Rogue Wave

Photo courtesy Flickr

Windshield wipers on busses used to have separate motors. A long ride on a rainy day was punctuated with hypnotic independent rhythms. Every minute or so, my trance would be interrupted by the muffled slap of two wiper blades hitting their respective frames.

Last night my partner came upstairs whimpering. Kitchen clean-up had taken an unusually long time. We realized that now and then simple household chores coincide to create a nearly overwhelming work load. This, I suppose, is a good argument for staying on top of simple chores so that when things add up the sum is small.

When I was very young, and we were at the beach, my mother trained me never to turn my back to the waves. She said that a long draw back was a sign that a big wave was coming, and if the water ever retreated a very long way, I should run for high ground. Really, really fast.

It is time to plan safe and sane holidays. Current best practice says do spring cleaning in the fall, when windows are closed and the traffic through the house subsides. There’s still time. Then detail the garden. Weed onto the lawn. Mow debris along with freshly fallen leaves. After a couple of mowing cycles, the mulch will disappear, and you can put the machine to bed for the season.

With the infrastructure in good shape, it’s relatively simple to start accumulating stocking stuffers, conspire with the extended family to keep giving reasonable, and plan decorations. Traditional treats like lebkuchen and fruitcake take a couple of months to mature. They’re the archaic version of convenience food.

The ironing and polishing it takes to get the table in good shape for Thanksgiving will carry through to Twelfth Night. Advent is a mini-Lent, a good excuse to keep things down to a dull roar while preparing for the twenth-fourth.

The day after Twelfth Night is the opening of carnival season, a Lent in reverse that closes on Mardi Gras. This time is celebrated with king cake, a rich vanilla sheet cake gaudy with purple, green, and yellow sugar. It is served on Fridays in work groups. A bean or china figure of the Christ child is baked into the cake. Whoever gets the infant bakes next week’s cake after he comes home from the dentist. The memory of Mardi Gras’ hangover will keep one safe and sober until Christmas bargain-hunting begins after the Fourth of July.

More after the jump.

The Eye of the Dragon

Photo courtesy Flickr

As I recall art history, an emperor asked a famous Chinese painter to make an image of a dragon. The painter practiced hundreds of times over several years, and one day the emperor showed up to collect his job.

The painter knocked out a sumi dragon, and the emperor asked, “Where’s the eye?” The painter said, “I don't want to paint one.” The emperor insisted, so the fellow dipped a brush in vermilion and added an eye. The dragon sprang off the paper and was gone.

So, I learned that the eye of the dragon is the last touch that brings a project to life.

An improvised interior starts with a good cleaning, perhaps some paint, and hard-working furnishings that are already on hand. It comes to life when a dragon’s eye is added. The final touch can be an artful can of dried weeds, an interesting hubcap, or a useful decorative textile like a throw for naps or a tablecloth.

If you vote for tablecloths, the dining table can have a rough top and double as a workbench, as long as you avoid toxins. A stable, well-designed table with a distressed top is a good bargain and not hard to find. Everyday tablecloths can be gently amusing. Geeks like a simple length of butcher paper for making notes. In the Fifties, the ballpoint pen drove white cloths out of restaurants, because the ink is permanent. Before then, diners had used fountain pen to make notes on the linen.

I enjoy playing with lengths of yardage hemmed with iron-on tape. An English friend told me that after World War Two, people were so poor they set their tables on newspaper. My perennial favorite is the hand-printed cotton cloth that comes from India, home of ancient textile motifs thought to be the oldest cultural images we have. European printed cottons bit East Indian patterns, as did crewel embroidery and native American beadwork. These patterns are period for any place up to and including the Cape Cod tract house that blanketed the country after WWII.

More after the jump.

Pure Fun

Local music live and local music broadcast by living dj’s
Organic cafe
Street calligraphy in chalk
Cancel procrastination
Tie-dye patches in bright, clear colors
Moss graffiti
Neon mohawks
African fabric
Christmas lights
Edible weeds



More after the jump.

The Week-End Report: Dirt

Photo courtesy Flickr

I gotta hand it to Mezuni: photographing dirt is not easy.

I garden simply and claim little expertise. In the twenty-nine years I have cared for this lot, I have recycled all the garden waste except for one huge holly tree. I did recycle one even huger hemlock. The remains of that tree raised the soil level in one area of the back yard by two feet.

A friend is painting my fence, and I promised her that I would clear it so that she can work unimpeded. Over the last few weeks, I’ve done small-scale logging, salvaging enough gnarly branches to plan a small rustic fence and mowing enough small prunings to mulch out most of the front lawn. The place wasn’t particularly overgrown, but making elbow room for the crew took an extra hunk out of the usual annual trimming.

This week-end I got down to ground level, freeing the pickets from layers of leaf mold that had accumulated. They shouldn’t have been allowed to accumulate, but I had overlooked what was happening on the neighbors’ sides of the fence. It’s old-growth cedar, so there’s no serious harm done.

An amazing amount of soil has been generated from leaves and mulch over the last few years. On one border, both sides of the fence had three inches of new topsoil. The area on the other border where I compost kitchen waste is a foot higher than it was last year, and a former kitchen waste area to the right that had been heavily mulched with bark had added six inches of soil on top of a layer of plastic weed barrier. There’s enough surplus topsoil in this area to set up a small new terrace somewhere on the property.

I look forward to using this little bonanza. Before we bought the property, the gardener had regularly mowed and discarded clippings. There were quite a few pest and herbicide cans in the basement. We celebrated in a small way when the first spider appeared six months after we moved in. After several years of leaving clippings on the lawn and toxins in the store, a gardener friend remarked that we had more worms than any property he had seen.

The first season, weeding was a two-fisted job. Seven or eight seasons in, I could lift weeds easily if the soil moisture was just right. Now, it’s nearly a matter of “What weeds?”, although there’s an interloper here and there in the lawn. A spray of benign herbicide takes care of offenders and breaks down into fertilizer. Now every garden operation is either a harvest or it’s some kind of great leap forward that I won’t have to repeat. I owe this progress to deciding to grow dirt and let the greenery be the by-product.

More after the jump.