Who comes when you call?

This friendly FDNY company belongs to Engine 279/Ladder 131, from Red Hook. 

When you are looking (desperately) for the good things about a country (this country) you are reminded quickly, at least in New York City, that competent help arrives fast, when you call. There are caveats, I know - who you are, where you are. 

This morning I stepped out to have coffee on the terrace under a deep blue October sky. Strong smell of gas. I went to the other side of the apartment, lifted a window and sniffed. Gas. Very strong. I called 911. Yes, said the FDNY operator I was patched through to, there was a "major" gas leak on our block and that the FDNY was en route.

Soon, I counted at least 10 engines. Our block was closed off. Buildings behind the company above were evacuated. Cars were towed. Dozens of fire fighters stood about. Neighbors gathering on the sidewalks met each other for the first time. I went back upstairs and readied our go-bag, packed our passports, and got the cat carrier out. The cat snored peacefully.

The pneumatic drilling that woke us yesterday - one hole right outside our house, one up the block, belonged to a plumbing company whose work this morning ruptured a a gas line. Now, the plumbers were sitting around, looking sheepish.

Three hours later the leak has been repaired and most of the fire people have departed, leaving just a couple of trucks. There are many more holes in the street and sidewalk. The gas company and the woeful plumbing company workers are still here.  Cars blocking a fire hydrant have been ticketed.

And life goes on.

September from the top

Three doves took three pictures of the terrace from the roof. Dove One perched in the gutter and shot towards the east. Below us are the neighbors' gardens, deserted for summer and early fall. Possibly because of mosquitoes. Even up here on the third floor we were bitten. They prefer the Frenchman who feels them the minute they land.

Dove Two, always in the middle. You can see how wide the African basil has grown in the windowboxes. And the moonflowers, well, they bloomed best while I was in Mongolia for ten day, and then Sq. Irrel discovered them. He eats the buds just as they become pointily delicious. The only escapees are the ones a little too far from the railing.

Dove Three faces west, and the empty expanse of the laundry roof. 

Tick, tick, tick. The neatly parked, white vintage laundry trucks have departed. The rolling iron gates have dropped down. The daily and nightly washings of the city's restaurant linens have decamped to the company's other hub, in Queens. Demolition and enormous construction come next, but when is anyone's guess. 

The table

The terrace, these days. 

Here, waiting to be transported to Alice Austen House, the intimate museum, gallery and home on Staten Island of photographer Alice Austen (1866 - 1952), where I am now no longer volunteering but working (hey - I was working when I was volunteering) are a clutch of tall thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana - whose delicate white flowers on tall stems evolve into touchable green seedheads), and Penstemon digitalis 'Husker Red'.

The plants are from the Gowanus Lowlands Nursery, and are part of my long-term project to introduce more native and native-ish plants to Alice's garden and park facing The Narrows, that skinny and very busy bit of water leading to and from the Upper Bay of New York Habor and whose shipping traffic passes almost within reach of anyone standing on the shore. 

The drink is a gin and tonic tinted with a fermented strawberry-bee balm syrup made in spring. The glass a gift from my sister-in-law Brigitte, to remember our holiday together in Maine, many months ago.

There you have it. Summary on a table.

Pirellikins on the daybed

Because sometimes you have to post a picture of your cat. Nkwe Pirelli. Pirellikins, Puss-Puss. Chunkey Monkey. Pudding Cat. Little Shit. Kit Kat. My Boooooy. I'd kill anyone who hurt him.

Now you know all our secrets.

He is staring at a mourning dove on the terrace. Which is why we cannot leave him unattended, outside. Dove killer. Quick, effective, proud. Devastating. 

The sunflowers are from Alice Austen House, on Staten Island, where some of them are due to be removed soon. So I got to pick them. I've been volunteering weekly in the garden there since August 26th last year.  

When I got home from pulling weeds that first day I received the impossible message via WhatsApp that my friend Don had died, dropped off a mountain. Calls followed. From Canada, to Cape Town - the web of friends. Calls with someone I'd never met, his death confirmed by this kind stranger whose day was six hours further advanced than mine. Patiently answering my disbelief. Unbelievable and unacceptable. Impossible to imagine how his wife, our friend Rosie, was living each moment as she learned. I sat in a ball on this daybed. The Frenchman coming home to wreckage.

The cat, the cushions, the sunflowers, the circles we walk. The flowers we grow. 

Al fresco

Outdoors. Why does it all taste better under an open sky?

Open sky. Not as open as it once was. But we can pretend. The chimney swifts hunting their in-flight dinners above us convince us everything might be as it should be.

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Swamp milkweed for monarchs

As I arrived home yesterday after a photography expedition (mission: liatris), I saw a butterfly's erratic flight above the tiny patch of garden I cultivate at sidewalk level. Its distinctive flight pattern, like a kite whose freedom is restrained by a string tugged at intervals, quickly identified it as a monarch. It had found the milkweed. I waited in the sun. Humidity 72%. She returned.

Swamp milkweed - Asclepias incarnata - forgives you if you do not plant it in a swamp, and it is ideal for narrow spaces. The monarchs love it. She came back again and again to deposit an egg at a time on the milkweed's leaves. 

This is the first year since 2020 that I did not also plant balloon flower (aka hairy balls, cough), the tall southern African milkweed Gomphocarpus physocarpus, thinking that it, like the annual tropical milkweeds, might do monarchs more harm than good. It's a tough decision because that plant is spectacular visually in tight quarters, and makes passersby very happy.

My monarch sign is now quite obscured by liatris, agastache, snakeroot and the swamp milkweed.

Apart from drought (we water by hand carrying the watering can down two flights), the biggest threat here is dog urine. Bafflingly, many dog walkers let their dogs lift a leg on this tiny garden, despite the sign asking them not to. The repeat applications of dog pee burn the plants' leaves and makes life challenging. It makes me very depressed.

 It's a scrappy garden, but apparently it works.

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Gardenista column: All about slender mountain mint

Summer, bottled

Red? Scarlet? Rose? Pink? 

Today, in the luxury of 78°F air-conditioning (Central Park recorded 100°F, JFK 102, La Guardia 104), I strained and bottled two different batches of common milkweed flower vinegar. It is hard to describe, but it helps if you have smelled the heavy, lilac umbels of Asclepias syriaca. Wildly fruity-flowery and bracingly acidic on the edges of the tongue. Also a honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and elderflower vinegar, where the soft fragrance of the honeysuckle still lingers. I gathered the flowers in early June.

The vinegars began in large jars, the flowers mixed with sugar and tap water, stirred and allowed to fizz (these methods are in Forage, Harvest, Feast). At this point they are what I call cordials - sweetly concentrated, and naturally effervescent thanks to the wild yeasts at work. I serve them on picnics, diluted with tonic or chilled seltzer. Or booze, more rarely.

But because I sip and cook with vinegar more often than I drink sweet things, I decided to let them all ferment (much) longer, until acetic acid bacteria had produced the sourness that tells you vinegar has arrived. 

They are nothing like a commercial white wine vinegar, for example. There is acid, yes (their pH hovers around 4 - commercial vinegar may be 2 or 3), but also many layers of fragrance and sweetness and a sense of very ripe fruit. They are quintessential sipping vinegars, more like shrubs, made for quaffing on heat-blasted days like today: a tall glass, filled one quarter with the wild vinegar, ice cubes, and then water. Swirl. Quaff.

To the right (in the image above) is the black currant gin that has been steeping since last Saturday, when I pounced on the first - and not cheap - black currants at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. I'm going to use the leftover fruit, still packed with that musky, tart flavor, to make my favorite jam. 

There they are, from the other side. True color. Left to right: black currant gin x 3, the common milkweed vinegars x 6, and the honeysuckle-rose-elderflower. Times four.

Don Kirkwood gave me the bottle with my name etched on its side. I joked that one day his bottles and upcycled lab jars (more etching) would tell me who I was, one day. Maybe they will. I don't know where he found the time to do this. He was a kind, kind man. 

So there it is. Summer, its flowers gathered, their scents and flavors captured, and the sticky, intense heat reminding me of the time we lost Don, in his springtime in the mountains outside Cape Town, hunting for a flower that likes cliffs. Almost a year ago. 

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Forage, Harvest, Feast