Winter Blows In

 
I haven't been outside today, but when I do the city will have been transformed.

Yesterday was drizzly and mild,  delightful in its  melancholy. I love the final days of autumn, when neighbors entirely abandon their stabs at kempt and let what's left of the vines creep out of bounds and the flowers frolic and tangle among them.

A few very tender plants succumbed weeks ago, their limp and watery foliage blackened but hanging on, tethered to branches by glutinous threads. Beside them, pink roses still budding and blooming, foolishly believing summer goes on forever.

But overnight, winter dropped. This morning the car tops and tree branches were crusted with a glitter of snow. Today, the temperature won't climb much above freezing.

Soon, I'll tug on my boots and gloves and tromp a path to lunch, iced blossoms lining my way.

Finding of beauty in the cycle of life.  The Japanese call it wabi-sabi.

I Want a Whatchamacallit

What is This?

I thought I had this flower figured out.  A patch of them waves in fairy splender along the wrought iron rail surrounding Marvelous Market on Capitol Hill, resembling not real flowers but a vision of them,  perhaps rendered in clay. Like Gumby. The petals are that meaty.

Clay and Resin Necklac

The beauty and frustration of Google is that you can take some whim and compare it to millions upon thousands of possibilities -- words or photos. Which is just what I did here, though I was more successful in finding a flower necklace made of clay than locating the flower I sought. 

The Aging Beauty of Alium

Elizabeth and I were strolling along the other day chatting about this and that nothing when she abruptly threw out an arm to stop me and pointed down at this sputnik growth alongside a garden path -- "I want alium next year," she announced.

At first I didn't recognize it, it was kind of like looking at a high school mate 30 years later -- there's something about you but...

And then I did.

I grew a herd of alium sometime early in my gardening career (can you call something you do so haphazardly a career?) and recalled being enchanted by the fuzzy purple popsicle heads that sproinged about the garden, but was put off in subsequent years by the price of the bulbs. I mean, these are spring thingies, they do nothing all summer, right? They come up and, bam, they're over.

The purple fluff falls off and what's left are these gnarly witchy fingers. But I didn't appreciate the skeletal back then, the way the remains of something have a curious beauty. It's not just the fresh and young and perky that have a lock on fabulousness.

I did have an early introduction to this  idea, even if it took several decades to take root.

Maybe 20-years ago I picked up "Drawing on the Left Side of Your Brain," and spent several weeks sketching. A fascinating book for those whose representational skills stalled out at age 8, or so. Which is (for some reason) most of us. Turns out it's all about not really seeing what's in front of your face. You're looking right at a chair or a chin and not able to get your pen around the contours.

And then you pick up the book and do a couple of exercises and...so maybe you're not Picasso, but you've actually produced something recognizable, something with depth, proportion, something that comes perilously close to -- art. Whoa.

I was lying in a bubble bath drawing my foot on the facuet, sitting in the front porch rocker sketching our big elm tree, hovering over Monica sketching her sleeping, thumb-sucking baby face.

And the more I did the more interested I became in out of kilter shapes and, most particularly, odd looking people. My eye flitted right past the pretty to itch at the thought of getting a bulbous nose on paper, corrugated foreheads, wattley chins, jutting bones and opposing hollows...the old were particularly enchanting, with all their parts coming unmoored in such interesting ways.

This went on for some weeks. 

Now, every once in a while I pick up one of the sketches and am briefly impressed with myself -- and then I recall that I put the book aside and returned to drawing very much as I did in Mrs. Turtletaub's third grade art glass. It's so much easier. I am such a disappointment to me sometimes (I am shaking my head).

So the alium has reminded me of all this and and seeing the spiky remains beside the garden path made me determined to damn the expense and plant them again next year.

  

Blight of the Apricot, Blooming of the Cherry

A rather large mistake is in the making. Serves me right for being so damn impatient, I say.

Oh, it looks pretty enough, the kwanzan cherry the Prince and I planted  several years ago to replace the apricot that up and died. It was good riddence to that, even if it screened our yard from the blight of new townhouses that went up behind our place and obstructed a clear view of the sky.

See, the apricot had a habit of prettily flowering and then spurting forth fruit, bushels of fruit, which you might think was very exciting and pleasant and tasty but was instead utterly disgusting and grew increasingly vile with each passing year.

It was here when we bought the house, approaching 27-years-ago, and weren't we thrilled that the skinny little sapling would eventually yield our very own apricot crop.

As it happened, just the summer before we'd been to visit friends in California and spent afternoons sitting stoned (or at least one of us was) on a deck plucking peaches from the branches of a tree that hovered deliciously overhead, sweet juices dribbling down our chins.

Clearly, we had a vision going here -- and didn't that apricot waltz right into the picture (funny what makes you buy a house, isn't it? It's all in the romance).

So we bought the house and watched the tree grow, fertilizing and fretting year after year when no fruit appeared. It never would, the tree experts informed us, because there was no other apricot in the vicinity and cross-pollination (or was it fertilization?) would never occur.

Southern Comfort

If you squint you'll see the date on the cover of this issue of Southern Accents Magazine: July-August 1997. You'll also notice (if you squint even harder) the thumb tack holes and blackening in the margins where it has been alternately pinned and taped to walls and cork boards for nearly 13 years.

Throughout the day, the sight of it in the corner of my eye tantalizes. What's out there, I wonder, beyond the arches where the sun light  is so brilliant? It's a garden I think, deeply green, with a circular pool and a fountain. I can hear the gentle splashing from where I'm flopped on the settee, feet up on the flowered hassock with its deep turquoise fringe, eyelids drooping over a book--the only jarring note. It's probably something involving serial killers or clowns in sewers.

We don't want to get too sappy now, do we? An acid splash is always nice; it's like a touch of anchovy in the mozzarella en carozza.

Ready or Not...

The prince has this idea that I should start gardening, or creating gardens, since it appears I'm alive and will probably remain so for at least the near future. To that end he's signed us up for some minor league expo at Eastern Market that's being sponsored by Frager's, our local hardware and garden emporium.

I was not asked my opinion of this.

What Ho! It's Curly Willow!

Today's constitutional, designed to keep me in robust physical and mental health, brought me as always to Marvelous Market, where I sat on a bistro chair for an hour and by turns tried to figure out something to write and glared at a baby in a stroller to see if I could alarm him (I assume it was a him since he was wearing a blue onesy).

I was not successful at either thing. Blather blat blat blat went my pen in my fat pink CVS spiral notebook and no matter how formidable I tried to look, whenever it was that I looked up, the baby just stared at me  and then offered a big mouthed yawn as his mother finally wheeled him away. There is something very askew with my ability to terrify.

Blat blat blat I wrote that down then packed myself up and crossed the street to examine Eastern Market, as if I don't examine it nearly every day but Monday when it is closed.

Going Postal

Can you make out this abomination from the photo? I  upped the contrast as best I could, but if I find it hard to see I imagine you'll find it nearly impossible, which on the one hand is too bad because it is really ugly, and on the other just as well, because it is really ugly. 

The ugly this I am referring to is a blockade the prince erected to thwart the postal persons who have worn a path across the ivy-covered front yard so he or she doesn't have to walk down the front walk, down the sidewalk and up the neighbor's front walk to deliver what's left of the daily mail -- usually a real estate postcard and  a WETA fund raising letter.

Pulling Free

Yesterday had me yanking and clipping dead stuff from the top of the fence on the alley side of the backyard.

Twenty seven years ago, when the prince and I bought this house, I planted a honeysuckle vine dead center on the 15 foot wall. It quickly grew to dance along the top, spreading seven feet here, seven feet there, merging with the ivy that grew upward from the wall's base.

Meanwhile, the wisteria planted in the far right corner and intended to soften the flat line of the garage roof  lost its sense of direction and began a stealthy creep under the branches of the honeysuckle. And somewhere along the way a seed from a white flower vine impregnated the soil ( I'm sure i never planted it. Or am I?) It too has grown up to merge with the honeysuckle and the ivy and the wisteria.

Lacing it all together is a climbing red rose of dubious pedigree that snaked its prickly way through the tangle of vines. It gasps and heaves each spring, tossing a flailing cane 20 feet up and out over the alley and flowers fabulously for a couple of weeks if it's cool enough, ten days if it's not. Then it succombs to black spot and waves its octopus arms and laughs at at me from its untouchable height.

Have I become Redundant?

Since I am almost entirely useless, Monica designed our gorgeous Thanksgiving table and centerpiece this year-- without one single word of advice from me.

She also took charge of the turkey and and took in stride the assistance of Uncle Bill, who has become extremely enthusiastic about cooking since his retirement.

This was a follow-up to last week's Resurrection/Birthday Fiesta she and Greg arranged for 42 friends: margaritas, salsas, beef and/or veggie soft tacos, chicken tortillas. All from scratch.

Monica says: "It's like I've become the mommy and you're the baby." How true. And there's nothing she seems to like more than saying things like: Mommy stop! Just stop. Do NOT lift that. Do not DO that.

I Did Say this Blog is Tangentially About Flowers Didn't I?

There are purple and yellow and palest pink orchids in the wee, glass walled, conservatory off my second floor office. Last year at about this time it was an open porch, but then I batted my eyelashes and said to my prince...Could you put up maybe some plastic so I could hold over the tropicals?

And lo. It was done.  

Besides the orchids, I've got a Meyer lemon, with an actual lemon just turning lemon colored, a key lime, a grapefruit, a Honey Bell orange seedling, and several varieties of jasmine.

The absurdly unfloriferous red hibiscus has been yanked from the earth and put in a pot. The pink geraniums from the front window boxes will be enjoying their second winter indoors; amazing how bushy and happy they are, if they had tails they'd be wagging. The ferns are on their hooks. The palm's in the corner.

It's all very splendid, though it smells a bit like an indoor swimming pool since the prince sprayed bleach on the backs of  the wonderful Alice in Wonderlandy wicker chairs that we picked up on last month's Tallulah trek.

It was last month, wasn't it? Somehow I've lost track. A few weeks ago, that's right, isn't it? When I thought I had the flu? But then it turned out I didn't.

It's increasingly amusing (to me anyway) that I chose Alice at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party to illustrate my blog. Leap with me down the rabbit hole:

Blowing Smoke Rings at Tallulah

I don’t know why Tallulah Bankhead is buried in St. Paul’s Churchyard outside the miniscule port town of Rock Hall, Maryland. But there the Alabama-born and New York-cured actress lies.

Rock Hall is in the middle of nowhere, even a spit farther from somewhere than Chestertown, a few miles away. It was in Chestertown that I took my first stab at higher education.

A tiny school of 700 lily-white, corn-fed students, Washington College, the town’s main industry, was about the only one that accepted me and my miserable grades and board scores. But with my crotch length skirts and thigh high boots I suppose I single handedly filled their slot for exotics.

More...
Two hours out of Baltimore in one direction, two hours out of Washington in the other, and then another four or so from Manhattan, my home town, Chestertown was splendidly isolated – from my parents.

More importantly, it was where the enchantingly outrageous Tallulah, with her quick wit, naughty eyes, and smoky voice had chosen to face eternity. “Divinely impossible,” she was called, and how I wished people would say that of me. Unfortunately, I was only successful at the impossible part.

This was (more or less) why I was booted from the school by Christmas, without ever having had a graveside commune.

Fast forward 30-some years and the husband and I are off for a Sunday drive from our Washington home, he for crab cakes and me for a visit with Tallulah; a fascination rekindled by my good friend Diana McLellan's book, "The Girls," in which she deliciously dissects the violet passions of some of the most celebrated female stars of the 1930s stage and screen--Garbo, Dietrich, and Bankhead among them.

St Paul’s is a country churchyard off a quiet road that’s a mile off another quiet road and set beside a pond that would be pretty if it didn’t appear to be in the process of being smothered by creeping kudzu.

Tallulah lies beneath a spartan stone slab stone topped with a decaying bouquet of plastic roses, strung here and there with notes from admirers, tightly wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the elements.

I wondered, as I contorted myself to take pictures of the epistles, if these earlier visitors traveled with rolls of wrap in their totes, or if a kindly church person preserves them. And if there’s preserved a cache of older letters to the star. One would think so, judging by the packed mud that surrounds the stone.

At some point I notice I’d stretched myself beside her to get a clear shot and her last words of record whispered themselves to me, codeine…bourbon…

Sorry dahling, I shrugged and blew her a smoke ring. Fresh out.