Every garden should have a pond -- Photos by Pat Bean
“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.” — Frances Hodgson Burnett
Travels With Maggie
News in the world today is not good. Anybody who doesn’t know this is suffering from reality disorder.
We may soon be eating radioactive fish. There are shooting wars aplenty including gang wars in our own country. We’re suffering from loss of freedoms because of terrorist threats, and from corporate greed that’s making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have a melting ice cap, diminishing wetlands and rain forests, and politicians running amok all over the globe.
The purple tulips
How does a person stay sane amidst all the chaos? It’s not easy.
The red turtle
As a former journalist who was deeply embedded in world affairs for 37 years, I spent the first six months in retirement rarely reading a newspaper. It was a nice reprieve.
But I’ve now returned to my morning dose of worldly events, and because it’s still one of this country’s few newspapers that doesn’t believe Britney Spears, Charlie Sheen or Lindsey Lohan’s shenanigans belong on its front page, the online version of the New York Times is my first newspaper-with-coffee choice of information these days.
Belle in the meadow -- Photo by Pat Bean
What I read rarely cheers me up. But I have an antidote, my morning walk with Maggie, where I let Mother Nature’s reality convince me there is still hope for the world. For the past week the walk has simply been around my daughter’s five-acres of land in Camden, Arkansas.
The view includes my daughter’s “Secret Garden,” which is still under construction. And yes, it is named after the book of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett written in 1910. It was one of my favorite books as a child, and one each of my children also read and loved.
If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s still in print and you can even download it for free on your Kindle. Meanwhile here are a few of the peaceful sights Maggie and I have been seeing this past week.
Pat Bean's blog 
it’s a lovely peaceful post, Maggie, and yes I should read it. I just put up a blog which is also a book I belive everyone should read esp a certain tale