pomegranatesandpaper

How Does My Garden Grow

 

For the first half of summer, I tried to take a pic of the garden each day, either when I left or came home after work. My neighbors probably think I am the eccentric garden lady with the two large dogs  who is forever trying to haul two dogs and a large briefcase on wheels through the garden path in the morning and home again at night. It can be quite a sight. Especially when we have the hose across the path and I can't get the rolling briefcase over the hose and the dogs are rubbing their faces in the lavender. 

Yes, my dogs love lavender and it helps disguise the disgusting urine-y smell they come home with from doggie day care. (Or the urine-y smell + cologne-like wipers they use on the dogs when I complain about how much they are smelling. Then they smell like eau de pimp dogs.)

 

 

As I take the photos, with two dogs pulling on one arm, I imagine ithat my neighbors are are thinking that I am certifiably crazy and they are right. So when I want a non-blurry photo, I throw the dogs into the house and then they jump on the sofa and bark at me the whole time I am trying to discretely snap pics with my cell phone.

 

 

You can't hide the insane moments of your life. They always tell. And that's cool cause really, when you come down to it, I am barely in control of the dogs, the garden, or any other aspect of my life.

 

 

Mr. Pom and I have done a good job on the front garden. The best part about it is that after 8 years of planting, mulching, enlarging, and more planting, the garden is pretty well established and needs just a good weeding and mulching in spring, and then a thinning of the perennials come July. The black-eyed Susans (I'll show you those tomorrow)  just  want to take over  and they got a good thinning over the weekend, along the "volunteer" sunflowers that sprung up from some I planted 5 years ago. 

 

I wish I could do that with life in general. Thin it out to allow parts to grow and breathe.

 

 

 

I not only like to keep track of what is growing when, I am a painter and I take a lot of photos for reference for painting later Do I have any paintings to show you of my garden? Well, no. But summer is too busy for painting. Just think of how bright and gay it will be come January to paint the gorgeous Russian Sage that is almost taller than I am and the amazing oak leaf hydrangeas that have about 200 blossoms that have gone from the brightest white to the most dusky rose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Succulents are all the rage this year. One of my paralegals found tiny little pinch pots filled with tiny little succulents. The pots had magnets on the back and he stuck them on the shelf of his cubicle. He bought them at the Stop and Shop next door to the office. I told them if he finds them missing not to look in my office (because he will find them there). He got the last ones, he told me. I told him there goes his Christmas gift.

I haven't gotten around to repotting the one above at twelve o'clock. I gave the same ones to one of my sisters and she repotted hers and even bought special potting mixture for cactus and succulents. They grew enormously and put mine to shame. And then they all died. And mine are thriving. Some things are meant to be and some are not. I love them because they remind me of my grandmother's front porch where she always had hens and chicks in a giant pot. I also love them because they hide where the porch boards are rotting although we had the whole floor replaced a few years ago. 

 

 

 

 

When I am not in the garden, I am on the side porch. It was just a slab when we moved in, but Mr. Pom and Mystery Man bought this kit from Home Despot and screened it in. I must admit, I never thought it would still be in perfect condition 12 years later, but it is. We use it constantly. I don't think I've sat in the living room since Memorial Day. 

 

 

 

 

On the left is the chaise lounge waiting for me to recover it. It best be used to waiting cause I'm thinking it will be a worthy winter chore.  That yellow box was fished out of my neighbor's garbage when her family was clearing out the house to sell. The tablecloth on the little table was my grandmother's.

 

The Christmas cactus was The Empress's. She kept it in a little white pottery cat-shaped jardiniere under her pink bathroom sink. I released it from the bondage of the Christmas tin pot it came in and I hope it is settling in nicely on the porch.  It looks a little scraggly from that view, but it is fuller on the other side.  Hopefully, it will acclimate on the porch and start growing.  Of all the things that I inherited from my mom, this old Christmas cactus reminds me the most of her.  It's not just that she used to call me to tell me that it was blooming and how enormous it was. Somehow when I see it sitting out here, it is sort of like she is out here with me.  I talk to it. So far it hasn't talked back, but I'll let you know. If it actually blooms this Christmas, I will water it with my tears. 

 

 

I am very proud of my orange coral chair cushions that I got on Overstock. com. If you haven't used that site, you should. I buy nothing that I haven't first sourced on Overstock. (Hey, Overstock, how bout throwing me a little swag - we could use a new living room couch. I promise to talk it up and do a sponsored post. Who I am kidding.) 

 

 

 

 

I never tire of these. Hope you haven't.  Wait till I'm at the Cape and post pics of the mansions with the hydrangeas up and down Shore Road in Chatham.  (BTW I got the scoop on where Harry Connick's house is. The Bride tried to find it, but the description of double chimneys on the pond is matched by about ten houses. I'll be sleuthing, never fear.)

 

 

 

Do you see that big ol' bee? This was taken with my Iphone 4s. This is why I no longer carry my Canon around.  

 

 

 

This planter is all Mr. Pom's doing. He does it every year. Sometimes he uses impatiens (has anyone even noticed that there are none this year? Has anyone even missed them? Not I.)

 

 

 

 

They are just screaming at me to paint. I may have to actually take the time to do it en plein air instead of en snowy day.

I am headed to the Cape at the end of the week. It is time for our vacation and I am going up before everyone else. The 5 weeks since the Fourth of July have flown by. I had no wish for it to go quickly as I have no wish for summer to be half over. I know that once we get back from the Cape I will feel as though the season is gone even though there will probably be another 6 weeks of hot weather.  

Right now, though, it is just dark enough to light some candles and plug in the porch fairy lights. The sky to the north is t the most delicate shade of a bruised, smoky blue.   Whispers of it drift across my view, with bands of eggshell white illuminating what is left of the day's light.  

Dusk is the most delicate time of day, the  cusp between activity and dreams. It is the moment when   all that was not done is naught before night falls. The young night is all promise and fireflies, smoky air and mystery, a subdued gentle first act before the glamour of lamplight. 

It is the time to drop everything - filling the dishwasher, throwing in a load of wash, watching The Newsroom on demand - and meet on the porch. We add our exhalations to the sky's  dusky blue of longing, of languour, of secrets and bittersweet desire.

The evenings are cool. They have the first touch of woodsmoke,  just a light perfume, like the passing of an elegant woman on the street whose scent  is more imagined than real. The harshness of the day's renderings fade into  into silhouette and we sink into the soft black of a charcoal rubbing of our lives. 

 

"L'heure bleue".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Then the Rains Came

Am I the only one deliriously happy that it is very cool and rainy this Saturday morning in New York? 

 

Ah, the pressure is off to run around like a tourist and go see things and do outdoor things. Sometimes, in the midst of summer, you need a day to say,  hey let's watch The Wire from the beginning. 

I also have a little sewing project that I need to do before Mr. Pom's head explodes that there is a giant, long box by the front door FOR WEEKS with Sunbrella striped Capri blue fabric to cover the chaise cushion for the porch.

Yes, I know it was all my idea. I bought gorgeous new Capri Blue cushions for the wicker sofa, but the chaise is a weird shape and I can't find any open stock cushions. I thought I was so very ingenious by going on the Sunbrella site and ordering yardage of the coordinating stripe (and adorbs navy blue rubbery welting for a little edgy look). Only now I have to clear off the sewing table (Upon which much crappola has migrated since I used it last in 1162 B.C,) and find the bobbins (which have mysteriously disappeared) and make other welting ( I hate cutting and sewing the bias strips) and then hoping to God that the pattern I made (or will make later - shit, the long kraft paper roll is at the damn cottage) was accurate and I can find the roll of velcro I bought (I refuse to put in a zipper - not on porch furniture for Pete's sake). 

So. 

Let's go to the beach.

Actually, there's a FANTASTIC music festival in my backyard practically with Bret Dennen, Delta Rae, and other cool artists, but I just wasn't in the mood for crowds. Hmm, now that it is raining, perhaps I'll put on my Gudren red riding hood raincoat and head up to Pleasantville.

But let's assume I actually do some of the projects that I have put off to a rainy day.

Like asking you all WHAT ARE YOU READING THIS SUMMER?

 

 

 

 

I gotta know:

• what are you reading this summer, and
• what are you being crafty about  this summer?

 

All the women in my family read a lot in the summer and all the women in my family did something with their hands in the summer. At various times, we made candles or concrete casts set in sand with shells; made and later taught the young'uns how to make landyards; tackled potholder weaving from a very early age; and wove friendship bracelets. My mother was heavily into making beads flowers and knitting and my grandmother and aunts all crocheted. Of course, there's nothing worse than a sweaty crochet hook and damp yarn on a hot, humid  day, but in general, sitting around in the heat of an afternoon was best passed if not at the beach, then with a cup of coffee and a crochet hook.

 READING!

 

In keeping me primed and on track for novel writing I decided to return to some of the nonfiction classics that were watershed books for me in terms of writing style and theme.

(I was going great guns on the novel all winter and then I got a new assignment at work and it makes my brain bleed with deposing non-English speaking peeps for hours  and then writing reports that take as long as the depo. This has seriously impacted my desire to put a sentence together voluntarily. Hence, the scanty blogging these days. ) 

 

This is what I am reading and rereading:

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard
• An American Childhood - same - which in my memory I confused with A Romantic Education by Patricia Hampl, which I am going to find in one of the other bookcases and read toot sweet.
• Still Cove  - Gladys Taber. I found this author at a local bookstore about 1989 in Orleans and proceeded to go back to the bookstore and buy every book they had by her and spend most of the vacation on the bed reading whenever the kids took naps. She was one of the first essayists that wrote about her ordinary life and turned it into a Vermeer painting. And she lived in her later years in a lovely Cape Cod house on our cove, though she had passed away by the time I discovered her. Mr. Pom and I stalked the house from the photo on the cover and found it and when I saw the mailboxes with the names of her friends, the neighbors she often wrote about, it was like stepping through the looking glass. 
• Still Meadow and several out of print editions of her earlier books when she lived in an equally gorgeous area on a farm in Connecticut.   Amazon is an amazing resource for books that you just couldn't get your hands on in the pre-internet days. I was able to get copies of previously out of print books for pennies.
• For my artistic side, I am forever getting into book buying trouble by the ladies Dana and Faith who are forever teasing me wth artist books that they run across. Right now, I just got Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger. Go on Amazon and read the first chapter about the plums. I dare you not to buy this book when you are done.
• Swimming Studies - if midsummer is not the time to read it, when would be?
• Also rereading - The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington.
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place  byTerry Tempest Williams
• Mumbai New York Scranton: A Memoir by Tamara Shopsi
• The Sea at Truro: Poems by Nancy Willard
• To the River by Olivia Laing
• Drawn to Rhythm - A Passionate Life Reclaimed by Sara Hall

On the fiction side, I just read or am reading

• Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman
• My Sister Lives on the Mantel Piece by Anabelle Pitcher
• Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
• A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths (which is my comfort food easy peasy mystery series about a female forensic archeologist)
• The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen
• The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett

In its own category is Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, which is the author's devastating account of being the only survivor of the tsunami that swept thru the resort where she was staying with her husband sons, and parents in Sri Lanka. I read it in one day and it has not left me some two months later. 

 

What am I making?

• Re-covering the hateful chaise lounge, which was such a great price at Target that I thought I could overlook the olive green chenille fabric. Friends with eyes, WHO WANTS OLIVE GREEN CHENILLE ON A SUMMER CHAISE?  Seriously Target, you have all these cool designers doing fly by lines for you, couldn't you ask one of them instead of obviously consulting some Italian grandmother who said, "Olive green chenille, of course, it won't show dirt!". My email addy is readily available for consultation before your next line when you decide to upholster a porch swing with leopard crushed velvet. 
• I am toying with so many ideas for watercolor series of books. Right now, though, I am committed to finishing up all the class samples for our ART IS YOU WONDERFUL CLASS ABOUT HEIRLOOM RECIPES,  PROUSTIAN GUSTATORY MEMORIES, GARDEN CLUB MORNINGS AND GARDENIA NIGHTS WITH THE SOUTHERN LADIES, AND SUMMERS AT THE LAKE. You are going to feel SO CHEATED if you don't sign UP (Shh - there's even homemade toffee and Italian cookies each day).
• Now, I am also toying with ordering some great samplers from Rebecca Rehnquist. Only - I remembered I have one I already purchased over the winter! Go see how she uses them for journal covers on linen or burlap. Scrumptious.
• And, I am definitely bringing down to the porch my box 'o buttons  and embroidery thread so I can make lots and lots of covered buttons a la Miss Tracy Stillwell (soon to be Mrs. Tracy....Stillwell? not sure about the name change if any)Let's hope that Brewster doesn't think the buttons are candy because, lately, he's really reverting to puppyhood. Anyone need a lot of exercise and wanna run a big ol' dog ragged for me? I have no idea what I will do with the covered buttons but it makes me feel very much like  1980's young mother quilting with friends on the lake self. And I use up fabric (yeah, like I didn't buy more just for these). 

 

Lastly, I am making TIME this summer. Plain ol' sitting and stitching and reading and writing time. The evenings on the porch have been amazing, even in the heat. We get a breeze at night (even if from the ceiling and box fans). The fairy lights are strong enough to read by this year. The fireflies are dancing around outside. The smell of cut grass makes me swoon.  And our new cushions are comfy enough to sleep on. 

Go outside on the front stoop, on the side porch, on the lawn,  or on the roof and welcome summer nights, these nights that are like no other all year. Yes, autumn has delicious woodsmoke eves and winter is all candles and fireplaces, but summer's evenings bleed into the night sky purple and pink and dusk becomes an event for wine and mischief. 

GO OUTSIDE IN THE DARK. GO WALK IN THE RAIN.

 

Taking It Seriously In the Heat

Early morning on the side porch, and the tender violet sky of last night has awakened into pale blue and wispy clouds  float in out of the viewfinder that is the porch door.   The sprinkler is already twirling on the front lawn and the rich smell of wet grass and soil floats through the 12-foot high mountain laurel that screens us from the street. The variegated coleus  have grown a foot since I was last home and  the little dogwood tree in front of the garage now  completely blocks our  neighbor's  view of the porch. 

 

 

 

 

It is good to be home.

 

 

 

It is even good to have Brewster wake me up at 6:00 a.m. and watch him drink two bowls of water. The day is sultry hot again, but we all had a good night's sleep after Mr. Pom dragged the air conditioners up two flight of stairs and popped them in the windows. His timing was perfect as we arrived home hot and sweaty late last night after walking from the High Line to  Soho to catch a half hour visit with Micalangela. She was working, herding a group of pre-college students from her school on a NYC trip. We caught up with her at Strand, walked down to Uniqlo, bought her a few pairs of shorts, and then into Dean and Deluca where she got sushi take out for the bus ride home.

 

 

 

It was the last thing I expected to be doing on Saturday, when I was supposed to be driving home from the Cape. The trip was cut short for a day for various reasons out of my control, but it was wonderful to be having coffee with Mr. Pom on Saturday morning and then catching the youngest for a little while. The fast walk cross town was challenging in the heat but The High Line was delightful and I enjoyed an iced Americano from Blue Bottle Coffee.

 

 

 

It's always best to leave the Cape on a hot, sunny day. The pain of ripping yourself out of the simplicity of hammock, sand, water, read and  repeat,  is easier  when you can carry a bit of Cape light on your shoulders  instead of thunder and rain. It is also best to immediately plunge yourself into hot, sticky, touristy New York as the yin and the yang of it make up for missing  the gulls swooping over while we eat Liam's onion rings on the beach.

 

 

 

Last week's vacation started out as a  little swag bag that dropped unexpectedly into my lap, sweetened  with a friend's visit and the last minute decision to take a week-long drawing class together. Beware of weeks bearing gifts, however.  I will never take a week-long art class on a vacation week again, but I learned much more than the sum of the classes. I learned that its best to leave schedule and homework behind on a vacation and that challenging yourself in art never, ever ends as there is always so much more to learn.

 

 

 

The class was at a  funky little art center filled with wonderfully creative types who were busy in other studios making pottery and figure painting. There was a little lighthouse and a garden filled with lettuces as sweet and green as Farmer MacGregor's.  We had a pot luck lunch with veggie burgers and "meat" dogs and I got to talk with the sweet, young interns who made me intensely miss my youngest. 

 

 

 

The instructor was wonderfully generous with her collection of natural objects. She set up a  long table laden with  exotic and commonplace bits and bobs  of nature finds from seashells to gnarly roots  to fossilized rocks, dehydrated turnips, antlers, pine cones, magnolia pods,  a purple cabbage and a green fennel.  Our first assignment was to chose something off the table and and draw it,  and the only guidelines were to not draw in graphite and to not outline the shape, but  to express the volume of the piece from within.

 

DON'T GET EXCITED - ONLY THE EGGPLANT IS MY IMAGE. THE REST ARE FROM THE TALENTED STUDENTS IN THE CLASS

 

Somehow, I grasped that concept without too much fuss - the first and last concept I grasped for the rest of the class. I draw a lot. But I don't draw big. Which obviously is my Achilles heel.  Attempting a very large sketch with soft charcoal for the first time, I concentrated so hard on shading the volume that I completely forgot to go back in  and make finer lines to represent more detail. Oh. (My stalks were shaded very three dimensionally, so there was that at least.)

 

THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE A TURGID HEART WITH ARTERIES STIFF WITH PLAQUE IS MY FENNEL. 

 

On the first sunny day of the vacation, she gave us homework!  We  had to make five 9 X 12 drawings. So instead of going to the beach or the bookstore or the coffee shop, two very cranky artists  sat at the kitchen (the Art Garage was too dark and the patio too bright and hot) and muttered about damn charcoal and argued about whether using watercolor and painting it instead of drawing was cheating.

 

It is the last time I will dedicate a  whole Cape Cod afternoon and evening to homework of any kind.

 

 

 

After screwing up A COLLAGE the next day (a collage, mind you, my mixed media friends!) , I lost the ability to create anything that I didn't tear up for the rest of the week.  

This happens to me ALL THE TIME: when I take a class,  I forget everything I know and act like I've never held a pencil, brush, or pen in my life. You see, I work VERY slowly. I need to get up and walk around A LOT. I need to THINK about what I am drawing. I cannot be RUSHED.

 

And so, I whine. 

 

 

 

 

 

 I dripped sweat onto my charcoal sketch, mentioned ten times to the instructor that I'd NEVER USED SOFT CHARCOAL ON A 18 X 24 DRAWING BEFORE, and was USED TO WATERCOLOR WHERE THE LIGHTS GO IN BEFORE THE DARKS AND NOT VICE VERSA,  and started to wear a hole in the paper trying to create a highlight by erasing a sharp line into the charcoal.

The instructor casually mentioned as she walked by that I was having trouble and would never be able to do that BECAUSE THE PAPER SHE GAVE US was printmaking paper and did not have enough tooth for charcoal.

Did I mention that she forgot to put the correct paper on the supply list and handed me this paper to use?

 

 

 

And then it got freaking hot. 

 

I took a break and stood puppy-like at the entrance to the pottery studio, my tongue hanging out with desire to just pound clay.

 

But the best was yet to come: mark making in the dunes!

 

 

The instructor was a lovely woman who had a long professional career and taught drawing at the college level. Her critiques were extremely positive and encouraging for everyone.  At one point, after telling us we should stay and work as long as possible each day (wut? the sun is out after 3 days and we want to go to the beach),  that her drawing classes are at least 8 hours long (gotta be more empathetic to art students everywhere) , and that she never, ever teaches any drawing techniques in any of her classes (gotta get one of these teaching  gigs)  I realized that art school is actually very much akin to law school: figure it out yourself or flunk out trying. 

 

I obviously lack the Dedicated to Art gene because while I was whining about drawing and the youngest was text-laughing at me, our instructor was home CUTTING AND SAWING WOOD into a variety of rakes for us to use in order to create mandalas and tiles and mazes in the dunes of Truro that we were to climb in the middle of the hottest week of the year. 

 

 

Yeah.  Let the anxiety begin!

 

 

 

After being seriously pissed off about missing the 4th of July parade to attend class and fretting about carrying heavy  tools and sketchpads up and across the dunes in the middle of the day, the making-marks-in-the-dunes experience turned out to be the  highlight of the week.

 

 

 

I wisely chose not to climb the highest mountain, but go up a baby one and sit in a protected bowl inside a dune that was positioned to catch the breeze and afford me a view north to Pilgrim Lake and Provincetown Bay and south to the Atlantic.

Before I began making marks, I saw to get a sense of the swale and what it wanted to tell me. I listened to a hawk up above and followed its shadow across the scrub roses. I watched as the tracks of animals from the night before slowly revealed themselves to me as my eyes adjusted to the bright glare. I felt the breeze cool me off and marveled at listening to nothing more than silence.

I remembered why I come to the Cape in the first place. 

 

 

 

 

 

The stress of the responsibilities of the week drained away.  I could have sat in the dune for hours and just gaze at the horizon. The mark making was just like messing in the sand when you were a kid, and after I did my obligatory assignment, I decided just to sit and enjoy the amazing view and the solitary quiet. I felt not unlike Carlos Castaneda finding his power spirit but sans the 'shrooms.  

 

I took some great photos of my "marks" and the teacher picked out a particularly close up one for me to draw as large as I could - even suggesting that I put several pieces of paper on the wall if necessary - in order to blow up the scale.

 

 

I started a big piece in charcoal.

 

Gave up.

 

Turned it over, pinned it on the wall and started it in pastel. 

 

Gave up. 

 

Took out watercolors, drawing pencils, and Inktense pencils and ended up with a picture that looked like the roots of flood-swollen trees.  

 

Internets, I didn't have a clue.

 

 

 

However, I did discover that using drawing pencils on vellum to draw sea shells creates yummy creamy lines and the shine of the vellum is perfect to depict the polishing by the ocean.  I loved our beach walks and scavenging for oddly twisted pods and roots and lugging home a big ol' twisted trunk to draw. I enjoyed getting to know the other two women in our class. And I liked seeing the pieces my instructor had in a small show with four other women. She sculpted wood into organic forms, sanded them down to a satin finish and painted them with contemporary strips of color.

 

 

 

I will, however, be so much more organized and prepared when I teach my own classes. I will try to be as generous as our teacher was with her finds and hope I can teach y'all how to do the few fiddly and piddly techniques I know how to do with a paint brush or a pencil.

 

And I will always, always allow my students to  cut class to sit along Main Street and wave your little flag as the lobster float and the world's oldest jazz band march past in a Fourth of July parade.