Category: Life Is A Spell

Trees are so theatrical! And much more so when they’ve lost their leaves. Their exaggerated gestures tell you which way the wind the blows, where the light is, who’s the toughest, how the ground rolls. And I just love this reduced palette of browns and grays.

We have a leaner out back, a widow maker. It’s very big but it’s dead. It’s bark is pealing, the woodpeckers have had at it but it’s oak and worth burning. We were planning on taking it down yesterday so we stopped down at our neighbors for some practical advise before we tried this one. He looked at it for a while and suggested we wait until it falls over or the wind blows it down. He thought it was too dangerous to work under and he was quite certain we would cut it at the base and pull it away with a rope tied to the trailer hitch on our car only to have it slide off the trunk and still be hung up. He’s a lot more practical the us but not as much fun. I’ve been thinking about ways of throwing a rope around the top of the tree somehow and then pull it until the tree breaks below where it’s hung up and then maybe the trunk would just fall over like was going to do when it got hung up. We’re going to sit on this one for a bit.

We often smell deer before we see them and sometimes we’ll hear them before we spot them but usually we just catch a glimpse of them “hightailing” it. They stick their tail in the air and puff it out while prancing away. They know we’re not hunters and that there is no hunting around here so some of them are pretty cocky. This guy stomped his leg at us.

I think we might have walked in on somebody’s play at the top of the big luge hill in Durand Eastman. The lighting was so dramatic and the trees were posed so theatrically. We just kind of stood there. It was a slow moving play but it didn’t last long.

Our neighbor, Monica, was telling us that there have been some beautiful sunrises lately. We wouldn’t know, but the sunsets have been sensational. I caught this shot while stopped at the light at Culver at Ridge. The golden hour was coming on. Does anybody remember Suburban Hair when it was on this corner? I usually skip the flu shot thing.

Just about any day is a good day to walk around the old water tanks in Washington Grove up on Cobbs Hill. They are constantly evolving. In fact we interrupted a guy who was painting over an already densely covered section when we stopped by last week. Bill Jones did a short movie while walking around one of the tanks about ten years ago and the work shown in it is long gone.

For weeks we’ve been speculating about what the new building at Culver and Norton might be. They tore down the tuxedo shop and dry cleaners and threw up a wooden building in matter of weeks. I figured it had to be a chain store of some sort because the various crews have been in and out of here so fast. They were putting a brick knee wall around the front sides on Sunday when we stopped in at the QuikFill across the street. Peggi asked the gas attendent what the new building was going to be and found out it will be a Dunkin’ Donuts. That will probably be a good thing for Palermo’s across the street, better than the new smoke-shop that opened next door.

While I was taking this photo one of the brick masons shouted, “What are you doing?’ I kept my eye on my camera and said, “I’m taking a photo.” He didn’t hear me and shouted again, “What are you doing?” I turned my head toward him and yelled, “What does it look like? I’m taking a photo” and I hurried back to our car.

Our nephew is taking the train up to hang out for the weekend. He asked if we needed anything from NYC and I emailed back, “more culture.” As if the city has a lock on that sort of hint. It does have more people.

This morning’s paper had an article about the newly proposed Rochester train station. The architects drawing shows a building that looks quite a bit like the old station, the one the city tore down in 1965 in middle of a destructive urban renewal rampage. That old one was actually the third Rochester train station. It was designed by Claude Bragdon and it was a showpiece of art and culture.

When I was in Indiana playing in a C&W band we did this gig on a flatbed truck by a big barn way out in the country. It was a coon hunting convention where hunters partied til dark and then followed their dogs into the woods to “tree” raccoons. Last weekend Margaret Explosion played a a “Chili Cook-Off” at the Genesee Center for the Arts and it was almost as strange. We set up in the pottery room and Ken stood in a doorway with his stand up bass. The sound was great though and I think we got a good recording.

After our set we sampled some vegetarian white chiIi from Mex Restaurant and some homemade beer from Three Heads Brewery and then bought a two dollar raffle ticket which proved to be the winning ticket for a pound of Starbucks Antigua coffee. Photographer David Johnson has a great show in the Community Darkroom Space. He studied with Ansel Adams and took this picture of a bass player on his back at the Primalon Ballroom on Fillmore Street in the 1950. I’ve always been partial to 1950 for some reason, something to do with a wide eyed departure from a warm and cozy spot.

We helped Leo’s relatives clean out his old place over the weekend. Another neighbor pitched in as well and he described the scene as something from the show, “Hoarders.” Leo used to pick junk up from the curb and squirrel it away. He picked stuff out of our trash and we laughed as we threw the same stuff away again this weekend. Our neighbors on the other side did a little dumpster diving this morning and we joined in. I found a few choice pieces of scrap metal for Sparky and then this afternoon WM hauled the dumpster away.

Note to self: Start divesting while you still have your marbles.

Our neighbor collects our leaves and uses them as mulch for his garden and the we use his garden so it all works like a charm. He was telling us that when they get together with their son’s in-laws about the only thing they can talk about is the weather. They are sort of opposites especially when it comes to politics and everything is political so the weather is a pretty safe topic as long as you don’t wander into global warming territory.

This Fall has been especially beautiful, unusually warm and sunny. That is probably all about to change but that’s why we live here.