Carrots, tomatoes and basil from garden on my t-shirt
Today’s walking route finished down at the garden (in our neighbor’s backyard). I forgot to bring a bag so I used my t-shirt to carry our pickings home. Peggi had two nice looking beets in her hands. She took a photo of me as a six foot gauge, something to calculate the height of our tomato plants by. We don’t get full sun down here, maybe four hours, so the plants keep reaching. They are no less laden with fruit though.
We’re getting pretty good at avoiding people on our walks and we’re able get our masks up in a hurry when we do run into them. We walked to Aman’s Farm Market the other day and ran into the owner. We asked how he was doing during all this and he told us he was doing great. The market is close to open-air in this weather and it feels safe in there so we were glad to hear it. But he did lose some good, long-time customers, ones that wouldn’t wear a mask inside. One guy told him it was all a conspiracy and the owner said goodbye to him.
Paul as gauge of height of tomato plant. Photo by Peggi Fournier.Leave a comment
Chicken Mushroom on the ridge trail through Durand Eastman
I had to tear myself away from the live feed from Sturgis, South Dakota. The camera is positioned over Sturgis Liquor across the street from the “Knuckle Saloon.” There’s a flashing sign out front reading “Jack Daniels Apparel Sold Here” and a van, parked under the sign, advertises “Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey.” It’s no wonder the people on the street walk so funny.
We watched an HP Lovecraft documentary last night. I’m not recommending it but it did color our encounter this afternoon with an Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp. Peggi identified the creature with her iNaturalist app and we were relieved to learn the “Killer Wasp” part is not where the emphasis should be. The huge, black and white striped wasp is not particularly dangerous to humans. It is the “Cicada Killer” part of the name that tells the Lovecraftian story. What we were looking at, a creature darting around on our driveway, was the wasp trying to kill the Cicada.
NYT featured an article about how readers were coping with the pandemic blues. A Milwaukee reader said, “I’ve been painting rocks and leaving them on paths at parks for a happy little surprise for someone.” Here in Rochester we too have come across those damn things and I can’t tell you how annoying they are out in nature. More annoying than those stone piles that people make on beaches.
Olive oil, tomatoes, basil, basil in a plastic bag tent and carrots from the garden
We spent some time down in the garden today. Some weeding, some planting (a new row of cilantro), some watering. I tied up the new growth on our tomato plants. Some of them would be eight foot tall if they hadn’t run out of stake. And of course we picked stuff (beets, basil, cilantro, arugula and kale).
It was especially nice down there because Michael Burritt, the percussion teacher at the Eastman School of Music, had his windows open and he was playing one of his melodious mallet instruments. He has a signature brand of vibes. Either that or xylophone. I always get those mixed up. And he has a particularly loud air conditioner which is usually on in the summer but it wasn’t today. So it was a treat to hear him play.
Warren Philips in his gallery with Antonio Tapies print on the wall.
Driving down Culver, a route we used to take almost daily pre-pandemic, I had a creepy feeling come over me. I didn’t miss the short ride to downtown, not at all. I wondered aloud if we were disengaging with the world. A gold, early seventies, Chevy pick-up was waiting at the Norton Street intersection with Culver Road. I couldn’t wait to get a better look at it and when we did I was delighted to see a young couple in the front seat, he driving and she beaming, while sitting right next to him in the middle of the passenger seat. This is why we go out in the world. This is why we must put this pandemic behind us.
We made an appointment to to see Warren Philips’ new show at his gallery in the Hungerford building. We expected to find Warren framing in his shop but he sat down and held court while we browsed. The wall behind him features an Antonio Tapies etching flanked by two Manolo Millares prints. Further down the same wall was a Lucio Muñoz serigraph. These are all giants of the Spanish abstract movement. All were featured in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca when we were there last year.
Early August is peak green in upstate NewYork. The woods are at their fullest, the trails are overgrown, the cattails are at their tallest. The Black Swallow Wort is going to seed. The garlic mustard and May apples are starting to die back. We’re peaking.
Our canopy of oaks, though, is thinner than usual. The leaves are spindly, half eaten by the caterpillar/gypsy moth plague, so there is more sun on our lot. We took notice of the stray Autumn Olive trees that we have, an invasive species that has popped up on all four sides of our house.
Our neighbor called our attention to one that was hanging over the road. He said he was afraid one of the thorns on its branches would reach in his truck window and scratch him. He offered to prune our bush, an offer that struck us as rude but one that was, true to form, only blunt.
Instead of pruning the tree we decided to take it out, it and twenty or so others. Some were fifteen feet high. All were gangly. Weed trees. And the thorns were “crown of thorns” size. We cut the tees down with a saw and then dug the root balls out, a task that took us the better part of three days.
In our down time we’ve been watching the high school senior across the street shoot baskets in her driveway. It was exactly a year ago today when I surprised her with a new net. She has gotten really good. So good that she now has a coach who who stops by and feeds her shots. When she shoots it is all net.
Statues with rosaries on Culver Road near former Saint Salome’s Church.
A bunch of us on our dead end street split the cost of the swimming pool that sits on an empty lot. The arrangement predates our arrival by decades. The pool was put in in 1960. One of the neighbors has been mowing the lawn there for years but his tractor has bitten the dust. I’ve mowed it by hand before but it takes forever and it is boring. I’ve only mowed our lawn once this year and I’m hoping I won’t have to mow it again. We are surrounded by trees. I use the mower in the fall to chew up the leaves.
The presidency of the pool corp rotates and Peggi and I are stuck with it for two years. It was up to us to find someone to mow the lawn. Jeddy and Helena live across from the pool and they have a guy that mows their lawn. We’ve heard them talk about the guy. Not unreliable but, “He said he would come today . . .” And he doesn’t just come like clockwork during a drought. He waits for there to be a need. He’s our guy.
I called him this afternoon. He said he would come tomorrow, mow the lawn and then tell us how much it will be. He said he charges one dollar a minute. I asked, “How fast does your tractor go?”
We brought back our fort three tomatoes from the garden and had them with some basil and Manchego theses. And then we vacuumed the screen on our porch. The tree debris, catkins, cotton wood seed and the gypsy moths, have finally subsided. We are deep into summer now.
Our tomato plants are now taller than I am. And more importantly they are taller than our stakes. Peggi reminded me that other years we strapped extensions onto the existing stakes so that may be tomorrow’s project. We have more plants than ever this year, two different kinds, all started from Fruition seed. We don’t get full sun, maybe four hours a day, so they are probably reaching for as much light as they can get.
Peggi got stung by a ground bee on walk yesterday. Her second bee experience in her long life. Last time it got infected and compounded the hurt so her doctor started her on antibiotics. In line at Wegmans to pick up the subscription she noticed the woman next to her, speaking loudly, was not wearing a mask. Peggi asked the pharmacist how the woman got in without wearing a mask and pharmacist said they can’t force people to wear masks.
“Philosophy of Andy Warhol” with Campbell’s soup can drawing and autograph.
Before climbing the walls in the depths of the Covid crisis the British writer, Sophie Atkinson, reread “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” and in a recent NYTs piece she recommended it as a roadmap to navigating the countless days at home. She was reminded of an obvious truth: “I don’t need to go outdoors or online to have fun. Life has started to feel a little lighter. ” I made a note to reread the book.
And yesterday I read Brigid Berlin’s obit. She was the “B” in the subtitle of “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” – “(From A to B and Back Again).” She too was an artist and she recorded most of the conversation transcribed in the book. From her obit -“Her most radical act, late in life, was to become a near replica of her mother, with a similar apartment, identical pug dogs and conservative political views.”
Because we ordered an early copy through Interview Magazine, our book is autographed with an original Campbell’s soup can drawing.
Airstream trailer in driveway on the walk up to Aman’s Farm Market
If I am not mistaken this is same driveway that we spotted a turquoise Metropolitan in about ten years ago..
I love the hot humid period we get in the the northeast as much as I love the bitter cold period in the dead of winter. Variety is the spice of life.
We typically get a reprieve from the leaf blower racket once summer rolls around. But this year, in the middle of summer, we are experiencing a fall of pieces of green leaves. The gypsy moth poop pellets cover the ground. Even we have taken to leaf blowing.
Ours is electric and once I turn it on I don’t turn it off until I am done. We have some neighbors who strap on the gas powered blowers and throttle them up and down every few minutes. In an ideal world this should be against a town ordinance. You can tune out a lot if it is a constant but on and off . . .
With our canopy being eaten we are getting more sun and the house is hot. We don’t have or want air conditioning so Peggi fashioned a poor man’s AC unit by filling a Guinness glass with ice and placing it in front of the fan.
Peggi went out on the deck to water our lemon grass plants and found this little guy, standing there, unafraid. And didn’t fly away while she watered the plants. We didn’t recognize the bird as a baby robin but continued watching from inside and saw its orange breasted mom land nearby and drop a worm into its mouth.
I was thinking of Lou Reed’s song where he kicks around the idea of having childen.
“I’d keep the tyke away from school and tutor him myself keep him from the poison of the crowd But then again pristine isolation might not be the best idea it’s not good trying to immortalize yourself”
Durand Beach early this morning just after the rain.
It was pouring when we woke up and the first thing I thought of was the groundhog in the Have-A-Heart trap that I put right next to the downspout of our gutter. We caught him on Friday down in the garden in our neighbor’s backyard. I called the town and they will pick him up on Monday morning and relocate him. He had not drowned but he didn’t look too happy. I fed him scraps from our compost pile. Cilantro stems (Peggi had just made a batch of cilantro pesto), banana skins, some cantaloupe rind and an orange peel. His first taste of the tropics for sure.
It was supposed to be raining at 7 and that’s all it took for everyone to stay home. Not even the dog walkers were out and by the time we got to the lake it had turned into another beautiful day in paradise.
Performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” at Téåtre des Champs-Elysees in Paris in 1913
I’m scanning the fourth column of my “Brief History of the World,” preparing to digitize a copy and make it available as an ePub download. It is an ambitious project. Assembling the twenty spiral bound notebooks, 3-hole punching the white 110 pound card stock and pasting cut out pictures from the newspaper was easy. I did that over a twenty year period. Scanning each image and reassembling the books in a page layout program is time consuming. The image above is from “Brief History of the World Vol XVI.” It is available as a free download here.
When I said hi to the couple walking toward us in the park yesterday the man wished me a happy Father’s Day. Not the first time and not something that bothers me in any way. It’s just odd considering the odds that any guy would have offspring. This year I was more interested in commemorating Juneteenth than Father’s Day.
In Maureen Dowd’s column she talked about regretting not telling her father, a former cop, that she was proud of him. I would imagine many people share that feeling. I know I do.
My father’s bone cancer came on so fast it made for some awkward conversations at the end but I’m pretty sure he knew how I felt about him. Although I do replay the scene from his last doctor’s visit, where his doctor, having just reviewed scan results, told my father to go home and get his affairs in order. My father was stunned. Outside the office I tried breaking the silence by saying what was going through my own mind, what I might go to if I was given that news. “Well, it is inevitable,” I said. Needless to say that fell flat.
Of course it is inevitable but he was in the middle of so many projects. He was not done living yet. Back in the car I asked if he had anywhere else he wanted to stop and he suggested the barn on Westfall Road, the one he was trying to convince the town to preserve. I helped him walk out there and I took a photo of him standing in the barn with his sketchpad.
After moving to Irondequoit, he took a liking to an unlikely part of the park, Johnson Pond, at the Camp Eastman entrance. He found Wood Ducks there. I guess they are not so common. He took a photo of turtles sunning themselves on a log on the land and the newspaper used it as one of their daily panoramas. We walked over to Johnson Pond the other morning and found nothing but green muck.
Regrets. I’ve had a few. I am sort of haunted by this one. While picking my dad up for an earlier appointment I stuck my head in my parents’ bedroom and said hi to my mom. I told her we were off to the doctor and we’d be back soon. She said, “I’m so proud of you.” It was one of the last lucid conversations I had with her and I couldn’t just accept the compliment, one that I don’t remember ever hearing her say before. I had to throw it back at her by saying something like you don’t have to thank me. Why couldn’t I just say “Thank you?”
Later she pleaded with me to get something from my doctor that she could take to end her life. “I know you can do it.” Her vascular dementia was turning her waking hours into a nightmare. It is past time for another contribution in memory of Mary to “End of Life Choices New York”, 120 East 23rd St., 5th Floor, NY, NY 10010.
The lake was calm again today and at first I thought this was the Mississippi style party boat back in action, the Spirit of Rochester, the one with the paddle wheel that doesn’t propel the boat but just spins as the boat moves while people dine and cruise in and out of the bay. Only when I brought the photo home and enlarged it did I see there is what we used to call a steam shovel on the boat deck with those two big stacks. It must be the barge that dredges the mouth of the river and then dumps the sediment out in the lake. But a barge is usually towed by another boat and I didn’t see one.
Tom and Barbara were driving by as we headed down to the garden. I walked closer to their car to say hi but they both pulled their masks up and it was hard to carry on much of a conversation. This virus situation is uncivilized.
We put in a new row of spinach, right where our first row of the year was. That one had pretty much gone to seed. We have spinach every day now in one form or another. Peggi plans to make Espinacas con Garbanzos with the two big bags we brought back. We put another row of cilantro in as well. This would be our third or fourth planting this year. We put it on everything. Tomorrow we plan to plant a second row of carrots. Our neighbor tells us a groundhog has a new family down there so we may have some competition for the produce.
Bright blue couch at curb on side street off Wahl Road, Rochester NY.
Because our mail-in ballots for school board elections had to be in by the end of the day, we walked them up to Pardee Road School on Norton and dropped them into a secure box. It gave us the opportunity to walk by Case’s, the nursery where we usually buy our plants. This year we made a Corona project out of it and started everything from seed. We cut through the neighborhoods on the way back and found this beauty out by the road.
Evolution has kept the earth in balance for a long time. Whether it has met its match with mankind is still an open question. Hopscotching around the world, taking advantage of people in other countries while walking all over people in our own is tipping the scales. The Coronavirus and BLM movement has radically altered our bad habits and refocused us.
The virus has been disastrous for those affected but for us, the lucky ones, it has produced an extended dream state where we have lost track of the days. Spring came in ever so slowly and it hung around forever. We don’t go anywhere other than by foot and oddly, that has been ok. We may come out of this in a better place.
We tuned into a conference call that our financial advisor did with all his clients this morning. We were early and the mics were all open. Todd said good morning and then offered that this was the type of day we all live through ten months of bad weather for. Before our mics were muted I said, “We like the other ten months.”
Our daily walks often take us to the lake and as everyone who lives near the lakes says, “it looks different every day.” We usually work our way up there, either to Sea Breeze or Durand, by way of the woods or trails through the park. Some of those trails cross the golf course and the manicured greens are a striking contrast to the woods. An even more glaring contrast is the golfers themselves, usually men in shorts and polo shirts. A look that attempts to nullify nature. And they don’t wear masks.
We were waiting for two guys to tee off today before crossing the course and one of them, an insurance man and friend of my brothers, recognized us. He came over to say hi and we stepped back. He came closer and Peggi pulled up her mask. I had almost a dozen golf balls in my two hands, my biggest haul this year, all found near the trail. I stepped back again and this guy came closer. I thought he was going to shake my hand. America is opening up again.
It was supposed to rain this morning, thunderstorms even, and we’re guessing that is what kept everyone inside. We walked with our rain gear but never had to use it and because there were so few people out, we walked along the beach. It felt a bit like a Mad Max movie or maybe the way the sets would look just after shooting.
It was early so the City had not had a chance to clean up from the night’s parties. Fire pits were still fuming, that damp smoky odor almost overwhelming. Driftwood doesn’t make the best firewood but generations will try. I was thinking back to the night after my senior ball and the party we had on this same beach. We were probably just as reckless.
Fireworks canisters and empty wine and beer bottles were strewn about. A soggy half pizza was draped over a log. A full gallon sized plastic container of cheese doodles was left in the sand and further down a bag of Smartfood cheddar cheese popcorn. Young green trees were snapped off at the trunk and probably thrown on the fire. Someone had started a fire under a fallen tree, a big tree. They scooped out the sand beneath and succeeded in burning a good bit of the trunk while the thirty foot tree stretched out along the beach. A two foot column of red plastic drink cups was still in a plastic bag. And a park picnic table, one those with tubular metal legs was in two big pieces, just small pieces of the charred wooden top and seats still attached.
Margaret Explosion CD “Civilization” (EAR 18) on Earring Records, released 2017Tonic Party by Margaret Explosion from cd CivilizationLeave a comment
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row
I thought of this while watering our garden. It is something that’s been floating around in my head since grade school or before. Where did the rhyme come from and what does it mean? I went to Wikipedia.
One theory is that it is religious allegory of Catholicism, Mary, the mother of Jesus, bells representing alter bells and the cockleshells the badges of the pilgrims to the shrine of Saint James in Spain (Santiago de Compostela). We have a couple of those badges. The pretty maids could be nuns, but even within this strand of thought there are differences of opinion as to whether it is lament for the reinstatement of Catholicism or for its persecution.
Another theory sees the rhyme as connected to Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), with “how does your garden grow” referring to her reign over her realm, “silver bells” referring to Catholic cathedral bells, “cockle shells” insinuating that her husband was not faithful to her, and “pretty maids all in a row” referring to her ladies-in-waiting – “The four Maries”.
The “Quitecontrary”part is said to be a reference to her unsuccessful attempt to reverse ecclesiastical changes effected by her father Henry VIII and her brother Edward VI. The “pretty maids all in a row” is speculated to be a reference to miscarriages or her execution of Lady Jane Grey.
I love the fact that no one really knows what it means anymore and yet it is still around.
I picked a variety of greens for our first dinner salad from the garden, basically thinning the rows of greens we had platted too close together. Romaine, mesclun, cilantro, some basil, butter crunch, arugula and some spinach.
Bag of pot found on the sidewalk in Rochester, New York
My LL Bean anti-tick socks were dirty so we walked in the nearby neighborhoods today. Just off Culver on Avondale I spotted a bag of pot laying on the sidewalk, a half sandwich sized baggie with three big buds in it. I picked it up with my left hand and made a mental note not to put that hand near my face. There’s a few neighbors on our street that might be interested in it.
Jimmy Cobb, Miles Davis’s drummer on “Kind of Blue, has died. Four of the five songs on that classic were recorded in one take. Before the session Miles’s advice to Cobb was simple, “Jimmy, you know what to do. Just make it sound like it’s floating.” We heard him at the Jazz Fest a few years back he still sounded good but it wasn’t floating.
America is opening up again. We figured out a way to play horseshoes while distancing. I don’t touch the green shoes and Rick doesn’t touch the blue ones. Instead of trading off we each shoot our two shoes, one after the other, and then step out of the pit. The opponent shoots their two and we walk to the other pit where the player who goes second picks up his shoes and steps aside. The only thing we haven’t figured out is how to drink beer with the mask on.
