Life in the Garden

Matters of Life and Death

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Warm and Friendly? Testify!

Kind Words From Our Clients:

Wholesale customer in Tacoma, WA: I really like your selections and your website is very easy to navigate.  I’m always on the lookout for new products to offer our families.

blue family keepsake urns

And a pet-owner in PA:

Thank you so much for your assistance over the phone regarding my choice for our pet, Cosmo. Our family is deeply saddened by her sudden passing and you made a difficult purchase bearable…we are grateful.

st. Francis pet urn

Baldwin, NY: “Thanks for having such a nice selection (especially the urn I’ve chosen as it was ‘the’ perfect one) and also for being so friendly and warm.”

blue companion urn

Thank you for letting us serve you.

Urn Garden Cremation Urns

The Have and the Have Nots

SHE WAS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY:

A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive.

BAD FENG-SHUI:

An eccentric loner is believed to have died of thirst after becoming trapped in a bizarre and intricate network of tunnels built from rubbish in his home.

Jesse James

So I finally got to see “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”. Loved it! Some might find it slow or dull, but the acting and cinematography is great. Brad portrayed Jesse James as the sociopath that he was, and Casey Afflek’s interpretation of Robert Ford is compelling.

Jesse was a cash cow not only for Robert Ford, but the whole state. Missouri is the cave state and so there are lots of hi-dee holes for the James gang.

Jesse james hide out

Jesse’s mother, Zerelda, who lost a hand to firebomb during a Pinkerton raid, allowed tourists to view the grave of her son for 25 cents. She sold rocks from his grave and legend has it that when the rock supply ran low, she simply restocked from the river. She also gave paid tours of the farm shortly after Jesse’s death, a practice that was continued by Frank in later years.

Jesse James corpse

jesse james tourist attraction

As we do in this part of the country, Jesse married his first cousin, Zee after a nine-year courtship. They had two children, Jesse Edwards and Mary.

Zee James suffered from a deep depression after her husband’s death, became reclusive and continued to wear her widow’s weeds long after Jesse’s assassination. Zee died in 1900.

Memorial Service Ideas: Snow Drop Flower

snow drop flower

The fragile beauty of the snowdrop flower pushes through the harsh elements to reveal the promise of brighter days and rebirth.

Snowdrop is one of the first bulbs to bloom in the early Spring. Usually they’ll appear January thru April and can form impressive carpets of white blossoms.  Snowdrops spread, but are not invasive, so that if you come back to the same spot year after year you may feel lifted at the sight of their patient, modest increase. A gardener friend tells me there are many places around the country where they have established themselves for more than a hundred years.

snow drop flower Painswick Garden, U.K.
Painswick Garden, U.K.

Snowdrops and Carnations are both considered winter flowers and might be two ideas to consider for a January memorial service , grave side or memorial garden planting. When the earth begins to warm in the spring, a memorial stone or tree dedication could be added to personalize the sacred spot.

white carnation funeral wreath

Social Marketing

JP’s post on the Twitter tool, blew me out of the water and totally validated my thoughts on using the application for my business. Over the past year I’ve watched the My Space come and go, Facebook is hot, and now Twitter. Meanwhile, I’m still clunking away trying to understand the blog concept.

And frankly folks, nobody wants to read about death and dying every word of every post, and Blawg knows, I can’t bear to write about it. Jet Packs’ laid it on the line:

And here’s where marketers fail: They don’t see the revenue stream. And here’s what they don’t want to hear: There is no revenue stream. Corporate blogs failed for the same reason. No one wants to write a company blog (and even fewer want to read it) that amounts to nothing more than spider food, especially when you have the comments feature disabled.

The blog has worked as spider food, and I’ll continue plunking away, trying to blend the life that I currently live: fitness in the morning, funeral in the afternoon.