In Maine, Spring isn’t quite over, but we are edging ever closer to summer.

The view from my living room window shows how the trees are almost in full leaf.

Green, green, green is the predominant color in my yard.

Minerva, our guard cat, watches over the garden.

I always complain that I have one of the worst yards in Winthrop in which to garden. These sweet speckled violets prove my point. Once they were in the bed featured in the picture above. Did they like it there? They did not. Even though the conditions seemed just right in the bed, the violets abandoned ship to take up residency on the lawn.

By the side of our house, we also have traditional violets that look especially fetching alongside the beloved ferns.

I’m still busy with gardening and will be for the next couple of weeks. It looks as though I won’t be able to accomplish all that I set out to do with composting and fertilizing.  I am seriously considering letting the leaves stay in the hosta beds for natural composting and fertilizing. After all, to quote my friend Jim, those hostas are as tough as a bag of hammers.

Anyway, we shall see.

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Watching

Movies

Pressure, with Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott

In the United States, Memorial Day was on Monday, May 25. Memorial Day is not only a time to remember loved ones who have passed, but also to honor the service and sacrifice of those who are and were in the armed forces.

Therefore, when we saw that the movie Pressure was playing at our local Regal Cinema on Monday, May 25, we figured this was the perfect day to see it.

Pressure is a movie about the weather. Specifically, what the weather would be like when the Allies planned to invade Normandy on June 5, 1944, also known as D-Day. (I expect most readers are at least familiar with the broad outlines of what happened on D-Day, and that no spoiler warnings are necessary.)

General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), an American, commanded the Allied forces, and his concern about the weather was warranted. Bad weather would make landing impossible, thus putting the whole invasion in jeopardy. But postponing the event also had its perils, not the least of which was that crucial information might be leaked to the Germans.

Enter the meteorologists—James Stagg (Andrew Scott), a prickly Scotsman, and Irving Krick (Chris Messina), an overconfident American. (Is there any other kind?) The movie opens seventy-two hours before the planned invasion on June 5. Krick, going by the weather in the past, predicts that the day will be sunny and calm. Stagg, receiving reports of storms approaching Great Britain and France, thinks otherwise.

The decision to attack on June 5 or to postpone the invasion is the central tension of the movie, and Pressure does a terrific job of ratcheting up this conflict. We all know the outcome, yet I was still on the edge of my seat as Stagg and Krick fought about the weather, and Eisenhower had to decide what to do.

Andrew Scott and Chris Messina were perfectly cast as the feuding meteorologists. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, and I was sympathetic with both men. Unfortunately, Brendan Fraser’s volatile performance as Eisenhower was not quite as good. I have read that Eisenhower took pride in being calm and measured, in not having meltdowns under pressure, which must have been considerable in the lead-up to D-Day.

Still, the movie is very much worth seeing, a timely reminder of the courage and wisdom our leaders displayed when the outcome of the war lay in balance.

Once upon a time, we had great leaders who did the right thing. Perhaps, someday, we will have them again.