Hagia Triada, an accidental Triad

05 05 2011.  Apparently abandoned by a neighbor who has vacated the house and placed these in the area to be collected by the garbage company, I both admired the light and considered these as a significant-seeming triad!

Like a series of Russian dolls or nested cubes or cylinders, these apparently were being utilized as deck seats in the outdoor eating area of a neighbor's house.

But one immediately thinks of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Father and Mother and Baby, whose little chair was just right for little Goldilocks.

And then a friend half a world away just wrote by e-mail that they are iconic, like Three Muses or Three Saints.  There are so many triads, such as the Etruscan ancestors of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in the Capitoline temple in Rome.

Greek uses the same word, triada, for the Trinity, so the little chapel that lends its name to a small town in Crete where a villa-sized Minoan palatial residence was excavated a century ago, is called Hagia Triada.  Of course, in serious theology a triad of gods is one thing and a god in three persons is another.  It's three, though, in either case.

Now that the university semester is over, and houses that were leased to graduate students are vacated, my fig tree has figlets big enough to be photographed, advanced enough indeed that I expect them to be ripe before the first week of July, the usual date.  If I give them an extra bit of water (though we do not usually want for rain here), they might be nice this year.  They are pale small figs, in any case, not the lovely black Mission figs of California, but they make good preserves.

05 05 2011.  Figs still dwarfed by the fig leaves.