Feather By Feather

Bees at last, Bees at last!

loiseaufait — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:36:45 +0000

Today THE BEES ARRIVE! I hoofed it back from a whirlwind time in New York specifically for their arrival. A Bee Meeting. My Mama and I will don our suits and veils and drive “Yota” (our little old pickup truck that has a tape player and only two tapes in it- Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic” and Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s “Deja Vu”, not too bad if you have to only listen to two tapes for eternity) and drive out past Zion’s Crossroads to pick up our little ladies. When we bring them home we’ll install them in the hive bodies and frames we’ve built from scratch, the frames numbered with the year so, with hope for the future, we’ll be able to re-use comb and frames and know which hive the wax came from, the hive bodies themselves painted a very pale pink (my mother’s day present to sweet Maman). Photos and beeswaxing poetic to come later.

The Tip Top

loiseaufait — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:46:44 +0000

I found my new place. This happens about, oh, once in a New York Blue Moon. It hasn’t happened to me since 2006 when I found 7B covered in fake snow and possibility a block from my first-ever 6th floor walk-up. It goes like this: you stumble upon a place by some wild and karmic circumstance, you’re in your own neighborhood, maybe the bar you thought was your place inexplicably had a $5 cover and sheerly on principle you refuse to pay that and you happen down some stairs you’ve passed before in the strange new one-way-warren of Bed-Stuy, and behind a caged door is shangri-la with a Little Richard doorman and an exquisite jukebox immediately playing Jennifer Holliday and then Ray Charles and then Al Green and the lights are pink and there’s hardly anyone there and whoever’s been there has been there for years and you know there’s food but there’s no menu you just have to guess that they’d have fried whiting and chicken wings with bright red sauce and french fries and good cold beer. I didn’t take any pictures, out of respect for the Sasquatch-like-awesomeness of this place, but I found the one above, my new place, The Tip Top Bar.

Buycott

loiseaufait — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:28:28 +0000

This is a post about an app. Other than my slavish obsession with Instagram and my wont to make a million vines of my cat drinking water (out of the darndest places! a flower arrangement! a champagne bucket! a DOG bowl!!!), I’m a slow app adapter. But then Janelle hipped me to Buycott. In short, Buycott is an app that allows you to scan the barcode of any food item and then it will tell you if the company that makes that product is environmentally sustainable or that they voted against mandatory GMO labeling or if that company doesn’t support reproductive rights for women or if they don’t support gay rights or clean energy or good labor and on and on and on. You choose which “causes” you want to filter, the app parses the old-boy-networks and paper-trails and spiderwebby corporate partnerships to let you know that by buying Angel Soft instead of Charmin, you’re directly funding fracking. I immediately started scanning every product in my house. Unsurprisingly, the big companies are usually cuplable, Raisin Bran: BAD! Post gave $1,176,700 against mandatory GMO labeling, Cheerios: BAD! General Mills donated $1,135,300, PowerAde: BAD, Coca-Cola gave $1,700, 500. But, like we’ve been hearing for a long while some wolves are lurking in organic sheep’s clothing: Horizon Organic Dairy who makes my 1/2 and 1/2 is against GMO labeling, as is Muir Glen with their Organic Tomatoes, apparently parent company “Small Planet Foods” doesn’t want us to know that our tomatoes have been genetically modified. Dang. In fact, one of the only foods in what I thought was my sustainably focused pantry that had a clean bill of sale was Duke’s Mayonnaise. Bless them, and bless Buycott for making sustainable choices a little easier.

Cucumber Road Trip

loiseaufait — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:30:28 +0000

The cucumbers have not been happy. And, as we all know, the most surefire cure for a little malaise, when your roots are in a twist and you need a little sun on your shoulders is a ROAD TRIP. So we packed a wagon with all of their earthly possessions and have gone on a little adventure, all the way across the yard. We’ll see if they like it.

Living Things Everywhere

loiseaufait — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:45:25 +0000

There are living things covering pretty much every surface of the house right now. I used to make it a priority to always have fresh flowers at the Brooklyn brownstone but, with the exception of when I smuggled bundles of fresh apple blossoms from our newly-discovered tree up there last time I went, or when I felt like celebrating something big by dropping some coin at the Chelsea Flower Market for lilacs or anemones, Brooklyn flowers usually means whatever-is-cheapest-at-the-bodega-on-the-way-home-from-work. Slim pickins’. Lots of daisies, the occasional lily, gorgeous hydrangeas that die immediately. Always lovely, never bountiful. But, ah, bounty! Right now we have these beautiful, delicate pink roses that Jeff, chimneysweep and green-thumb extraordinare, brought us yesterday when he came to ready the woodstove for next season and make sure no birds would build their nests in the chimney in the meantime. We have fig cuttings Miss Ravenel brought me from her french fig tree in rooting medium on the windowseat, hoping they’ll take root and we’ll have figs next year. There are peonies blooming on the coffee table (and I stole one for my bedside) courtesy of Abby and Catherine, who came by to get our bride ready last Saturday. There are peonies in the bud at the kitchen sink, brought by my mama. There is a low slung bowl of languorous thyme, trimmed from an unruly transplant. A clear bottle on the kitchen counter with Brookie’s rosemary, a pint glass of mint plucked from by the stairs for juleps. Bud vases of lysianthus and spirea dot the sideboard and on top of the piano, and there are pink trumpet azaleas brought in from the garden to amend the last gasp of sweet Meags’ parrot tulips. It’s a serious bounty, and to be surrounded by such love and beauty is a rare thing indeed.

Mother’s Day at Poplar Forest

loiseaufait — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:37:57 +0000

After a weekend of bossing around the men with machines, Mama decided that we would spend Sunday roadtripping down the lusty curves of our favorite country roads to Thomas Jefferson’s personal retreat, Poplar Forest. The destination proved totally appropriate as the removal of a bunch of junk trees in our own backyard has revealed our own small tulip poplar stand, ringing a clearing in our woods. TJ himself called the Tulip Poplar “The Juno of our Groves” when he sent some seeds on to a friend in Paris, and we too are enamored of them since their yellow flower will be a favorite nectar source of our beloved yet-to-arrive-due-to-ongoing-unseasonable-cold-weather bees. The afternoon, glorious, our little family borne about the grounds of the old estate like seeds on the breeze, and we are certain Jefferson would have approved of our continental picnic of crusty bread, various charcuteries, olives, a ripe pear, Cowgirl Creamery cheeses- favorites Mt. Tam and Red Hawk, and, of course, cold rosé. In short, a perfect day for Mamas and everyone. Poplar Forest is to Monticello what Rockaway is to East Hampton- more casual, less people, a little rough around the edges, but if you know what you’re looking for and enjoy simple pleasures, it’s just as good (if maybe not a little better), vegetable garden small and do-able, serpentine wall in elegant decay, slightly falling down.

Men with Machines

loiseaufait — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:31:18 +0000

Today the men are coming, and they are bringing their machines. The big diggers and claws and shovels and saws will take care of 50 years of brush piles, fallen trees, wild honeysuckle, deadstands, and brambles, revealing wild cherry and strawberry and apple and hickory nut already (and that’s just before 9am). I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight. They might as well put this backhoe in a centerfold.

Weather Stick

loiseaufait — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:56:13 +0000

Sweetheart’s Mama gave me this for my birthday maybe three years ago when we were still living full time in Brooklyn. The Davis Hill Weather Stick. A short wizenedy looking stick with a tag on it that proclaims:

Weather Sticks will tell you what the weather is doing. With good weather they will point to the sky; and when things aren’t so pleasant they will point to the ground. We don’t know why, but the Old Timers had faith in them and that’s good enough for us.

This little missive was followed by instructions to mount the stick outdoors, nail side up, under an eave or window frame, somewhere you can see it from inside. Now, Sweetheart’s Mama is an awesome lady. She saw this strange and ancient meteorological thang and thought “I know just the almanac-reading girl who would like a funny old fashioned item of use and beauty such as this”. She might not have realized, though, that the weather stick was a tiny call to action. In our sweet old Brooklyn brownstone basement we didn’t have an eave, our windows had bars, and the only thing we could see from inside was other people’s legs as they walked by on the sidewalk. Hardly a place for a natural barometer, hardly a place where the coming of rain means nothing much but a proliferation of guys selling cheap umbrellas outside of the belching mouths of the subways. So I’ve been carrying this stick around for, literally, years, it lived on the dashboard of my car for a while (a wanderlust call to arms) until I finally hung it last week. Outdoors, nail side up, under the eave of the shed with the sunflowers painted on it, where I can see it from inside. And this morning, as it is quiet and grayly raining, it points down. And tomorrow, when the sun will shine, it will point up. Just as it should.

Gold Dust Rainyday Women

loiseaufait — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:55:47 +0000

A much-needed rainy day after the sweet melee of this past whirlwind has us watching our sprouts take off (with little twinges of worry like Brooklyn parents- is there such thing as too much water??), hearing the rain on the tin roof, drinking lots of coffee, getting work done, listening to this.

On Friendship

loiseaufait — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:15:42 +0000

I’ve spent the morning listening to The Talking Heads, getting ready (right on the heels of last weekend’s 18 person slumber party) to host yet another full house for my dear dear Meags’ wedding, aaaand, because those cases of champagne don’t buy themselves, tackling a work project on friendship. Really thinking about friendship in the abstract, reading page after page of sappy typographic pinterest quotes, I swear almost started crying. My heart was full. How lucky we are, my friends, to have built an arsenal of fiercely loyal, unconditionally understanding, and completely brilliant people who multiply each others joy and divide each others sorrow? How true a thing, how honest, how beautiful, how kind. Bless you my friends who I will see tonight, who I saw last week, who I’ll see this month, and those who I will never see again. I love you so.