Crazy Stable

 Yes, this is the Bronx. (Well, just.) If you have never been to Wave Hill, go soon. We lounged on their lawns overlooking the Hudson last Saturday, drunk as the bees on hazy warmth. (The bees were either stupefied or dying, but either way they allowed themselves to be lavishly petted.) I collected a bagload of pinecones and spiny little beech seed pods, and we tore up and ate the foccacia we bought at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket back in Brooklyn that morning. The Child ran around the mighty trees barefoot and we all lay down under a cedar tree in the last rays of the setting sun.

No wonder I felt brave enough today to unpack my platen press (a gift from my lovely and creative cousin-in-law) and its mysterious packages of type, reglets, quoins, and coppers. Up in my corner of the Crazy Stable, I am determined to set words into type the old-fashioned way--one letter at a time. I've done it before, at the Center for Book Arts, under the tutelage of letterpress instructors...now it's me, a typestick, and a tweezer. Check back for reports on my progress.

Wouldn't it be cool to set these words into type?:

Autumn begins to be inferred

By millinery of the cloud,

Or deeper color in the shawl

That wraps the everlasting hill.

The eye begins its avarice,

A meditation chastens speech,

Some Dyer of a distant tree

Resumes his gaudy industry…

                       --Emily Dickinson