Crazy Stable

I've always thought I'd be a wonderful chatelaine for a great, brooding manor house, just like the unnamed mistress of "Manderley" in Rebecca. In this, one of my favorite books and movies, the heroine dreams of returning to the haunted ruins of the gorgeous estate where she first arrived as a young bride.

I would have done a far better job endearing myself to the servants. (When I first fell in love with the story in high school, I swear, I had no idea that we would buy an actual ruin, with no servants, or that my mother would fulfill the role of Mrs. Danvers.)

Well, anyway, we got a taste of the real thing on a day trip to Long Island's Gold Coast last Saturday, where we poked around the Sands Point Preserve. This is Hempstead House, a Gothic pile built (rather ludicrously) in 1912 for Howard Gould, son of "robber baron" Jay Gould. After a breezy picnic, we rambled the grounds making comparisons to both Manderley and the CrazyStable.

Hempstead House has admittedly better views; a private cove on the Sound beats even our sliver of Prospect Park.

Near the cove, they've got a fine ruin (prompting me to plead to Daughter in a Cornish accent, "Please, Miss, don't send me to the asylum!" Hey, you either know the movie or you don't.) But we've got the garage, artificially aged to a decrepit cottage by the scenery crew of NBC's Law & Order!

The house has cooler lighting fixtures than ours. Bigger, too. But the Gould scion's marriage collapsed a few short years after building this pile for his "lucky" wife, whereas Spouse and I are still together, sporadically renovating.

Garage-wise, even with our NBC connection, Gould has us beat: He stabled his horses in "Castlegould," built in 1902. What, did the guy ride out in shining armor, with pennants flying?

Finally, we found something that the magnates and we had in common: rotting wood! In particular, door paneling lifting off in birch-like sheets. This is exactly what our (interior-grade) back door is doing.

It's nice to know that a crappy composite door from a cheap contractor can have something in common with Old World craftsmanship bought by millionaires, if enough neglect is applied to either one. Makes you want to go out and grab some wood putty and spar varnish doesn't it?

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited…”

Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca (c) 1938

When we last left our heroine, she was digging, in crazed spurts of activity, through impacted Mystery Piles in remote corners of the CrazyStable. Spring cleaning had turned into spring insanity, as I realized with horror...we have more than 21 years' worth of crap stored up here.

I was brave, reader. Fighting against the packrattism that runs in my blood like the curse of the vampire, I disgorged the following items into big blue Ikea tote bags:

--the Alcott & Andrews "power suit" from the 80s that made me look like Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl." Daughter tried on the jacket, was truly baffled by the veal-chop-sized shoulder pads.

--The set of mini speakers that my Dad planned to rig up in our newlywed apartment so I could listen to a record playing in the living room while I cooked in the kitchen. Let's just say they never got rigged, and never would.

--More Paternal Relics: clever Daddy's finely cobbled-together full-spectrum plant lights, which he customized for the plant shelves he made in, oh, 1981 or so. Clever Daughter (me) has felt guilty for 21 years that I disassembled that planter, moved the stuff here, and never rebuilt it in my plant room. Permission to ditch the rig was granted when I realized that the cords were so old, the plugs weren't even polarized. The fluourescent "Gro-Lites" went with them; let someone else worry about how to recycle them!

--The handsome and unreadable National Geographic books on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that I salvaged from my Aunt Rosemary's apartment in Florida. Let someone else feel guilty about never having read them!

--Every sweater, every goddam one, that makes me look fat and is old enough to be pilled. Fat + Pilled + GONE.

Where did they go? To a fabulous event held today, the Flatbush FreeMeet! Sponsored by activist blogger Sustainable Flatbush (great work, Anne!) and the Freecycle New York City folks, it's so simple: You bring stuff, or take stuff, and everything's free. No persnickety thrift-store donation rules here: The only things they don't want are items "heavily covered in pet hair" (allergies), or "drugs, weapons, or adult items." (None were in evidence.)

It was incredible fun to watch folks pounce on the items we'd brought. That white satin dress (above), which never was quite right for any occasion, intrigued several shoppers. A sweet little girl prized Daughter's toy cat carrier, and scooped up several children's books. Ladies in saris powered through sweaters. (The event took place at Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues, the halal-meat capital of Brooklyn, and was a model of Flatbush's delirious diversity.)

And the guys flocked to a table that was vaguely electronic-related. (Wow, typewriters!) Daddy's speakers aroused a lot of interest.

And I found something cool: a tiny measuring gauge, no bigger than a refrigerator magnet, for use in sewing. The lady next to me was delighted to see me snap it up. "It belonged to my mother," she said, "who was a seamstress...but I don't sew." The system works!

That's what dear old Samuel Johnson called a second marriage, but it could as well describe my wagonload of goodies from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's spring plant sale. The BBG is the only other thing, besides Prospect Park, of which we are members; even without free admission or discounts, membership would be worth it just for the preview dibs on this sale, which spreads across the cherry orchard like a delirious bazaar of lush perennials, annuals, shrubs, and houseplants. More coverage from Flatbush Gardener, whom I must have narrowly missed seeing.

(First, we had to smell the wisteria, with its faint note of woodsmoke, and then I had to smell each color of lilac at least twice, but otherwise we were very efficient.)

Every year, the Member Preview is more of a scrum, it seems. This year, the lingering threat of drizzle did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of hordes of plant-crazed warriors. Daughter protested against being press-ganged into acting as my field artillery support, but Spouse gamely stepped in. And this year, I had a plan: shopping for my newly imagined border of acid-loving shrubs, to resolve at last the puzzle of what to do along the back fence. I didn't see a rhododendron I liked (I want one like the ones in Manderley in Rebecca, or like the ones I saw in Ireland, head-high fantasies with blooms the size of cheerleaders' pom-poms). But I got a little-leafed holly, a "bog rosemary," a pale pink azalea, and a purplish heath. Now all that stands between me and the border of my dreams is a shovel, a bag of MirAcid fertilizer, and a bottle of ibuprofen.

Speaking of rosemary, I got a real one, a tiny one, to replace the poor victim sacrificed to my sloth who froze to death over the winter when I left it outside in its pot. This variety claims to be hardy to zero degrees, which is probably nonsense, but...hope over experience.

And speaking of scrums, hope to see many of my favorite fellow Brooklyn bloggers, and to meet some new buddies, at the 2009 Brooklyn Blogfest tomorrow night. For details on this convivial gathering in its exciting new venue, the Galapagos Arts Space (which is way too cool for the likes of me, so I can't wait to infest it), go here.

It was just supposed to be a little spring cleaning. Get the study cleared out, kill a few impacted mystery piles lurking in corners. But instead, it feels like this.

Want this instead. Would cover it with piles of mystery crap in, oh, one-and-a-half weeks.

Help. Do not want Daughter someday to have to sign up with this.

Note to self: Buy more contractor's bags. Watch out when I get a fresh new box of contractor's bags. Landfill, here it comes!

Images: Top: Bettman/Corbis; bottom, ApartmentTherapy.com

In honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day, and the very first blooming of my pale, pale lilac, here is "Lilacs" by Amy Lowell. Actually, it's the first two of four stanzas; Amy takes lilacs as seriously as I do.

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

Your great puffs of flowers

Are everywhere in this my New England.

Among your heart-shaped leaves

Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing

Their little weak soft songs;

In the crooks of your branches

The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs

Peer restlessly through the light and shadow

Of all Springs.

Lilacs in dooryards

Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

Lilacs watching a deserted house

Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

Above a cellar dug into a hill.

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere.

You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver.

And her husband an image of pure gold.

You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—

You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

When a ship was in from China.

You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,

May is a month for flitting.”

Until they writhed on their high stools

And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.

Paradoxical New England clerks,

Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night,

So many verses before bed-time,

Because it was the Bible.

The dead fed you

Amid the slant stones of graveyards.

Pale ghosts who planted you

Came in the nighttime

And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.

You are of the green sea,

And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.

You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,

You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.

You cover the blind sides of greenhouses

And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass

To your friends, the grapes, inside.

(To read the rest, and you won't be sorry you did, go here.)

Amy Lowell, “Lilacs” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot, Esquire