Category: Life Is A Spell

Lake Ontario’s level is right at its November long term average but the sandy beach looks bigger than ever. We’re not the only ones who have taken to walking the length of Durand during the pandemic. And there is plenty of room to distance when passing other parties.

We came back through the woods along the golf course and saw only one foursome. My brother, Tim, an avid golfer, told us the course was closing for the year after today. He had stopped by to pick up the golf balls I’ve found, the last of three batches I gave him this year, a couple hundred balls. The only ones I keep are the Supersoft matte balls in the hot colors.

Real Madrid played Villarreal to a 1-1 tie yesterday. Modric (our MVP ), the 6″ 4″ goalie and Toni Gross all started. Vinicius and Isco came in as subs but for some reason most of their starting lineup was on the bench. We watched the match in Spanish and they probably told us why but we didn’t catch it.

We finished our walk down at the garden and picked a big batch of arugula, cilantro and romaine. Peggi’s making more pasta for a lasagna dish with the last batch of fresh tomatoes sauce. We recorded Atletico vs. FC Barcelona and we’ll watch that one over dinner tonight.

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I am not tired of winning. My next door neighbor, Rick, probably won more games than I did this year but I won today and the last time out. He keeps track of these thing on a calendar but doesn’t tally the results until the holidays. The paint has about worn off the shoes and they are starting to rust.

The cold snap we had a few days ago finally did our tomatoes in. Peggi made a fresh sauce with the remaining tomatoes and we had that over her homemade pasta. The arugula and spinach love this weather and the romaine is thriving but the peppers are done. It was so nice tonight we decided to cook out, roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

I am happy to hear the Rochester Red Wings are now a Washington Nationals farm team. I’ve always preferred the National League and grew up when they were affiliated with the Cardinals. I hate the AL’s designated hitter rule.

My mom was a baseball fan and got Stan Musial’s autograph when he was playing for the Wings. We had Knot Hole cards when we were young and used to keep track of the games on the scorecards they sold at the stadium. Rochester’s International League included Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo and Havana. I remember seeing a game with Havana just before the shooting that got them kicked out. Fidel Castro threw out the first pitch when the Wings played their season opener in Cuba in 1960.

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We got as far at the corner this morning before finding more wood by the curb. Someone had split some large red oak logs into hefty wedges. They were asking to be taken home. We took a few pieces with us and went back for the car. It was only 30 degrees today but perfect for working outdoors.

We fired up the spitter and went to work. Peggi and I make a good team, splitting and stacking. We have way too much wood but this stuff was irresistible. Dense and heavy, you could cut perfect 4 by 4’s out it and build rock solid corners. Full of BTUs, the splitter barely took a bite before the just logs popped off.

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Our garage smells like Schutt’s Cider Mill. We bought a big bag of 20 Ouncers at Orbaker’s in Williamson on Sunday, just before they closed their stand for the year. We didn’t have room in the refrigerator so we have them in cold storage. We plan to make apple sauce with those.

The apples in the photo above are Ida Red’s from Lagoner Farms in Williamson. They used to be our favorite apple. We’ve been stuck on Honey Crisps for the last couple of years and Orbakers was sold out so we came home with Snap Dragons. They are just just as crisp and refreshing but a little less juicy with bit of tartness.

European settlers who brought apple seeds to New York in the 1600s. Dried apples were a staple for colonists and hard apple cider was a popular drink. The micro climate along the lake provides an extended growing season. Lucky for us.

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It doesn’t often reach 81 degrees in November but it did today. We started by walking along the beach. We went around this guy and I positioned myself to photograph him. “Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.” – Eduardo Chillida

One of neighbors, down back, has a gas powered leaf blower that they use almost every day. We have one too but it’s not like this one. Where our electric blower goes on with a switch and stays on until we’re done, this neighbor continually throttles theirs’ up and then down. So you can’t get used to the noise. We thought for sure that it was the new neighbors, the ones that have dutifully tried to maintain a green lawn all summer and lined the edge of their property with with fallen trees. We walked down there today and discovered the source, a woman we see all the time, “The Coronal,” a former military officer with purple hair and a yappy white dog. She had headphones on. We waved.

Peggi and I made a racket as well, first with our leaf blower on the roof, then the driveway and finally with our mower which we use as a mulcher. The oak leaves have half their mass this year due to the Gypsy Moth infestation and they are more than half down so one more noise session will do it for this year.

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We surprised a fox in the woods this morning, not jumping over a lazy dog but brown and quick. As soon I said “There’s a ” he was running across the creek and out of sight. It was too cold for golfers this morning so we cut across the golf course on our way back from the lake and returned through the woods.

We live close enough to the railroad tracks for the whistle to sound lonesome as it rolls through downtown. And I could picture us on Amtrak, trays down with our devices and books, headed to NYC to stay with Duane in Brooklyn and run around the city from gallery to museum to a place in Chinatown for dinner. I could see us hanging out at his place at night, sharing photos, listening to music and sipping scotch before bed. But then I remembered.

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After braving two art shows last week we made reservations for the Warhol show at the MAG. The cow wallpaper and the silver clouds are there along with some of his TV shows. And there are many of his silkscreens there including the Myths series which we owned for many years. We bought the series as a group with my brother and our friend, Kim, in SF from Ronald Feldman Gallery for $6,000 and then sold them at Christie’s in 2017. We stored them all behind our piano on Hall Street until my brother moved out of his Manhattan apartment

The deal was a bit of a gamble because we were buying the prints before Warhol created them. The series was called “Myths” and included The Star, The Witch, Howdy Doody, Uncle Sam, Superman, Mammy, Dracula, Santa Claus, The Shadow, and Mickey Mouse. A bonanza! It will be a thrill to revisit them.

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Sometimes, because of the size of the waves and or the amount of recent rain, it can be next to impossible to walk the entire length of Durand Eastman Beach. The lake was calm this morning but it has been raining for a few days so the outlets from the various small lakes were really running. A guy coming toward us had taken his shoes off to wade across this one. We made it but got our shoes wet.

There were hardly any golfers out and those that were had to carry their clubs. I took advantage of that by going off trail and following the edge of the fairway. I found thirteen golf balls, the most in months. One was so orange it glowed in my hand. Too orange to photograph even.

After bushwhacking I brushed off real good. It will be nice when we don’t half to worry about Lyme anymore. We have two friends who have been involve in a study at UR and they tell us vaccine they give dogs works on humans and and it is now only a matter of determining the dose.

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My parents moved us from the city to Webster when I was ten. My father saved some money by finishing the family room and the bedroom above it himself. We made frequent trips out there when the house was going up and sort of helped my father as he cut and hung the paneling in the two rooms. The bedroom was designated for my three youngest brothers. The five of us boys were sharing one bedroom in the city.

The housing development was in an old corn field and it was surrounded by corn fields. Webster, pre-Xerox, was a real frontier. They had not yet built the bay bridge so the two routes we took were Empire Boulevard and the “the Dugway,” Browncroft Boulevard. Empire Boulevard, which starts in the city as Clifford Avenue, was a three lane road. The middle lane, a turning or passing lane, was shared by traffic in both directions. There was a gas station near Howard Johnson’s in Eastway Plaza where they collected the head-ons.

We lived on the other side of the four corners on the fringe of the village. 250 or Webster Fairport Road was called North and South Avenue when it crossed the four corners. And somewhere in there it was called Nine Mile Point Road. I always pictured the point as the the big sand cliff overlooking Lake Ontario. It was just to the east of Andy Finn‘s cottage, sort of across Lake Road from that little grocery store between 250 and Philips Road.

There was a little creek there, labeled Four Mile Creek on today’s map, that flowed into the lake and it was lined with funky summer homes. Andy Finn’s father owned the Texaco Station in town. His family rented a big green cottage on Lake Ontario right near Nine Mile Point and we spent a lot of time there. His parents sat around with their friends drinking beer from the can while the flip tops piled up around them. A community of summer homes was just to the west of them, near where Hedge’s is today. It seemed like the Finns had the nicest place. Its been torn down and the whole area has been redeveloped. 

When Peggi and I moved back here in the mid seventies I revisited that spot and took these photos. I was taking a photo class at the UofR then and I used it a class project. It is interesting to me how I am still taking the same photos today. The cropping was a little clumsy but the chunky composition and flattening of the plane are still my tendencies. 

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Peggi is watching Petra’s (from Fruition Seeds) video presentation on planting garlic. Old-timers tell us to plant on October 15th. Petra says we can even plant earlier. We plan to scoop up a wheelbarrow full of our leaf mulch and bury the cloves in the far corner of the garden.

The carrot above may have grown from three seeds. It is wider than most of our carrots but much shorter and it has three roots. We picked a bag’s worth today because someone got into our garden over night and ate most of the carrot tops. It ate nearly half a row of Jared’s lettuce and it knocked some the branches off our kale plants. Jared theorizes that the fur on the groundhogs backs has gotten so thick for winter that they can’t feel the charge when they slink under electric fence.

We took some pear shavings and a slice of plum down there to put in our Hav-A-Heart trap. We’ll report back.

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We walked in the rain this morning and then read the paper while the rain changed to hail outside. The temps are headed back up to the 70s this weekend and we’ll think about closing the pool after that.

The sun came out for the afternoon and we headed down to the garden. We noticed a groundhog by our mailbox spinning in circles. It was getting so dizzy it kept falling over only to get back up and continue walking in tight circles. We felt so sorry for it. Since our garden is in Jared’s back yard we asked him what he thought we should do about the groundhog. 

Instead of trapping him Jared thought we should just call Animal Control and have them either test it for rabies or put it out of its misery. We only got a recording at Animal Control so we left a message and didn’t know if that meant they would come or not. 

The groundhog crossed the road and Rick came out of his house so Jared, Rick, Peggi and I all watched the groundhog walk in circles. Rick considered getting his 22 out, the one he bought with S&H stamps in 1966. Jared asked Rick if he had a baseball bat and Rick brought out an aluminum softball bat. Jared grew up on a farm and he did what had to be done. I went in the garage to get a small pink flag that I picked up on one of our walks. I was going to mark the body so Animal Control could find him but when I came back out Animal Control was on the scene.

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The lake must be lower than the long term average. The newspaper keeps that stat on the back page of the sports section. Last time I looked it was above average. There was plenty of beach and hardly anyone on it so walked all the way to Rock Beach Road, Rochester’s Gold Coast, where the private property signs come out. We turned around there and walked the beach back to Zoo Road. It felt like we were on an exotic vacation.

We were reading when I spotted someone backing into our driveway. An old man slowly got out of the car and opened his trunk. I couldn’t imagine who it was. As he walked toward our door I realized it was a friend from high school. We had not seen each other since the pandemic started. He showed us two aspirin-sized bottles of a THC product that he had picked at Building 12, Kodak’s former film finishing operation, a building he used to work in. He takes the capsules for pain and seemed quite pleased with the product. Coincidentally I was wearing my long sleeve Kodak shirt, the one I’m wearing the photo above. I bought it on a visit to Kodak’s camera store. I was there with father when Kodak was still in the film business.

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We walked up to Aman’s this morning and noticed their Fresh Corn sign was not out front. In fact I saw it was out behind the building. I can’t believe corn season is over already. Here’s hoping they’ll get a late harvest.

Shelley emailed us about passing along her book to an editor at ADK’s magazine. That reminded us that we were going to put large versions of her artwork online and then link to them from the drawings in her book. So Peggi and I spent the afternoon posting the enlargements as links from her book. We realized “A Year in the Woods” is a perfect pandemic companion. Check it out if you get a chance.

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Interesting that people listen to loud EDM in their cars so early in the morning. We were headed up to the town hall to put our taxes in the contactless dropbox they have out back, a walk we used to do all the time when we were patronizing the library. Plastic Recipe 21 Premium Vodka bottles are still strewn along Titus.

We spotted an old cot by the road with a thin, rolled up mattress. It reminded me of the one my brother Fran slept on when we were growing up. The five boys were in one room. Mark and me in a double bed, John and Tim in bunk beds and Fran on the cot.

We’ve had a mattress rolled up in our basement for years. It is our guest mattress since our house has only one bedroom. We always ask friends who’ve slept over how they liked it and they have never complained. We recently slept down there ourselves when they were warning of high winds and found it really uncomfortable. We upped our game and ordered an inflatable mattress from REI. We’re going to test that later today.

Although La Liga is already a week into their new fanless season the three teams we care most about have not yet played. Both Real Madrid and Barcelona play this weekend and then Atlético. I watched a pre-recorded Atlético match from last season this morning, a 1-1 draw where they were seriously outplayed by Real Sociedad.

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Things that were all green just a few weeks ago are taking on beautiful colors.

I worry that the forced isolation brought on by the pandemic is making us, not just Peggi and me but a lot of us, less “sociable” (adjective: Willing to talk and engage in activities with other people; friendly). Although loneliness is a real problem it is not so bad inside your own head. Confronting strangers is more awkward than ever. Are they wearing a mask? Are they taking this thing seriously? We are more judgmental than ever.

We took the path through Tamarack Swamp this morning and when we got to the boardwalk we were following a woman with two dogs, both off leash. We slowed our pace and watched her put the dogs on a leash when she got to Lakeshore Boulevard. She had earbuds in and was was talking to someone on her phone while taking up most of the path. Peggi masked up and said, “I’m going to pass her.” As she ran by, one of the dogs growled and lurched at her, would have bit her if the leash was six inches longer. She pulled the dogs close and I walked by. We decided to ditch her and walk along the beach but she came up behind us and let her dogs off leash again. Peggi looked at the woman and said, “Really?” There is a leash law.

The woman grinned and said, “Sorry you’re so angry.” We skipped the beach and waited for traffic to slow before crossing Lakeshore Boulevard. A car was coming especially fast so we stepped back and then they hit the brakes and waved us across. People aren’t so bad.

On the ridge trail we spotted a runner coming up the hill toward us. We masked up and stepped into the woods to let him pass while he slowed to a walking pace. When he reached us he said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve already had it.”

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Our weather app showed rain all day. We walked anyway with rain gear, the hooded things that scrunch up into the zippered pocket when when we’re not using them. There was hardly anyone else out. The woods was dreamy, the soft rain, the degree of separation that the hood provides. I forgot where I was for minute, a sensation I love, similar to the feeling you get when you are on a brand new trail, going somewhere you have never been before.

The three walks we took across Spain had us in this suspended state. I want more.

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Our neighbors on both sides feed the birds. And even feed the woodpeckers. We have three kinds of woodpeckers around here. The Pileated are the most dramatic. They sound like monkeys and look a lot like the Woody Woodpecker character. Then there is a medium sized one with red on it. And the smaller ones in various shades of grey, one of which was hammering away at the soffit of our house for a few weeks. We kept shooing it away but but it had free reign while we were out so we wound up with a hole big enough for me to put my fist in.

Our neighbor suggested Great Stuff, the plastic foam filler that comes out of a can. We found it at Lowes and arranged a curb side pick-up. I went up on the roof, laid down on my stomach and squirted the stuff up the hole while Peggi guided me from below. I have this hideous formation of goop hanging down from that spot and plan to go back up there tomorrow to cut it off. I’m thinking of painting the filler brown.

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We don’t plan our daily walks unless we need something at Aman’s or Home Depot or Rubino’s. And we don’t like to go out and back on the same route so we make somewhat of a circle out of it and wander for four or five miles. We spotted this giant puffball in the woods at the end of our street and then headed down to the bay via Liberty Avenue, a road we don’t often take. It was surprisingly quiet for a holiday and there were a lot of flags flying like Labor Day has something to do with patriotism. We followed Seneca Road to where it ends in front of both the Mohawk Yacht Club and N.Y.C. (Newport Yacht Club). It was quiet on the bay too.

On the way back we saw a grey Corvette with the top down. The side of the car had the letters TRUMP on them and a Donald Trump dummy was sitting in the passenger seat. We guessed there might have been a Boaters for Trump rally going on down at the lake.

If it wasn’t for this pandemic we’d be downtown tonight keeping Rochester in the national news and demanding justice for Daniel Prude.

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I was beginning too think AD Espanã was packing it in due to Covid. July/August was one issue and I was jones’n for the September offering and kept checking the Apple bookstore for the new issue. Two days before the calendar flipped they released it. $3.99 a pop. The perfect compliment to dreams of Spain.

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Our garden is giving back. The hours we spent down there this year were more enjoyable than most. The pandemic forced us to gear down and enjoy the ride.

We went all in for Fruition Seeds this year and started everything from seed, their seed, the organic stuff. And we learned so much from Petra and her videos. A PopWars shoutout to her!

It’s Been a Good Year for the Roses.

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