Cat on a cold tar roof

Estorbo, on squirrel patrol. He doesn't stay out too long in these very cold temperatures, but both of us like the cold, at least for a while. His latest eccentric habit of drinking water from a glass on the stone table on the terrace has been derailed because the water is frozen.

I should tidy the terrace. It is all rasping leaves and grating brown stems. And, not too far off, I must grit my teeth and prune the fig. Really prune it. It's easy to tell other people to do it to their figs, but I have never pruned the fig's branches, only the roots. It is such a modestly-sized tree. But this year it will undergo both surgeries. Topped and tailed. The fig yield this year was lower than usual, and the pruning will encourage the new, sappy green growth on which the main fig crop grows.

February is around the corner. You know what that means: witch hazels. I would appreciate some more winter, before then. Some snow, for example.

The fallen

The great Christmas tree discard continues.

We still have ours.

I like it. The cat likes it. It sheds needles into his water bowl. I sweep needles up every morning. He sleeps in front of it every night.

Our first Christmas tree. We'll miss it.

A bonfire would be nice...of all the thrown away trees. A new slogan: Bonfires, not guns.

12.09pm, from the wires: I have it on good authority that the Parks Department chipper is at work on Park Avenue, chipping the trees the city erected on the long lovely mall in the middle of Park Avenue. I love the smell of wood chips in the morning?

Cold flowers

Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Sunday. Despite the warm January weather - 51'F/ 11'C - there were few people out. The water on the harbor was choppy, the weather already on its way. 

A woman walking with her husband stopped and asked me what these flowers were, after I had straightened from my photographng crouch.

 Hellebores, I said.

...Hee...? she queried.

Heh-luh-bores. I said, more slowly.

She looked blank, but I could see her thinking: Heal the boers. He labours. Heel the boars?

...?

Lenten roses, I offered. And added, They're early.

Thank you, she said, and they moved off.

So what were the flowers? asked her husband, leaning in towards her as they walked away.

Hee...um...Heel..., she said. And then they were out of earshot.

They are in full bloom about month ahead of their schedule (last year I saw them in March, early and late; the year before in February, in snow). And they are in for a nasty shock. So are the azaleas in bud on Montague Street, the camellia on Pacific Street, and the premature and tender shoots of daffodils. I don't think even the toughest, cold-loving flowers can withstand temperatures of 11/F and -9'C.

Neither here nor there

The ugly days of half measures.

If the weatherpersons are to believed the temperature will drop 20 degrees, soon. It's a nasty day, a nagging wind, an overly silver sky, and the terrace's leaves rustling and rattling and neither dead nor alive. There are still green leaves on the Abraham Darby rose, and the crass daylight carcasses of the Christmas lights. One blue pansy, and some white and half-reddened strawberries. The next few days will take care of those.

Soon, sub-sub-freezing. Winter, at last.

Green sauce with brown food

I cook a pot roast a little less frequently than once in a blue moon (which, it turns out, occurs more often than one might think - it's the second full moon of a month and occurs about once every 2.7 years). I make a pot roast about once every 4.3 years.

It's good, too. I used chuck, browning it first, before adding a waterfall of dry vermouth, some whole shallots and bay leaves. After this had been in a 350'F oven for two hours I added the vegetables - celery, carrots, potatoes. The watercress was whizzed up with garlic and lemon juice, salt and some sugar for a fresh salsa verde/chimichurri/green sauce, which we splattered over the thin slices of meat.

I like to tell myself that, just as the potential artery clogging and carcinogenic meat actions begin to happen, the green sauce packed with vitamins and antioxidants comes along and WHAP! - nails them on the head.

Good.

Christmas flowers

...that's what I thought these flowers were called, when I was little. They bloomed prolifically in svelte blue and pink banks beside the narrow road that led into Knysna, the small, lagoon-wrapped south coast town where we spent some summer holidays. I was too young (and too-unborn, for the most part) to remember the earlier time, when my mother's parents lived on Leisure Isle, the little island in the lagoon itself, and reached by a narrow causeway

My grandfather, Lennox Fleischer, was known as Fly by his friends and drove around the island in a "solo car", adapted to hand controls, as he had had both legs amputated. Spinal tuberculosis, I think. His friends built a concrete ramp for him where he could launch his small motorboat, to go fishing. My brothers fished with him. I never knew any of that. For me it is a story. I did not know him. He is buried in the cemetery, there, across the water and on the hill.

Leisure Island remains very, very special in my heart - the small waves of the lagoon collapsing on the sand, the long, low tide, the crests of the breakers between the two headlands. When my father was young and heedless he swam across The Heads and their strong currents. An unpopular move, I gather. Was he thinking of Byron and the Hellespont, I wonder? I never thought about that before...

Knysna is now holiday central and heavily populated. I think we last visited just after Vince and were married [...my photos have improved!], staying in an expensive guest house on the island, and fantasizing about what it would be like if my father had bought the modest beachfront holiday house that was offered to him for sale, long ago. It was called Pinky. It was pale pink. One summer our cousins visited and my Uncle Reg played sand lions with me every day on the pale beach where long straight strands of seaweed and chalky cuttlefish washed up, between the water and our summer home.

The lagoon, when I saw it with Vince, was still pale green at high tide, and the waves still flopped onto the beach at night with a sound sinister enough to have made me throw my toddlerhood toys (I had an extensive koala collection) out of my cot, one by one, so that my mother would come upstairs after the very last and very deliberate thump, to see what was the matter. I didn't like the waves. I thought they were coming up the stairs to get me.

And there were island gardens full of Christmas flowers. The hydrangeas pictured were not in Knysna, but at The Food Barn in Noordhoek, in Cape Town in December. I was going to write about food and lamb pies and French chefs. But the flowers made me think, suddenly, this Brooklyn night as I type, about small waves and blue flowers and a summertime when tomorrow was a concept so foreign that it left no mark whatsoever on my sunny, sandy, sand lion life.

Waddup widda rosemary, yo?

Is it Red Hook or is it the rosemary?

It is mid-January. This we know.

Two different rosemary plants, both in bloom. One in a community garden, above, one on a brownstone, stoop, below. Both in Red Hook. Which is actually chilly, because it's the near the water. When it's not under the water, of course. 

Yesterday was colder than it has been for a week, which was reassuring. I walked to Fort Defiance and met my botanist friend, Marielle, there for lunch. I had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, which seemed about right. She told me of her family's plans to go to Vermont in February to show her two little boys snow. Her eldest is four and does not remember it.

Snowcation. The way forward.

I have been eyeing a cabin in the Catskills, after our friends BonBon and Quasar rented it and liked it. They went snowshoeing. I know. It's not going to happen. It could, though. It's complicated.

Perhaps I should check on my roof rosemary. Since "Bobby" arrived to patch our leaks - if his given name is really Bobby I'll eat the roof membrane; I think "Bobby" was simply what he decided his American audience could deal with - I have not been back up there. Scared, really. Bobby looked with incredulity at Raccoon House's roof, next door, and said, Pipple libs dear? Yes, I said, Pipple libs dear. He wasn't too complimentary about our roof, either. No one has offered to repair our water-damaged closet below. Tick, tick, tick. Maybe I wrote this book just in time.

Boom.

A bit fell off Raccoon house the other day...

But back to the rosemary. I suppose it thinks it's spring.