Cooling off

If you are a regular visitor to the blog you will notice that we have taken our clothes off: left. It's a seasonal thing.

Record-breaking 90'F in New York, on this 26th of April 2009, which is just wrong. So the least I could do was get nekkid. Vince took the picture of me last year on the granite boulder beach populated by penguins, just past Simonstown on the Cape Peninsula. The tourists all mass along the boardwalks one beach down, at Boulders, not knowing really about this little cove, Foxy Beach, where you are allowed to swim and sun yourself along with the gentle little black 'n whites.

The picture of Vince I took this February, on Dune 45 in Sossusvlei in the Namib Desert. No penguins there, but very pleasant barking geckos.

The Median

On a perfect spring day, we started to dig. At last it was time for the neglected, ugly East Houston Street median to be dressed in the new clothes I'd designed for it. What better than flowers, for bees, for butterflies, for all of us green-derived Noo Yorkers?

The crew - Viki, above - had been working for a while before I arrived. So I tried to dig extra fast.

Spontaneous volunteer Ricky, from the 'hood. He found a real earthworm. The combination of digging teenager plus earthworm was a happy one.

Das Boot. Sort of. These are my serious action boots: gardening, mud-sliding in Lynn Canyon, and horse riding on long sandy, wet beaches.

Looking better and better.

I think we'll put the cones in the street when we plant next Thursday. I swear I felt a side mirror shaving my jeans as I bent over.

There were the predictable Hoo baby catcalls: we had three girls on the crew - very hard working girls...but many of the comments from cars and trucks surprised me: good job! what are you planting! thank you! can you plant sunflowers? It felt good. They felt good.

The UPS guy said, Someone's getting their money's worth...

One lady stole our soil, scooping it up furtively into a little bag as we worked the other end.

You're stealing our dirt! I yelled at her: Why???

Because I don't have my own, she said...

What could I say to that.

Then she said she had 6 cats , 1 hyacinth and was dying of AIDS. I told her to help us plant next week. She said she would.

We took off several inches of soil and bagged it to allow for the added soil from the 400 perennials we'll be planting. Kim, one of the gardeners, asked if she could have the bagged soil, and said she knew a guy who could take it to their community garden in Bushwick.

Below, Kim and the "guy": who turned out to be Rodrigo Gonzalez, who paints murals and makes beautiful art.

Off goes the extra topsoil. I warned them that it might be salty, from winter roads, but right now they are contending with lead-tainted soil and consider this an improvement.

Then we added some organic Vermont compost.

At last. Soft and fluffy soil the way I like it. Greenstreets will one day live up to its name. It has been brownstreets for too long.

It's going to feel good to lie flat tonight.

So this is Phase One.

9/12/09 Update: for follow-up and Things Growing try here, here, here aaaaaand here!

Pink or pink

The terrace pink is bothering me. For a day I loved it. Then a slight gloss came out, in the sunshine. Yech. The pink is a popular one. It is the pink of Estorbo's ribbon, the pink of the lining of my coat, the pink of my Thai coobook. It's in every magazine, paired with orange, or lime. I need a deeper pink. More bloody, more like the first wall that I painted years ago.

Back to the paintshop.


And it needs to be ready by May 15th, when Constanza will grace the terrace with her fly-by- night presence.

Blombehoeftes

In Petra Muller's short story Verbeel Jou Nou Dit (Imagine That), in her collection Desembers (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2007), Altus Louw says, Ek is 'n man met blombehoeftes.

I am a man with flower needs.

Well, that is the sort of woman I am.

Then he goes on to say: Ek voel altyd 'n vreeslike ding oor my kom as ek tussen blomme is. 'n Aansteeklikheid.

I always feel a terrible thing coming over me when I amongst flowers. Something contagious.

With me, it just means I want more flowers. In Namaqualand in South African springs I have wanted to roll in them.

The crabapples opened this week of April.

The Kate Winslet crabapple is opening in Cobble Hill Park. I will take better pictures tomorrow when the sky will be blue. It still looks like Kate: creamy, smooth, soft, guileless.

And they're back...

One of many self-seeded bronze fennels. Beautiful feathery fronds, good for anything a la Grecque; late season yellow flowers, favourites of pollen-heavy bees, good fresh seeds...

Green garlic sprouting with the leftover arugulas, refugees from the squirrel.

My favourite, the calamintha - like a resurrection. Peppermint nose and frothy white flowers.

The fig setting embryonic fruit and leaves. The third crop succeeded last year. This year I did not wrap the little tree, just brought it down to the floor of the terrace.

Letter in spring

Dear Husband

Feeding you is a chief pleasure of my life. Thus speaks the empowered woman. And I do it so seldom. Feed, you, I mean; I know I speak a lot. Thank you for fixing the table so that its one leaf can stand up now. I should invite some friends over for dinner. Maybe Constanza has time for dinner when she's here in May. I would like to feed more people more often. But we need a bigger place. They don't seem to mind, though...

I would like to feed your mother and sister and nephew. Do you think he would eat what I cook? Also it would be good to meet them. I'd like to feed my mother too. But she's even further away. But we will. Feed people. We will have a bigger table. This table's big but it creaks like a ship on the high seas: which reminds me that we still need to feed Eric and Mimi the Patrick O'Brian dinner cooked from the book. I guess we can't cook rats. Millers. Maybe at their place. Not rats, dinner.

Some day: I'd like a really, really big table. Where you work and cook and eat. That sort of table. Where maybe once a week, perhaps on a sad Sunday night, all friends come for dinner. I've always wanted that. Sunday suppers.

So we do need a bigger place. Not my place, not your place, our place. It's interesting being married and not having an our place, isnt it? Maybe we're lucky. Not taking for granted and all that. And there is a lot to look forward to.

But mostly, I would like to have breakfast with you. Perk the coffee, heat the milk, cuddle the cat, cook the pancetta and butter the toast. Sit in the creaking Heywood Wakefield chairs and eat at the creaking table with sunlight streaming in from the east.

Love,

Your Wife

Stuff

..."why does a lillium spit out pollin"

...is the question that someone from Limerick, Ireland, asked Google, and how they landed on my blog. There are many lily landing places here.

It was exactly what I needed. A slow walk home, taking pictures of blossoms. The thin letter from the Dept. of Homeland Security heavy in my bag. Within 90 days they say, they will review why my citizenship has not gone through yet. April 4th was the latest day by which I should have heard, after my apparently successful December 4th interview. Another three months. At least it's movement. At least I exist in the numbers.

So many kind people have asked, When will you be a citizen, when will Vince move to New York?

I don't know I don't know I don't know. For a year and a half we have not known. His visa application was denied last year, so now we wait and wait and wait.

I got home, cried, picked up the cat, and listened to him purr.

Thank you Limerick, and I'm not sure my blog answered your question .

Why does a lilium spit out 'pollin'?

A lady lily, late at night, lurching home, weaving, sick to the stomach, spitting out yellow pollen, burping up Guiness fumes and Formosa fragrance, night pollinators stalking her in the shadows...

Five years ago this month I moved to this little apartment.

Then I wrote:

New 

Fat moon rising in April
where jets pass like stars in the new east

My mouthful of red wine
pausing the chaos
of a life tipped

A sore back
A black cat
Potatoes boiling
Books to unpack

My sounding board
a lamp
a table
a terrace
waiting for lilies

April, 2004

Also in my bag, less heavy, Go! magazine's camp cooking booklet with my pictures and recipes. That was nice. And suddenly, hitting me in the solar plexus as I leaned on the pole in the subway car, a full page picture of my husband in the magazine, back turned to the fire at Klein Aus Vista, Namibia, chops and potatoes on the coals, Vincent looking at the sunset.

We've come a long way.