Crazy Stable

Summer is just over an hour old, and in honor of the Summer Solstice, here (compiled with help from the Child) are the Top 10 Great Things About Summer in the CrazyStable:

10. No radiators hissing, clanking, dripping, and generally reminding us that we owe our winter souls to the gas company.

9. Fistfuls of fresh mint anytime I want it--spearmint, peppermint, and the amazing creme-de-menthe-scented chocolate mint.

8.  Lush vegetation in the garden, especially the out-of-control ferns (at least until they are fried in the first heat wave).

7. Watching thunderstorms roll in from the west across the expanse of Prospect Park from the third-floor window and screaming when the lightning gets too close.

6. Sitting in the garden at dusk, watching lightning bugs and waiting for Stellaluna, the little brown bat, to dip in a figure-eight flyover on her evening bug-hunt.

5. Getting Spouse to barbecue, even if it does mean he will stand there worrying whether or not the chicken is done yet.

4. Walking out onto the porch in the morning to the smell of woods and meadows.

3.  Cocobop's belly becoming a silver furry solar collecting panel when he takes a sunbath. [N.B. Guess whose entry this was, mine or the Child's?]

2. The breezes coming through our windows (at least 2 in almost every room), luffing the white ball-fringe curtains in the guest room, and creating the summer soundscape of soccer cheers, ice cream trucks, and birdsong.

1. And the Greatest Thing About Summer in the CrazyStable: The mystical collective summer unconscious of Flatbush all around us...Dutch farmers in the field (probably growing tobacco), within sight of the steeple of the Reformed Church around the bend of Church Avenue....British soldiers trudging across those fields towards  Battle Pass (in today's Prospect Park) during the August of the Battle of Brooklyn (theoretically, they could have walked through what is now our backyard)...American soldiers, their campfires glimmering as the regiment spends the night camped out  on the 19th-Century Parade Grounds, watched by curious onlookers who have arrived in horse-drawn carriages...decades later, on those same grounds, a young Sandy Koufax and Joe Torre play on the baseball diamonds...and, just after World War II, a restless young writer named William Styron, a Southern boy in a rooming house on our corner, absorbs the sights, sounds and stories that he will someday immortalize in Sophie's Choice.  In summer, when it gets hot enough to hallucinate, I sometimes fancy that our leafy blocks have time holes, shimmering weaknesses in the space/time continuum where I could step in and tumble back to another era--is it any wonder?

I loafe and invite my soul;

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

                                              --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Tardis photo: BBC

Work continues apace on the porch...Spouse has painted the steps! (leaving a Mailman Path, right, to be finished soon.)

The story of the porch is so very much the story of the house--loads of potential, a good but faltering start, and then drift and decay for want of endless resources. Like many of our projects, it's sort of like a new capital half-built in the jungle by a crazed post-colonial dictator...grand intentions derailed by reality.

This is actually the second porch, a clone of the sagging and rotting original, which we had torn out and rebuilt some 15 years ago. When we bought the place, there were no front steps, just a plank; we had a cheesy set of steps built the following spring, followed by the total rebuild years later. But the porch reconstruction exemplified the dreaded old-house "mushroom effect"--where do you stop?

Under excruciating budgetary constraints, we chose to stop at the top fascia board. We later had the house exterior painted (just once in 20 years), but had the painters skip the porch, because we were going to do the new parts ourselves, and rebuild the old parts eventually, so why paint stuff you are going to demolish? Eventually? Thus, the original thickly alligatored paint still clings--along with a scary-looking hole, presumably made by carpenter bees who are brewing molasses inside or something.

We also skipped any attempt to paint the inside porch ceiling, because it was "too far gone"--and because the paint flaking off probably has lead in it, and thus we would need smart and more expensive people to demolish it safely, as opposed to cheap and stupid people who would track paint chips all over creation. We would also need a carpenter with the lapidary skills needed to replace all that overhead tongue-and-groove. Or we could go the tacky but possibly safer route of encapsulating it. Meanwhile, the "diving board" is dipping lower to remind us of another job-in-the-low-five-figures screaming to be completed.

To repay this agita, the porch should be an inviting haven...with a glider. One of these years, I will "save up enough money" (hahahahaha) for such a glider, and sit like a lady from To Kill a Mockingbird, observing the passing scene in the evening breezes. I've already envisioned how how to keep people from stealing the glider--we'll bolt it to the porch floor. There used to be a hanging porch swing God knows how many decades ago; you can still see the hanging hooks for it. I'm afraid I would never trust even a rebuilt porch ceiling to hold me; I envision a "Three-Stooges" romantic scenario where the courtin' couple brings the whole house down.

For all this, the porch is magic, especially wonderful to stand on in the rain. Every one of these houses used to have one, and many have been bricked in to form a foyer or extra room; it was only decades of neglect that spared ours from a similar fate. We really will finish it, someday.

ALLERGY ALERT: The following post has been manufactured in a facility used for processing nuts.  And Charlie.

No, Uncle Cocobop, please don't kill me! I swear I will never try to bite your face off again! I will never ever wake you up by jumping on you from a great height! I will not, ever, use your tail as chewing gum! Hey, how bad could it be--I've still only got my baby teeth!

Ah, that's better. Just relaxing with Mama Lexi while Dad watches the news. Feet above the head improves circulation in my brain, which I've been told might help.

Nothing like a lush front lawn.  Here are two of our favorite amphibious homebodies, Ray the Reclusive and his cousin Ralph, now appearing at the American Museum of Natural History in "Frogs: A Chorus of Colors."  These are Golden Mantella Frogs; you can see other cool species that sound as if they hail from the Archie McPhee catalog, including Vietnamese Mossy Frogs, Mexican Dumpy Frogs, and Waxy Monkey Frogs. The exhibit, which just reopened for a return engagement, is on until September 9.

Speaking of mossy, yesterday morning we had to move the washing machine out to make way for a new one...it was, of course, pretty scary under there. I could tell the delivery guys were wondering why we were bothering to clean the footprint, since they were just going to put a new one over the slime/sludge anyway. Now that there's a new washer, dryer, and fridge, I feel as if I should be standing around in pearls and a perky Fifties housecoat, pointing to my Modern Appliances.

And speaking of Modern Appliances, there was one final (I hope) death in the Great Die-Off. Last night, about to whip cream for strawberry shortcake, I plugged in my Holy Ancient Handheld Mixer...the one so old my grandmother allegedly used it (and she died in 1958), the one whose plug I replaced and whose solid metal body is speckled with a Pollock-like frieze of every cake I've ever baked. Upon being plugged in, a rocket of sparks shot out of the wall, and the circuit-breaker tripped. (The same circuit-breaker that governs the dead washing machine next door in the laundry room. Coincidence? I don't think so! This may be how they communicate--through the electrical system!) Time to retire this noble instrument and go for a KitchenAid--handheld, not standing, I think. But I want to frame the Holy Ancient One in a shadowbox like a display of regimental regalia in an officers' lounge, its beaters crossed beneath it. Spouse says this is nuts. Actually, he said, quote, "Tell it to the blog." Hmm...the first signs of familial houseblog fatigue (FHF) syndrome?

We're well into June, and thus you are overdue to meet the roses. Some of them are already spent fireworks, like the red rugosa, which covered itself in glory and a perfume so intoxicating it's almost a caricature of what commercial fragrance engineers consider "rosey." Here are the rest of the clan, still in bloom:

This is Cardinal Richelieu, presumably named after his royal-purple-velvet vestments. He blooms first and only once, usually accompanied by a flush of color-coordinated columbines bobbing at his feet like altar servers.

Here's Coquette des  blanches, a Bourbon rose first bred in 1871. What's with the name--"white coquette"? This girl is temperamental, growing ridiculously tall but often producing a gorgeous crop of stillborn buds due to "balling." It seems to be weather-related, because last year she didn't drop all the buds. This year: every bud in this picture is already dead, a ball of faded furled petals. Damn.

Meet Golden Celebration, a David Austin rose (he's a breeder who crossed many of the gorgeous characteristics of antique or "heirloom" roses, like intense fragrance and full, cupped flower shape, with the reblooming ability of typical garden-center hybrid tea roses). This bush pumped out a staggering show this spring after I spared its life; the canes clearly had canker (a brown, spongy interior) when I pruned them. But now the next generation of buds has wilted over pathetically; the canker may have caught up with it. So the celebration may turn into a funeral. Notice that this "yellow" rose, after sun exposure, gets splashed with deep pink as if by a watercolorist.

Flopping over like a tall girl drunk at a party is Katy Road Pink, also known as "Carefree Beauty." No matter how hard I prune her, she grows to six or seven feet tall; last week's rainstorm beat her into the compost heap, but she didn't seem to care.  This is indeed a "carefree" rose, and I've learned that she qualified for a wonderful program originated at Texas A&M University called "Earth-Life Roses." Since most people think that roses won't grow unless you bombard them with chemicals (and some, like typical hybrid teas, fulfill that fussy stereotype), these researchers set out to identify roses that would, basically, grow in a vacant lot. Anywhere.  Since this is the level of care I lavish on my beloved roses, it makes sense that my surviving bushes include not one, but two on the list, including this darling:

On the right is Perle d'Or, a polyantha, who covers herself in dainty bouquets (which aren't designed to make good cut flowers, but you can't have everything). The buds look, indeed, precisely like golden pearls. This particular bush has two special claims on my heart. One, it blooms over the final resting place of our beloved cat Hodge. (Hodge had diabetes, and whenever I water the rose, I think fondly of my ever-thirsty boy, who was kept happily going on two daily insulin injections for two years.) Second, this plant was hand-dug and given to me by master rosarian Stephen Scanniello years ago at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, when the entire Cranford Rose Garden was undergoing renovation. I was a docent there, and word got out that Steve was giving away plant stock. He picked it out for me, lifted it on his spade, and with a practiced hand broke it into two perfect specimens. (One since died, but this one is ripe for division.) Steve is now president of the Heritage Rose Foundation, by the way. The lavender flowers to the left are Nepetia "Six Hills Giant," which should grow to massive proportions but remains "Six Hills Shrimpy" because the neighborhood alley cats roll in it. Oh, another dear departed cat, Gordon, rests beneath the catmint.  Note a miniature purple-red rose flourishing in the planter box.

And finally, the June Bridezilla of the rose garden: Maiden's Blush, a thorny and sprawling alba that blooms once a year and enslaves me for the remaining 11 months. This monstre sacree tosses out four-foot canes with abandon, upon which bloom roses whose fragrance causes people to moan, cry out, and just gaze in wonder as they sniff. It is a rose perfume out of another time, given like some fairy-tale reward for the sacrificial labors of slashing it back and deadheading it as it tears my flesh. (I've tried leaving the hips to ripen, but the birds can't be bothered eating them.) My favorite story about this rose: Its name in French is Cuisse de Nymphe Emue, or "Thigh of the Aroused Nymph." In English: "Maiden's Blush." For my money, this tells you absolutely everything you ever need to know about the English versus the French.

Maybe it's the scent of petals in the air, or just desperation, but I have finally undertaken a long-feared project: breaking up the cement in the 'Garth.' A cloister garden, or garth, is what the driveway reminds me of now that we fenced it in, and it gets tons of sun. And I need space for tomatoes now that the raspberries have muscled into the former vegetable bed area. But I can't afford the manpower for Guys with Jackhammers, or even sledgehammers, to toil in the midday sun.  (Bestfriend and I want to do an off-Broadway play about our lives as cash-impaired chatelaines, called "I Am My Own Mexican.") So I bought a sledge and protective goggles and had a bash at it. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, especially if I whack away at the periphery of an existing crack. Here's the first fruits of my labors. The sorriest part is that a thick layer of aggregate underlies the cement pad itself, a sort of concrete double-decker sandwich. As I excavate, I will start layering on compost and manure. And I will perform reparations for our neighbor down the street, who is busily landscaping with a cement truck.

If I make sufficient progress, there may be room for...more roses!

Come all ye loyal heroes and listen on to me.

Don't hire with any farmer till you know what your work will be

You will rise up early in the morning from the clear day light till the dawn

and you never will be able for to plough the Rocks of Bawn.

--"The Rocks of Bawn" (Irish traditional)