The Cosmos




The moon appears -new, waning or waxing. The stars are plentiful, and unchanging. The earth rolls around to meet the sun. There is wind coursing over the earth, and stillness, and blue sky and grey. Precipitation arrives then departs, a party to deep cold and surprising warmth. A blanket of snow withers over the tawny, textured padding of leaves. Squirrels navigate vertical and horizontal, white tail deer arrive unannounced, birds prefer early but often stay late, and coyotes call out at night.


My Beating Heart



Some days I wake before we've rolled around to meet the sun.



By the time I get dressed for the cold, stumbling through, half asleep, the sun has breached the canopy.



A light snow fallen the night before drew me out from the warmth. The farm field, behind the scrim of trees, changes weekly from white to mottled gray to black and then white, again.



It is still.



No rustling of cold-crisp leaves, no creaking of timber, no muffled doof of dropped snow glops. There was a squirrel motionless, vertical, on a dead or dying red oak. Fixed on that spot for quite awhile, I say this squirrel did not make a move. To my right, then, an explosion of noise! My head jerks upward to see a squirrel bursting out of a leafy nest wadded into the crotch of another red oak, then scrambling into the branches of a different tree. I thought how rare that I should get out of bed before squirrels.



I was about ready to come in from the cold when Betsy came out dressed for a walk. Not too far she promised, just around the bend in the road. Outside for half an hour, not moving but for camera work, I was pretty cold, but I joined her. 


- I am the still squirrel and Betsy the exuberant one. -


 At the end of the drive, up slope, frosted pines, spruce, and aspen grow in the clearing.



Down slope, sumac curlicues tickle the sky.



I see a prop plane traveling northwest and I think how cold it must be in that cabin, single engine planes fly in pleasant weather, and then I understand -it's about the stillness.



Around the bend, a roll of hay, unused, under a willow.



And the matted grasses.

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On March 1, 2015 I will discontinue posting on NYCGarden. You can continue to read my posts here.



A Walk Around The Block



Across the road (it's wrong to call it a "street"), a stand of Quaking Aspen, Populus tremeloides. These are roughly forty feet tall, and maybe thirty years old. The trees grow in clonal stands, suckering off roots from the initial seedling. These stands can go on for hundreds or thousands of years if fire burns through at supportive intervals. The bark color can vary depending on the region, but in our locality they trend toward the white of a Paper Birch.



Our five mile walk around "the block" takes us by several properties with horses. That tells you something about the nature of the neighborhood (please don't feed the puns). The lots are large, generally over ten acres, many with rolling meadows and wetland basins (but little standing water). Taxes are high (but not by New Jersey standards), and there are probably property tax credits for agricultural uses ("Green Acres"). When you are this close to the city and agricultural, you need resources, you need to make the land "productive" or you will pay. The pressure to change the zoning is real and looming. Another post, another day, about what I call the development shadow.



Given such low-density zoning in this part of the "city," you'll find fairly long views often punctuated by a fairly large house.



You may also find a property named to conjure up salad dressing.



There's a little, err Long, lake, a remnant of a much longer lake, hemmed in by two fingers, one of which is a pronounced esker. In the distance, two blue ice-houses.



In winter we can walk (or drive) on the lake. In the distance you can see the road cut, traveling up the esker at its junction with the other ridge that encloses this body of water.



On this side, three fifths around the block, more horses and a varied, glacially-sculpted terrain.



The late sun gives glow to tilled acres and woods alike.



The cedars that grow on open, upland sites burn with the setting sun.



As do red houses.



To the northwest, some fields open to cultivation and livestock.



More rare, a field's infrastructure. This was dairy country awhile back.



Now, an attempt at viticulture.



To the west of our place, a partially-filled, old gravel pit has become a horse boarding operation. Rex had questions about how the open pit affected the hydrology of the area, and now that it is filled, more so. From what I've seen, and what I read, we have a complex hydrology, to be expanded in a later post.



Along the county road at dusk, about a half mile from our place, a stand of last season's weeds.


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On March 1, 2015 I will discontinue posting on NYCGarden. You can continue to read my posts here.


If Change Is The Answer


So far, ninety percent of you (if 20 votes is any indication) have stated that I should change the URL for this blog to reflect my new circumstance. Sounds good. Now, does anyone know the guy named Hugh who (hats off to him for being so early to the game) started this blog using the needed URL but never made more than one post eleven years ago? If so, tell him to delete.


Change


Or not? That is today's question.

Does anybody care whether or not this blog maintains a URL which matches its masthead? If I should change it, I will lose all the traffic google, links, and other good-hearted bloggers have sent to me over the years. Most newcomers find their way here via search hits on older posts. Keeping that in mind, things have changed considerably and this blog no longer reflects my gardening or other activities in NYC and further, the masthead might confuse people who think they have gone to NYCGARDEN and what they see is MOUND. Hmm. What to do, what to do.

What are the chances folks who come to NYCGARDEN, and see my final post (which links to a new URL), would actually click through to see where it goes? How about a poll: over there, on the upper right.

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Change is the constant. Fifteen years in NYC was unusual. I'm a transplanted person, in NYC four separate times, in Oregon, Maine, the Hudson Valley, and New Mexico. We really cannot say how long we will stay in Minnesota. What it comes down to is work, where is it, who will have us? Today I dropped my wife at the airport. She has decided to commute to NYC after no adjunct positions opened up for her here and one of her previous employers got themselves into a little teacher shortage during the first week of the semester. Flying every week will eat up most of the paycheck, but at least there won't be a blank spot on the resume, and I am here, after all, to look after the house.

What we know is that we'll be here until, at the least, June, maybe longer. Both of us are applying for academic positions in other states. That is the reality as things are very uncertain. In the meantime, I will continue to journal my experiences here, for myself, and hopefully for you. And if you have a second, take the poll (on the upper right).



The Country Mouse

Two weeks ago I destroyed a home.
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As I freed the old mower from the earth's icy clutches, two mice sprung out and bounded through the snow like miniature gazelles. It was a scene out of a children's story. They headed for the next mower, and then the next. I became the giant, hell-bent on recycling metal, tearing off plastic, draining molasses-like fluids in subzero temperatures. Fe fi fo fum, rrraurrgh! The two mice, hearts pounding 700 beats per minute, finally climbed a tree, pausing with wonder -who, what, is this monster?

But I am a sensitive monster, you know the kind, like Bumbles. After finding one of my large terra cotta pots had broken, I brought the clay round to the mower-shaped leaf and acorn patch in the snow and fashioned a structure roofed with a round basket. I do not know if they have returned, and hesitate to investigate lest the monster return. Yet, come spring, I will remove the hastily made structure.


There are mice, like the one above, in the garage and occasionally in the basement. Rex had stored innumerable things friendly to the woodland mice and we have been disposing of much of that. I like all the animals, but I do not want to compete with mice, they've all the dark hours to find ways into things and unlike the ordinary House Mouse, Deer Mouse Peromyscus maniculatus and the White-Footed Mouse Peromyscus leucopus do harbor certain diseases (Lyme, Hanta) that are rather off-putting.

Meanwhile, the garage is a safe place for them, away from the half-mile focus of Red-tailed Hawks, the nightly snacking of Coyotes and the occasional Red Fox, or any other predators that find mice a tasty morsel. And then, inside, there is the aging but agile hunter, one who is steadily gaining confidence in her new, larger queendom.


The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse, one of Aesop's Fables


The Eddings Tide


I was as surprised as anyone when I heard of Amy Eddings', host of WNYC radio, departure from New York City. Not because her decision was shocking, or even that she has chosen to leave the number one public radio station in the nation, but because, and I sense I am not alone in this, she is moving to Ohio. Anyone who has heard my road traveling stories knows well enough that I'm not sweet on Ohio (although they do have the best rest stops between New York and Wisconsin) and I thought, good lord, what will she do there? Where is this Ada? Parents passing, or have already passed? Going home? What?! This morning I decided to discover why and what I found is that there is no one to tell it, but her.

I met Amy once when her program asked me to come up to the station to explain the difference between pea shoots and pea sprouts and concoct a recipe to share with their listeners. A minor connection, really, yet in reading through some of her blog posts I see that her reasons for leaving WNYC and New York City are, at least in general ways, quite like our own. We share (or, maybe I share it with her husband, as we both moved to the home regions of our wives) that sense of insecure longing for some thing or event that validates our decision as the right one. Inescapable to any ambitious person leaving NYC is the thought that they are leaving the game, maybe their ambition has melted away and are putting themselves out to pasture. Yet, what grips my thinking, now, not quite four weeks after arriving, is not what I have lost by leaving NYC, but what I have gained, and how remarkably privileged we are for being able to do so.

NYC can shield our privilege behind crumby buildings, raucous neighbors, dirty streets, and low-paid work that is largely chosen, not inherited. In the context of that great city our income, our utter lack of savings, retirement planning, or insurance made us feel poor, but truly we are rich in the context of the poor. Outside of that city we shed that shielding skin and with considerably less conflict than if we had sold off our far away inheritance to make the best of someone's misfortune, a crumbling house in the gentrifying edge of a community about to be displaced.

So we are now suddenly landowners, suddenly landowner-neighbors, taxpayers, insurance payers, and so on with more house and land than we can justify, or feel completely comfortable with, in a region of homogeneous ethnicity and income. Despite any misgivings, we intend to make the most of ourselves and new home, with hope that we can find an income stream that allows us to stay here, in the upper midwest, or what I prefer to call the northern tier, or north woods, or some such descriptor that doesn't exact such dismal recompense, and continue our creative industriousness.


The Cosmos




The moon appears -new, waning or waxing. The stars are plentiful, and unchanging. The earth rolls around to meet the sun. There is wind coursing over the earth, and stillness, and blue sky and grey. Precipitation arrives then departs, a party to deep cold and surprising warmth. A blanket of snow withers over the tawny, textured padding of leaves. Squirrels navigate vertical and horizontal, white tail deer arrive unannounced, birds prefer early but often stay late, and coyotes call out at night.


There's No Good Way To End

As you could imagine, packing a studio and apartment into a truck, then driving it over 1250 miles of cold highway under the gun of a brewing snow storm, and finally unloading the eleven hundred seventy six cubic feet of deeply frozen objects in subzero temperatures, left little room for blogging. I was fortunate to have Matt, friend and artist I met long ago at Skowhegan, help me pack the apartment and half the studio into the truck on New Year's Eve. Big thanks go to friends of two decades, Mark and Shelly, who kept me well fed and rested after the apartment became unusable New Year's Eve through the second of January, Andy and Rachel who threw us a never-ending party the Saturday before, Mark, again, for copiloting my drive of two days, then carefully hustling things into and out of the house all through a blustery, subzero snowstorm, Marie for her generous tribute on her blog, and Sara, who has been cleaning and organizing hundreds of items into categories of keep, yard sale, auction, and trash.

So, nearly two weeks after that balmy Saturday walk around Prospect Park's lake, I can sneak a few moments from the cleaning, the disposition of a lifetime of things, the organizational relating of new, old and less so, to move this blog ever closer to the present moment...



Forsythia, having had a cold November, thought December must be spring.



The lake was in fine form.



On its south side, newly laid plastic to smother view-killing phragmites. 



Because the lake is all for the seeing of it.



Inspiring towers to go up, as they are beginning to, around Prospect's most affordable corner.



As expected, the new skating rink is immensely popular.



Many new people are visiting, leading to much needed, improved maintenance on the south side of the lake and ever more likely are towers to surround it.



But the beauty of Prospect Park is the ability to disappear into it, to disappear the city around it.



Yet all agency is marshaled toward development for the wealthiest and all too often in the name of preserving what is intended to benefit all. 







Keep On Truckin




Renting a twenty-four-foot box mounted on a two-axle truck is always more than one bargains for, but even more so in a city where myriad obstacles to productivity, safety, and security are enshrined into law. 

Simple questions like "where can I park this truck?," are met with simple answers like "nowhere, if by 'where' you mean a street."

The truck depot tells me that thieves, the clever ones, know if a truck is empty or full by the look of the tires. I admire anyone who is good at what they do, I simply wish they could put that effort into something not quite as disruptive as stealing all our belongings while the truck is parked illegally on a deserted commercial street from 9pm till 5 am. 

I don't think any of us are aware of how many overpasses there are in NYC that are too low to accommodate a 13-foot tall truck. Twelve-foot, eleven-inches is common enough, but thirteen -that's a nasty number, so nope, not doing it. Do you know the anxiety of approaching an unlabeled overpass? NYC happens to produce a map highlighting all the probable impacts, and would you be surprised to hear that some appear (although the map is poor enough in detail that one cannot be sure) to be on highways like the BQE?  

We've all experienced how difficult leaving NYC can be, even if only for the weekend in a rental car. This is like that, except loading the car takes three days, you can't park it on the street, people are always beeping at you, you just might run over a pedestrian or drag a parked car 20 feet if you're not careful, and you never really know if you're going to crash into a bridge. 

I do not envy truckers, but they probably have sweeter rides. My truck, a GMC with 160,000 miles to it, rides like a pogo stick, has a slippery bench seat and the floor has a shiny, sticky residue harboring crumbs from someone's last long distance dinner. There's a Wendy's straw deep on the dashboard. The thing rattles so much, the objects in mirror are experiencing a 9.2 earthquake. 

It's not all bad. I'll miss the once in a blue collared moon favor called in by my father. In the past that might have looked like a climb up a power plant smokestack to get a needed photo. Today it looked like buying donuts and coffee for a guy named Charlie (who refused a good tip) so that I can park the truck in his company's lot over night. I'll be there tomorrow at 7am sharp, after a bus ride and 18 block walk, to get it outta there. If I'm lucky, he'll agree to my pushin' it by asking if I can leave it there once again tomorrow afternoon, loaded with my apartment things, until 7am sharp, Friday morning. 

Then I can pack the truck full of vastly more studio belongings in anticipation of one night of illegal street parking on a deserted industrial block, all set then to leave Saturday morning, driving headlong into a snowstorm beginning in Pennsylvania and getting nasty by Ohio. 

Tenacity




The last few days have been the hardest, after ten days of packing both apartment and studio, but this morning, well, just before noon, Betsy made her way out of Brooklyn, in our van, via the tunnel, up the West Side Highway, which hardly lives up to its name, to the GW Bridge, and then on to I80 westward. 



In the back of the van are various items that cannot or should not freeze, things that, along with the cat, Betsy must haul into a roadside motel. Among these are three houseplants -a Norfolk Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a Pothos or Philodendron (Epipremnum aureum), and a purple Oxalis (Oxalis triangularis). These have been with us so long that I often confuse their origins. The pine may have been a gift, the Pothos possibly a specimen from my greenhouse project at Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Oxalis a yard plant bought when I was living in New Mexico. All three should survive the move, after all, they've survived considerable neglect in our apartment, but I do think the Norfolk Pine will suffer under the unrelenting low humidity of the Minnesota house. I am no daily mister, so maybe a spot in the bathroom will suffice? 



Several days ago I clipped the Pothos so that it, along with two other plants, can be easily moved between van and motel in an old plastic laundry basket. When I slid the white-stained terra cotta pot from its roost of a dozen years, I was surprised to find that the vine, above, was not rooted in any soil at all! It was and is still rooted only to the painted wall. Is it gleaning moisture from the air, the walls, the paint, or is it not in need because it has entered winter dormancy, a time of exceptional drought tolerance? 

I would leave it there, for the next tenants, if I had half the belief that the landlord would appreciate its tenacity. Instead, I will pry this talisman from the wall paint and carry it along. 




Silent Night




Larry's trees, sometime in early December, after a brief snowfall.  

I haven't spent Christmas Eve in Brooklyn since 2001, but this year it was necessitated by packing both studio and apartment. We bubbled and glassined, crated and boxed delicate painted, ceramic, steel, and fabric objects until seven thirty, at which point, if we were going to cook, we needed to cease. After a stop at the grocery store, the van did not start. I jumped out, did some fixing (at least it was warm), and got it going. Cooked a quick meal, then collapsed on the couch, surrounded by piles of boxes and bubble wrap, escaped into a Nature episode about Tibet on PBS while the upstairs people banged and harangued with heavy heels, dragged furniture, and the whining of a motorized toy for the man-boy. 

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Today it is Christmas. We are going for a long, quiet day at my cousin's place in Carroll Gardens, no packing, a day of rest. Betsy is scheduled to leave tomorrow, in our van, with cat, and things that cannot freeze (my paint and houseplants, for instance). I am scheduled to continue packing, until Tuesday, when I pick up the twenty-four-foot-box truck, and begin to load the apartment. If I complete this mission according to schedule, I will drive out of Brooklyn on Friday, January 2, with every thing we have in tow.

I believe I just saw a little sun on the wall, in the cavity of an emptied bookshelf.




Taking Out The Trash



Our pails, a silent sentry, as instructed -three feet apart, at the intersection of the woods, road and drive. A hawk, circling high overhead, issues its gritty reeeeeeeahh. The road, here, is quiet and I am noise.



Downslope, down road, toward the late autumn sun, down low.



Removing the trash and recyclables is a journey by any New York City standard. I, for one, was fond of dropping my trash right out the window into the pails below, but not here. No, trash removal has several steps, one of which is rolling the bin down slope, toward the culverted passage between one wetland and the other, then upslope to the road.



To my mind, it is cold out, for November, maybe six degrees F, yet the empty-handed return along the tenth-of-a-mile drive frees my senses for seeing, and I found myself trailing farther down slope, into the wetland, along a deer trail.



The wet lowlands contain the most attractive sites on this land, but the green season mosquitoes chase me out too quickly. In the white (or brown) season, I take time.



The drainage opens up, like a park, onto the wetland, the edge of which is favored by deer, coyote, turkey, and me.



Although the ground has yet to freeze, the wetland is firm enough for walking. I've explored its perimeter, before this moment, in December or January.



The wetland is, by its nature an amphitheater, a concavity, surrounded almost completely by upland elevated fifty to a hundred feet above the occasional water line. On its western flank is the headland of an esker that carries southward to frame lakes that were at one time deeper and larger. Our (Rex's) house sits on land that was likely a small island or peninsula, long ago, near this lake's northern boundary.



Recent heavy rains have been quickly eroding the steeply sloped land to the northwest and northeast, washing out sediment that fills the small wetland due north of house island. Soil and organic matter have been filling this basin for thousands of years. Trees have taken root in drier spells, then were soaked out in wetter ones. Water enters the large wetland at three points -east, north, and west, converging, then heads south toward a pinched outlet that funnels the water to a small, nameless pond, then farther on to Dutch Lake, and finally into Harrison Bay.



The cattails (I haven't yet identified the predominant species) have exploded into their fat and furry season, regal and rough. Finally, my camera and fingers are beat back by the cold and I head back into the woods.




The bones of the land are most clear in winter. 










Final Touch



I hadn't been to the beach farm in two months. It was hard to go, out of busyness as much as emotion, but it was time, or rather time was running low, so this past Sunday, blustery, cool, and unfavorable to contemplation as it was, I went.



The buckwheat never got turned under which, in retrospect, appears a good practice given no other fall planting. The tangle of light carbon comes to be an effective mulch, keeping down weeds and shielding the soil from eroding winds. It should be turned under next spring.



In our other, short-lived plot, the unharvested fennel bulbs died back from frost and have since re-animated. I let them be.



Just down the row, under the blackened skeletons of tomato vine, speckled romaine has sprouted. The spring romaine must have successfully self-seeded, something I have yet to see in any lettuce I've sown.



Adjacent to graying, dry fennel stalks and the soggy flesh of decayed eggplant, our parsley is embracing a return to normal temperatures. I pinched some.



From the shed I collected some belongings, a bin, two types of spreaders. I left my wheel dib prototype hanging along with rarely-used garden tools and Wolf's jug of wine.




On this last visit to the beach farm, I was visited by what I think is a young eagle. I missed and will miss the autumn congregation of migratory birds and their electric cacophony. 



Finally, the beach farm was a great place to bbq with friends. I think this post by Marie, of 66sqft, brings it home. We had some great neighbor gardeners -Jimmy, Wolf, Joanna and others. They'll water your garden when you are away, rib you for your weeds, then offer you a cold beer, and they always took heed of my experiments and that is how I earned the nickname: the professor.


Two plots available. I recommend F12.