Lenten Roses

Saint Salome’s on Culver Road
Sign in front of Saint Salome's on Culver Road
Sign in front of Saint Salome’s on Culver Road

We walked over to Kathy’s today expecting to find her garden in first gear. Her Lenten Roses were in bloom and the daffodils were almost open. Kayakers and fishing boats were out on the bay and the temperature was headed toward seventy. We walked by the new townhouses on Culver, the ones that chased Matthew and Louise out of the neighborhood. I miss them and St. Salome’s, the church they tore down to build the townhouses (you can see one of them behind the sign above). The church was looking pretty run down. I always like that they advertised the “Sacrament of Penance.”

Saint Cecilia’s on Culver Road
Bingo sign in front of Saint Cecilia's on Culver Road
Bingo sign in front of Saint Cecilia’s on Culver Road

St. Cecilia’s, further down Culver, still has one weekly mass but no parish priests, no school and no bingo. They sold most of their property to a senior living facility. According to the Diocese of Rochester website, Rochester had 54,500 Catholics when the diocese was formed in 1868. The average Catholic then was socio-economically poor and they gathered according to their ethnic background in 35 parish churches (and 29 mission churches.) By 1966 there were 155 parishes (and 36 mission churches.) Each had parish priests and two or three daily masses. Today they are closing shop all over town. There are so many alternatives. Spiritualism was founded in the city of Rochester by the Fox sisters. The Mormon faith originated in Palmyra, just east of Rochester.

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Wladziu Valentino Liberace

Garlic drying in our garage
Garlic drying in our garage

Liberace photobombed my shot of our garlic drying in the garage. He performed two nights at Canandaigua’s Performing Arts Center in 1985. We didn’t see the show but I snagged the poster from Record Archie once the dates had passed.

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Missing Log Cabin

White Amaryllis in living room
White Amaryllis in living room

We heard the red-winged blackbirds’ song but we couldn’t spot any of the birds in cattails along Hoffman Road. The outlet from Durand Lake has cut a swiftly flowing stream through the beach on the big lake so we were unable to cross. The roads through the park are all so descriptive. There was a zoo on Zoo Road and there is a pinetum along Pine Valley Road. Lakeshore Boulevard is aptly named. There are ferns on both sides of Sweet Fern Road so there must have been a log cabin on Log Cabin Road.

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Off Landmark Society Tour

Goofy house on Garford Road
Goofy house on Garford Road

At dinner last night, in Kathy’s backyard, Jan mentioned a recent house fire in which someone had died. It was on Garford Road, one of the streets off Culver, and we were trying to place it. We walk in a different direction most days so if it is nearby, we have been down it many times. Turns out it is one of the sunnier streets and we prefer the tree-lined ones so we were not that familiar with it. We walked over there today and most of the Cape Cod is still standing but it looks like a total loss.

This nearby house caught our attention and we stopped to study it. We discussed the charred logs on the beds of white stones and the weathered stump with a plate on top of it. Peggi directed my attention to another detail and I broke out laughing, quickly catching myself because some of the neighbors were outside. She had said, “It appears they don’t want anyone using their front door.”

An American flag seems to completely cover one of the few windows in the house. The eagle (is that where the “spread eagle” term comes from?) at the peak is a nice touch. This patriotic section of the house appears to have a spotlight on it. It’s odd that the person who designed the house recessed the garage. And the canvas awning they have on the window near the garage makes it impossible to see in or out of it.

The shades are completely down on the criss-crossed picture window and the diamond pattern is picked up again on the tiny window in the door. Finally, I love the house number, the two digits separated by the bare bulb lamp.

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World Unto Itself

End of Seneca Road in morning fog
End of Seneca Road in morning fog

Rain was predicted this morning so we got out early for our walk. The bay was especially beautiful in the fog. Parts of the bay were still frozen over and we couldn’t even see across to Webster. There are so many ways to walk down to the bay. Culver Road ends down there of course but each cross road off Culver (Point Pleasant, Seneca, Titus, and Norton) also winds down a hill to the bay. Each one is world unto itself.

Seneca Road ends at the Newport Yacht Club. You can just see the tip of one of their docks in the photo above. And there is a new house going up just to the left. They cut way into the hillside to carve out a lot and are putting up a huge three story home. There was King’s Audio Technology van parked outside and while I was taking this picture the owners pulled up. We congratulated them on their new home and told them we used to go to the bathroom in the woods on their lot. They laughed and told us we could use their bathroom when their house is complete.

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Worm Moon

Worm moon over Culver Ridge Plaza. Photo by Peggi Fournier.
Worm moon over Culver Ridge Plaza. Photo by Peggi Fournier.

Peggi was up at the crack of dawn and caught the Worm moon over Culver Ridge Plaza. It is aptly titled as I just watched a robin pull a worm out of the formerly frozen ground.

We dove into Warhol’s Diaries last night on Netflix. Did Warhol want these made public? If it was just the AI voice reading the diaries that would be one thing but I find it a bit uncomfortable watching Rupert Murdoch’s wife and former Factory hangers-on analyzing Warhol’s insecurities. I guess it’s all part of the full picture and he did open the door.

"Philosophy of Andy Warhol" with Campbell's soup can drawing and autograph.
“Philosophy of Andy Warhol” with Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can drawing and autograph.
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Beautiful & Wild

House with funky flag on Lake Breeze
House with funky flag on Lake Breeze

We had one the best skis of the winter this morning. There was fresh snow and the wind was howling so our tracks from yesterday had drifted over. The temperature was in the mid twenties so it wasn’t heroic or anything, just beautiful and wild. Ann, the ski coach from West Irondequoit and a yoga buddy from when we used to meet in public, was out on the course with crutches. We stopped to chat and learned she had broken her ankle. She slipped on the ice while wearing clogs. I was thinking that’s what you get for wearing those ugly ass shoes but I kept it to myself. She giving encouragement to her team as they whizzed by.

Yesterday’s ski was problematic but we pulled it off by avoiding the lowlands where the recent thaw left slush under the snow. We only missed one day of skiing during the meltdown and took advantage of the down time to walk up to Aman’s. We brought back a peck of 20 Ouncers and Peggi made applesauce.

We watched Paris Saint-Germain play Real Madrid in the Champion’s League last night, an edge of of your seat match that remained 0-0 until the sixth minute of stoppage time when Mbappé, playing along side Neymar and Messi, danced around Lucas Vasquez and put one past Thibaut Courtois They deserved the win.

We followed that up with “The Two Faces of January,” based on another Patricia Highsmith book, a psychological thriller. We were on the edge of our seat for that one too.

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Floral Arranging

Common Hackberry bush on Walzford Road
Common Hackberry bush on Walzford Road

Walzford is one of our favorite streets. We make a point of going down it or coming back on it when we walk up to Aman’s. The lots are generous, the houses are all different having been built over many years rather than all at once so the street has a complex character. We ran into Marsha here, where she has a part-time job tending to one of the gardens. There is a fair amount of BLM banners and a wrap around porch with a sign overhead that reads, “Porch of Indecision.”

We shopped at both Aman’s and Wegmans so our backpacks were loaded. We could barely bend down without falling over but the pile of fresh flowers near the curb on Culver was irresistible. They must have been used briefly at an event, probably a funeral, and then discarded. White Lillies, purple flowers mixed with Eucalyptuse greens all freshly picked. We picked through the pile and carried an armload home. Peggi arranged four gorgeous displays in various parts of the house. It smells like a funeral parlor in here.

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Roulette

Kids in the water at Durand Eastman beach
Kids in the water at Durand Eastman beach

Folklore has it that one in every dozen Pimientos de Padrón, a popular Spanish tapa, may be hot. Most often the whole batch is mild but one time in Madrid, I can remember exactly where the cafe was, every single one of them was too hot to eat. We left them on the plate.

Fruition Seeds offered Pimientos de Padrón this year so we grew our own. We picked our first batch to have while we watched the Spanish men’s soccer team eliminate the host nation in the olympic semi-final. Eight or nine of them were hot as hell. Water doesn’t help but yogurt sort of neutralized the fire.

We put a new row of arugula in and it was up in three days. And another row of cilantro, our third. Our tomatoes are starting to roll in and the second planting of romaine is begging to be thinned. Peggi has been making little pizzas with our cilantro pesto and today we brought back a big bag of basil for traditional pesto which we plan to make with the garlic Jeff gave us from their garden.

Just watching the contractors work on our roof was exhausting. They jumped out of the truck at eight each morning and didn’t stop until five. We had a few things to do to stay ahead of them and then there was the nightly check on what they had done. We were thrilled with their work and they told us we were good people to work for.

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Hot Houses

Garden with buckets for cold weather
Garden with buckets for cold weather

The temperature was near ninety a few days ago. The street pool is open and we’ve been swimming for the last week. And now this.

I remember the big guy at Case’s saying, “Wait until Memorial Day to put your tomatoes in.” But that was the old days. We’ve gone with the 15th for years and when the long range forecast looked especially good we put them in early. It will be 70 on Monday but between now and then they are predicting lows around 43.

We rounded up every pot we could get our hands on to create little tents for the tomato and pepper plants. We started everything from seed and we need to protect these little babies. The basil, lettuce, Swiss chard, arugula, spinach, carrots, beets and mesclun will all be fine. They love this weather but we are walking a fine line with the tomatoes.

Our garden is in our neighbor’s old tennis court. He engineered the four tier electric fence to keep the ground hogs out. And he lets us use his hose to water. We make sure to keep him entertained. After we brought every plastic container we had down he let us borrow his buckets, some flower pots, his recycling containers and his wheelbarrow. Our plants are under each one of them. And there’s a few plants out in the open serving as a control group.

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Counting The Days

Newport Yacht Club on Irondequoit Bay
Newport Yacht Club on Irondequoit Bay

So many funky places to live. We walked down to the bay and found clusters of homes we never noticed before. Places that you can only get to by foot and can only see when the trees are bare. Seneca Road dead ends here at the Newport Yacht Club, thankfully not as fancy as it sounds. Just to the south Titus Avenue winds its way down to the bay. You can see the last of the homes on that street from here but you can only get there by boat. And to the north Point Pleasant goes down a steep hill to a gated community of condos but the road splits off into the forever funky Schnackel Drive and the private access walkway that leads by foot only to at least ten more homes that line the shore. All these neighborhoods are a short walk and each one makes you feel like you’ve left town.

Exactly one year ago today we had two other couples over for dinner. In our house without masks! An event we had arranged at the Little Cafe where Margaret Explosion was playing that Wednesday, the night news broke that Tom Hanks and his wife had Covid. Our house guest, Steve Black, had just left that morning. We went into lockdown the next day. Fast forward in a year that somehow went both fast and slow and we are only one week from being fully vaccinated. That is we had our second jab one week ago.

"Oh Yeah" by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 11.13.19. Peggi Fournier - sax, Ken Frank - bass, Phil Marshall - guitar, Paul Dodd - drums.
“Oh Yeah” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 11.13.19. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Phil Marshall – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums.
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Knowledge Bump

Quonset hut house on Titus Avenue Rochester, New York
Quonset hut house on Titus Avenue Rochester, New York

The funky neighborhood south of Lake Bluff Road in Sea Breeze will surely come up in value some day. Maybe just after we leave, the way the triangle between East Main, Culver and Merchants came up just as we left it. Not that I’d want to live in a neighborhood that has arrived. I’m just noting that it is under appreciated today. And funky. There’s tiny houses with views of the lake, dead end streets surrounded by woods and an anything goes attitude to property management. 

We walk in This neighborhood often. Sometimes we work our way up to the lake on Birch Hill Drive which skirts the edge of the park above Tamarack Swamp. We’ve even found a way to connect the dead end of that street, where you overlook the lake, to the dead end of Lake Bluff. This is Tom Sawyer stuff. 

Yesterday we found a street we had never been down before. Trelawne Drive. It too dead ends at cluster of homes, some of which have a view of the lake. Finding a new street is like the best part of a dream, the part where a whole new scene unfolds and you think, “I’ve got to remember how I got here.” It’s like finding out there is a new album of unreleased Eric Dolphy recordings. I had just read that Thelonious Monk called the swollen protrusion on Dolphy’s forehead his “knowledge bump” so he has been on my mind.

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Corrupto

Corruption graffiti along the Camino de Santiago in España
Corruption graffiti along the Camino de Santiago in España

It is impossible to get away from corruption. It is a good part of what makes the world go ‘round. We found this graffiti under a bridge on one of the last legs of the Camino Portuguese. We did it! We walked from Porto to Santiago. It went too fast.

My watch has the sunrise time in the upper left hand corner and because it automatically adjusted to the Spanish time zone I assumed it was telling us the time of the sunrise here. So we set the alarm for 7 AM to get an early start for the last of our two week walk. Turns out that was sunrise in Rochester. We were up before the coffee shops opened. In fact young people were still partying outside a bar when we left our hotel. The sun, in this western region of Spain does not break the horizon until 9 AM. We walked the first few hours with the aid of the flashlight on Peggi’s phone.

The Cathedral in Santiago is closed for repairs so no Botafumeiro. No problem. We did that last year when finished the Camino Frances. We’ll take a high speed train to Madrid tomorrow.

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Very Dreamy

Gardens at Wynona and Saint Paul Boulevard Landmark Society Tour 2019
Gardens at Winona and Saint Paul Boulevard, Landmark Society Tour 2019

The 1000 foot span of the Veterans Memorial Bridge led to the development of West Irondequoit, an early bedroom community for Kodak Park on the other side of the Genesee River. Gullies run all through Irondequoit, most so deep they remain undeveloped. Left here when the glaciers receded, their wildness is the prime attraction. Many homes have picture windows in the back that look out at them. The original owner of 959 Winona, on the corner of Saint Paul, cultivated his portion of a gully but the gardens were swallowed up by time. In the late seventies, the new occupants of the Neo-Classical home restored the garden and it was a feature of 2019’s Landmark Society Tour.

We picked up our tickets to this year’s event at Saint Mary the Protectress, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Saint Paul Boulevard. Cynthia Howk was sitting at the welcoming table and she introduced me to her colleagues as “Leo Dodd’s son.” This is Olga’s church. We were here for the funerals of both her parents and their services, sung in four part harmonies in Ukrainian, were extremely beautiful.

My watch said we walked four miles between houses but even the ones not on the tour showed nicely. The wet weather this Spring has been especially kind to plantings. There was a stately 6000 square foot mansion with dual staircases and two Arts & Crafts style Bungalows with wrap-around porches and a tiny little French Cottage, built in 1927. One house had a Speakeasy style bar in an inner room with no windows, just a wrap around bench, dark wooden paneling and a corner bar with just enough room for one person to stand behind and serve cocktails. The liquor bottles were lit and displayed on glass shelves in front of the mirror backed corner. Very dreamy.

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Push Pull

Leo's two person saw
Leo’s two person saw

We “suited up” (Permethrin-treated tick gear) in yesterday’s fifty degree temperatures and walked through the woods with this two person saw. It belonged to Leo, our former next door neighbor, and it still hangs in his old shed. Monica, the new, proud owner of the shed, let us borrow it. I couldn’t wait to use it.

Peggi and I traded ends a few times and coordinated our strokes to make short work of the big Sassafras that had fallen across our ski path at the very bottom of the biggest hill. We carried the saw all the way to the golf course and cleaned up four of five other blow downs. We’re ready for snow.

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Napkin Rings

Woman painting steeple at Christ Church in Irondequoit
Woman painting steeple at Christ Church in Irondequoit

The brakes on our 2003 Element went funky over the weekend. Not bad enough to reach the calipers but they just started falling apart. I called B&B Auto and they were able to take us in so we left before breakfast, dropped it off and walked back home. We stopped at I-Square for a latte and watched this woman scraping the wooden steeple on the church across from the House of Guitars.

We spotted a handmade sign across the street from the town hall for a “Record Album Sale” so we stopped to check it out. A guy with a black wig was loading a car in the driveway and he seemed bothered that we interested in the sale. He told us to wait a minute while he locked up the dogs and then he led us to a small room with thousands of records. “Everything is a buck” he said and that was the last we saw of him.

The records were in surprisingly good shape, some never played, and there were multiple copies of many. We had a short stack in no time, Nino Roto’s soundtrack to the Godfather, KC and the Sunshine Band, Art Tatum, Stand by Sly and Family Stone and something I had never seen before, Our Memories of Elvis with a picture of Elvis’s father and the Colonel on the front.

A woman was screaming at someone on the phone in another room. It seems her brother wanted her to pick him up and help him take back his empties. When she hung up she came in the small room to ask if we wanted some napkin rings. Peggi said no and then the woman asked if we canned. Peggi said yes, but that was as far as that conversation went. And then she started complaining about foreign people. “They want everything for nothing. Always trying to talk me down. I gotta get rid of this stuff. I’m just gonna give it all away.” She asked Peggi if she could get rid of the words on her tv. She said, “I’m a little hard of hearing but I don’t need the words at the bottom.” She was watching QVC and screaming at one of the contestants.

She got on the phone again and told someone that the guy had met someone on Facebook and he was moving out. She said, “I hope it’s a scam.”

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Cantalouped

End of Sea Breeze Pier in Rochester, New York
End of Sea Breeze Pier in Rochester, New York

Our neighbor, Jared, emailed that he had found gopher holes in the garden. We have a plot in his backyard because we have very little sun in ours. He also informed us that the animal had eaten two of our four Kale plants. We had been picking leaves off them for salads and the damage was not fatal. There is enough of the plants left for them to rally but we had to trap the thing before his next meal. Jared said he had a rotten cantaloupe in his refrigerator, left over from the last time he set the trap, so I cut off a piece. It had black and white mold spots on it but it was still juicy. It worked like a charm and we snagged a young groundhog within hours. I called Animal Control but they had closed for the holidays so fed him apple slices and strawberries until the they came this afternoon. Meanwhile more holes appeared and our neighbor’s broccoli and squash has been pruned. I reloaded the trap and will report back.

We have watched so much soccer in the past few weeks there has been little time for anything else. Except walking, of course, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice,” which we watch three times. The 1986 Swedish film is astoundingly beautiful. The long shots and limited cuts draw you in and won’t let you go. Erland Josephson’s character, after renouncing religion, makes a bargain with God, (a common Catholic tactic, one that promises you a vague eternity) if God can stop the impending holocaust of WW3.

Despite a numbing possession rate Spain let Russia beat them overtime with penalty kicks. I intended to wear my my Spain jersey for the match but it was too hot so I went shirtless. And Japan, playing the delicate, quick passing in thick situations type of game that is irresistable just couldn’t hold on to their sixty minute 2-0 lead over Denmark. Mexico, our default home team, took it to Brazil but couldn’t finish. We gave that match our all but we’ll now route for Brazil. Is it just us or is this the best World Cup ever?

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Half Moon

Lights on sidewalk in East Irondequoit
Lights on sidewalk in East Irondequoit

We managed to ski in the park yesterday but had to avoid large green patches where the wind and sun had cleared the snow. The temperature is winter-like but we haven’t had enough snow since that run in December. We may have to travel north to whiter pastures before Spring comes. The half moon in the clear skies over our home was too beautiful for a photo. I submit these holiday lights instead.

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Wanted

Theives attempting to break in to house off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
Theives attempting to break in to house off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York

Burglaries are good for business. Good for the video camera business, the alarm business and presumably profitable for the theives. These kids look like they are about 16 years old. Their images were caught on a newly installed camera which was mounted on a house these kids had already broken into a few weeks ago. There have been seven break-ins or attempted break-ins in our neighborhood in the last three or four weeks and everyone is talking about it or what they can do prevent it. I know some of the neighbors are armed. I don’t really “know” that they are but they have those “Stop the Safe Act” signs in their front yard and I assume that follows.

The young couple across the street just ordered a 3-pack of video surveillance cameras. If something moves over there while they’re out they’ll get an image sent to to their phones. I spotted a Doyle Alarm vehicle on the next street over and the neighbor down the street was talking about installing his own glass break sensor. The local police have really increased their patrols. It will be interesting to see how this all ends.

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No Lie

Local peaches at Aman's Market in Rochester, New York
Local peaches at Aman’s Market in Rochester, New York

My watch can be a little annoying, like when I’m riding my bike and I get a prompt to “work on my stand goal.” But yesterday I went through the express line at Wegman’s where a really young kid with a floppy afro was cashiering and with my wrist in the air I asked if he was familiar with Apple Pay. He said “just point your watch at the keypad” so I did and that was that. I was on my way.

We could hear a drum and bugle corps practicing while we were reading the Sunday paper. The high school is a few miles away but when the breeze is right you can hear the unison snares soaring over the woods. The school is right next to Wegmans so we rode back to the football field where the Buccaneers of Reading Pennsylvania were practicing for the big Labor Day competition at Rhinos Stadium. This is a lot more than snare drums. It’s like a musical marching army.

We had some peaches for dessert the other night and I said something about how good the local ones are and our friend, Jeff, told us a worker at a farm stand near him said “a late frost damaged all the peaches in New York State and if someone tells you they’re local, they’re lying.” Well, Aman’s Market is just down the road from the high school so we stopped in there next. We bought some more peaches and some prune plums. I planned on asking the owner if his peaches were really from Hamlin as the sign says but he wasn’t in. I’m ready to give them the benefit of the doubt. They don’t take Apple Pay though.

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