornaments. The Autumn leaves and the holiday decorations in the front yard are a few of the things that perked me up this week. How about you? I'm linking up with the lovely Jenny Matlock's Warm Heart Wednesday . Click here to join the meme and/or read more warming posts.

"You have beautiful earrings," I said to the woman in the grey coat walking beside me. I was going with the flow of the crowd checking out the various food booths and trucks at yesterday's San Benito Olive Festival in our county. "Thank you," the woman replied, stopping to give me a better look at her earrings, so I thought. They were dangling earrings in an intricate delicate design with tiny balls hanging at the top and bottom. They had an East Indian look to them. As she was telling me how she had a lot of earrings that her relatives gave her she began to take one earring off. I figured for me to look at the lovely design closer. Some women do that—take off an earring to show another woman who is admiring them. I've done it myself. Why do we do that? I don't know. She handed me both earrings, which startled me. I studied them. "Gorgeous," I said, as I handed them back. She did not take them. "They're yours," she said...

My  ABC Wednesday   theme:  The Mama and Her Authentic Green Thumbs. . .and Fingers In the Mama's language of Ilocano, the word inang means mother. This photo is the Inang of the Mama when she was 70 years old or so. The last time the Mama saw her Inang was in October 1949, just before she sailed with the one-year old Only and Older Bionic Brother from the Philippines for the United States. The two were heading onward to their new lives with the Daddy, who was already living in their new home.  I think it's fascinating that the Inang of the Mama signed that photo in 1971 to her daughter not as Inang Mo (your mother) but by her first name Emeteria . That to me is very forward thinking for a woman of the Filipino culture of her generation, which makes me very proud. Having never met the Inang of the Mama, I do not think of her as lola (the Ilocano word for grandmother), but as the bright, beautiful, and bold woman Emeteria.   To know a little somethin...