Month: June 2012

Gardenias

I just heard Mama say “Oh! A-HA!” and run outside. This bloomed just this morning. Oh, sweet Southern perfection in a cut glass vase. May you all have something as delicate and divine ushering in your summer weekend.

Bounty…

Oh the Bounteous Spread! Yellow squash, magda squash, cucumbers, young red onions, spring onions, new turnips, bright pink beets, savoy cabbage, new sweet corn… and Veuve Clicquot. All of nature’s good and honest yield, about to be consumed by Mama’n’Me.

everything but the bubbly came from Amy’s Garden– Mama’s amazing organic CSA (and, yes, of course she also got the flower share).

Good Heavens

In 1769 Thomas Jefferson (founding father, renaissance man, most handsome ginger) prepared his natural observatory at Monticello to watch as Venus made her way directly between the light of the sun and the earth. It was partly cloudy. He missed it, and it only happens every 105 years. Oh, Heavens. Well, TJ, I have some good news. Yesterday, starting at 6:09pm Venus began her extracentennial trek across the face of the sun, and we saw it! The stars aligned, the clouds cleared, the champagne popped (serendipity that the cork showed a star crossing the Sun??), and we covered our eyes and Douglas’ telescope with the small dark squares of welders glass that Daddy bought for the occasion as the tiny dot of the planet moved against the light of the Sun until it dipped below the horizon. It was, well, Stellar.We toasted to the heavens, listened to an amazing playlist that Daddy made for the occasion (“I’m Your Venus”>”Ground Control to Major Tom”>”Here comes the Sun”>”Age of Aquarius” etc. etc.), and watched the skies turning around us.

 

Thanks to Clay Jenkinson and his amazing Thomas Jefferson Hour, if Mama hadn’t heard his talk about TJ’s thwarted attempt to watch the 1769 transit, we’d probably have missed it.

It’s a No-No

In honor of Mr. Johan Santana’s no-hitter (the first in Amazin’ Mets history!) here’s the amazing first-hand account of Doc Ellis and the LSD No-No.

 

ps. fingers crossed it stays sunny for the Venus Transit tonight, Daddy got his mitts on some welder’s glass so we can look right at it!

Up Nawth

Perfect timing that this postcard from Will arrived in my Brooklyn mailbox just as I was out the door to head south for a sojourn among the seagrasses, diamondwater, and, yes, kudzu ravines of my homeland. Sorry, Nawth, I’m outta here.

 

ps. that charming pre-war kudzu shack is roughly the footprint/size of my brownstone apartment (but with attic space and an, um, garden) what do you think they’re asking for it? $1800 a month? $2500? $74 confederate dollars? Let me know if pets are ok and we’ll talk.

Rare Birds

 

It’s no secret we love nests around here, so obviously we went head over wing when we saw these newly re-released lithographs from the Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. The story of the book is almost as lovely as the images- a girl sees John James Audubon’s work chronicling Birds of America at the 1876 World’s Fair, and she and her family decide that there should be a companion book focusing on the birds, eggs, and nests of their native Ohio. So? They make one themselves. A hundred years pass, their book languishes under plexiglass in a random corner of an Ohio museum for years until a young librarian finds it, falls in love with it and writes her own book telling the family’s story and preserving the images for generations to come. Rare birds all, no?

Images and backstory from here. Lovelovelove.