If you need me, I’ll be right here.
Author: loiseaufait
Little by little the bird feathers its nest, and object by heart burnished object we surround ourselves with lovely necessities of memory and function. It is these things that make a silly Apartment a Home or a silly Wednesday an Occasion.
Whether my nest is an old farmhouse, a sixth floor tenement walk up, or a brownstone basement... whether I share it with family, vagabonds, women of heart and mind, or a little brown cat and a sweet ginger banjo, my principal joy is filling it with light and laughter (and corralling).
Shangri-La + Xanadu
We’ve been spending our mornings drinking coffee and watching the bees zoom in and out of their hives. They leave the hive, shot out like a bullet, up and over the house making, yep you guessed it, bee-lines towards the ancient and gigantic blooming tulip poplar in the neighbor’s yard. On the way back, they weave woozily, back and forth in a zig zag, lady bees laden down with yellow bolls of pollen on either side of her back legs, under the wing, like saddlebags. 
And after much discussion (and minor confusion about which one was which “the one on the left is bringing in more pollen than the one on the right” which left? which right?) we have decided to name our hives: Shangri-La and Xanadu. Paradise.
Mama took the picture of the bee with the pollen. Isn’t she good?
Miss McKay’s Moon Vine
In the short almanac days of dark December, a care package came from Miss McKay. A burnished new short story and a bright yellow envelope, rattling and full of purpose, marked “open with care”. Inside the envelope, a dozen (magic?) seeds, labeled McKay’s Moon Vine, and accompanied by these instructions:
In May soak seed overnight. Plant in sunny spot where she can climb, a spot you walk by every evening. Enjoy big, white, fragrant blooms with sweetheart at cocktail hour.
Oh heart, those are my kind of instructions. And, through the trials of this strange and cold spring, almost at the very tail end of May, it is finally warm enough to plant them. Welcome Home.
Save your Bees for a Rainy Day
Actually, TODAY was the day. Mama and I went out to the east side of town to pick up our two nucs from a very sweet beekeeper named Jacob who I immediately wanted to set up all of my friends with (laaaaaadies? he breeds his own queens!). You can see our two nuc boxes resting on top of the two hive bodies above. A “nuc”, or nucleus hive, is a short box containing a fully-functioning mini-hive, five frames (as opposed to the 10 in a standard hive) of bees who have already drawn out and built the wax comb every aspect of their lives is based on, who have already been storing honey and pollen in those combs, and a beautiful queen painted with a red dot who has already been diligently laying brood to make more bees to go off and harvest the sweet nectars that are flowing as we speak. Last night, we strapped down the two long, audibly buzzing, rectangular boxes to the back of our little pickup and began the hour long trek home. When we got back, not only was it dark (ok for bee move-in day) it was also raining (NOT ok for bee move-in day). So we had to put the bees under cover and wait for the morning to move them in. When we woke up, the pent-up bees were making so much heat trying to cool down their plugged up hive, it fogged up my camera lens, air hot to the touch being beaten out of any vent hole by the flapping of 40,000 wings.
We puffed them with smoke to calm them down, then sprayed them with sugar water to zuzz them up and then moved them, slowly and surely, frame by frame, from their temporary cardboard hutches to their forever-homes. They immediately took up ancient established positions- some moved to the empty frames to start exploring, some situated themselves at the door of the hive, fanning their wings with a special perfume to let any sister-bees know that this was home, so come on in, and some of them alit on the dewey honeysuckle nearby to cool off after a hot night in cardboard city. Needless to say, after our very first time handling our very own bees, meeting our very own beauties, Mama and I are two very happy beekeepers.
Bees at last, Bees at last!
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
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
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
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
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
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. 
Feather By Feather 