T-7 and counting

A pink evening. This was Sunday.

I don't know what came over me. I cooked like a fiend. Too-many Berkshire pork chops, roasted with grapes and rooftop rosemary branches in the oven. Two apples whole, in their own pan, beneath. A tray of those delectable squashed potatoes hissing beside them, scattered with chopped garlic and preserved lemon. And then there were the marrow bones. Small dishes of black currant chutney and pickled mustard.

The weekend's activity was intense - and shouldered heavily by the Frenchman. He carried all the boxes destined for Harlem, in out and down and up again. He fetched and drove the truck.  Then he took apart the book cases and the bed. Then he lay down.

I cooked. And I shook pink cocktails. Red currant gin with a slosh of sumac vodka and a squeeze of lime: tart, tannic, fresh. I sipped and chopped. The revived Frenchman watched a movie. Then we tackled the pork chops. With melting roast apple, and crisp potato and wobbly, parsleyed marrow.

And glasses of prosecco. Of course.

Our last Sunday supper in Brooklyn.

[ And a nice bonus for today - a lovely review of 66 Square Feet on Apartment Therapy's theKitchn]

The Other Roses

The edges of the terrace still look like a garden. Lady Emma Hamilton, Windermere, Abraham Darby (and another of those, on the roof). And all the sun-lovin' herbs.

And, as I shuttle between this photogenic gem of a terrace, and the bigger wider one in Harlem (ironically not as easy to photograph, and you know it's all about the pictures!), I am consolidating ideas about the new space, which is so different. There is the uniform line of wraparound weathered wood planters. It is both a boon and challenge. Boon because it's all there, already - lots of linear feet of planting space. Challenge because in long, quite narrow boxes roots become intertwined and plant bullies can crowd out more tentative perennials. In pots they are segregated, and their differing water needs can be meted out easily. Shared planter - everybody gets the same. So there will have to be more discipline in plant choices.

The Harlem terrace, south view. 

The terrace floor here on Henry Street is exposed, now. The gravel has been removed, the filter fabric lifted, and the planks of the pressure treated deck revealed. Pots have been coralled, some emptied, in preparation for the second phase of our move to Harlem, with the new terrace, and new light, next week.

Yesterday we moved boxes up there, traveling Manhattan's length on 1st Avenue in a bouncing truck. The Frenchman calculated that he climbed 140 flights of stairs, total. Four flights down to truck, four flights up, and the parlour level stairs over there.

66 Square Feet,  May 2012

I have decided that the Iceberg is coming with us.

It was the first rose on this terrace. Arrived as a stick from Texas, and gave us these, last spring:

May 2012

I cut it back to about three feet, and have no idea, really, how it will respond. I doubt we'll see flowers next spring, even if it recovers, as I think it will want to bloom on canes formed this year. And now there ain't none.

At night it leaks clear fluid from the cut ends. Capillary action undiminished as it pumps water and nutrients to phantom branches, higher up, and over the roof.

Fire cat

There was a huge commotion on Atlantic Avenue yesterday, opposite Sahadi's. Vince saw it: smoke, fire trucks, an FDNY mobile disaster preparedness medical unit, and a line of ambulances, pulling up one by one. The whole avenue was shut off right down to the BQE. It seemed major.

When we went out later to shop for supper, there was just some mopping up near the cordoned-off basement area of one of the two side-by-side Middle Eastern shops, where the fire seemed to have broken out.

But on the sidewalk outside, was this shop cat. I know it, from one of those Middle Eastern stores. It was grubby down one side, as though it too, had been in the smoke. But it wasn't afraid or darting about, just very interested in what was happening. A cool, working cat.

Fresh cut flowers

Can you buy real flowers at a supermarket?

This is a selection of in-season blooms outside Key Food on Atlantic. I'll miss them, in our move to Harlem. While they do stock the boring and ubiquitous and season-defying long stemmed roses, lilies, Siberian iris, and orchids (and hyacinths, in October, which is just upsetting to a gardener), the flowers pictured here could, by no long stretch of the imagination, be blooming in local garden now. And that is what flowers mean, to me: now, this minute; this is it.

I remember houses in Bloemfontein where the marigolds were planted in rows, with neat, Dutch Reformed spaces between each non-touching plant. Then, I hated them. But these are a riot.

Not bad, as generic bouquets go: sunflowers, marigolds, cockscombs (Celosia spicata -  the smaller, pointy, feathery pink flower and Celosia cristata, the ruffled, sea-coral one), sweet William, argeratum (fluffy mauve), Gomphrena (round, fluffy hot pink ones).

There won't be flowers in our house, for a while. It's all a little disheveled. Boxes here, boxes there. And when we do get round to it, in that northern Manhattan neighbourhood, where every person who passes you utters a greeting, the weather will have turned again, and might call for Viburnum branches, or sprays of late asters.

Tart with tamarind

Curry in the house - next door at 66 Square Feet (the Food)

Goodbye to all that*

June 2006

In some ways, leaving the terrace is about making decisions I have put off for years.

Like the New Dawn.

This rose is - as anyone knows who has grown it - a long distance endurance climber. It does not hold back. And after almost seven years it had wrapped its thorny, once-blooming arms all around one side of the terrace and over the door. Its lovely and delicate flowers appeared for two weeks, less in heat, and were gone.

                                                              May 2007, the rose party

But for some years it had not been well. Hanging in there, but desperate for more room.  It made a good support for the clematis that I grew up through its canes, and for the Gloriosa lily that wound its little leaf hooks around the bare lower parts of the rose, and for the very, very tall lilies in the neighbouring pot, which I tethered to the New Dawn to keep them out of my way as I moved back and forth.

                                                                                May 2008

But some relationships have to end. A tipping point is reached and over you go (thank you, Malcolm Gladwell - imagine if he got royalties every time someone said that. He must hear it and wince and think - ka-ching!).

Today I cut the New Dawn back, and then down, and then tipped its massive rootball out of the large pot, and bagged it. The Frenchman had to carry it downstairs. It was too heavy for me to lift. I was not as sad as I thought I would be. But looking at these pictures does make me sad.

May 2009

The terrace is a-kilter. Almost two thirds of the gravel have been removed, the filter fabric lifted to expose the deck beneath, the shady corner is no more. It will be left blank.

May 2010

I am doing this as much for myself as for the notoriously litigious landlord. I want to leave nothing. Not out of spite, but out of neatness, because I like to end things cleanly.

May 2011

The terrace in its glory was a story. It is a story. 

May 2012

                                                                     It will always exist. 

* Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves, 1929

The Others

Also seen on my walk the other day. 

Don't ask. I don't know.

There may have been a film crew, nearby.