Hello dears, just checking in to let you all know we’re laying low around here this week, taking some time in the chill and damp of dark January to regenerate a little. Gathering our resources, pooling our energy so that we can emerge, soft and new, just like these sweet gentle pussy willow branches my Mama brought me. Back next week with more adventures. Like Meags says, hearts need to rest. xx.
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).
Found: Deer Bed!
I fell in love with this incredible Katherine Wolkoff photograph of a deer bed after seeing it in Abbey Nova’s house tour (loving, lurking), and actually went so far as to contact her gallery and inquire after prices (as they say, if you have to ask…). The whole series of photographs is stunning, but it’s the idea of the deer beds themselves that I find so compelling. To make their beds the deer press down tall grasses to create a little room, grass walls shield them from predators, grass-over-brush makes a soft place to curl up. Something from nothing, softness and sleep. Imagine my joy when on walkabout the other day in the backyard, trying to figure out where to start digging for the firepit, I noticed my very own deer bed amidst the grasses being kept long for winter, to be turned under when spring comes*, but in the meantime, satin sheets for sweet does.
*also when spring comes, and this deer bed comes with a “free continental breakfast from my tender garden shoots” I’ll probably change my tune as to how sweet these does are, but for the time being, they are welcome to lay their winter bones here.
Ain’t We Got Love
Sweetheart finally asked me the question I’ve always been waiting for: “Will you sing a duet with me at a small mountain-town variety show?”. I said yes. We sang this (which I think might just be our theme song):
And the audience liked it so much that they asked us to sing another! So we sang this:
And then luckily, they didn’t ask us to sing any more because we don’t know any more songs. Yet.
The List.
After the holiday melee, Sweetheart and I finally had dinner, sitting just the two of us at our big dining room table next to the woodstove, talking about the day’s hike, the things done and yet to do, the possibilities of earth, of time, and of adventure. After a few glasses of wine and the third or fourth “we should really do ______” or “we need to go check out ______”, we decided we’d just make a list. Actually write down everything we could think of right off the bat, all of the old haunts and new enterprises, the suggestions and mandates and secret spots people have shared with us so far, and just go through it and cross them off, one by one. And, of course, we’re going to do the same thing when we get back to Brooklyn. Never fear, we will keep you posted.
And Bless this Neighborhood Too
And while I wax poetic with extreme excitement over exploring my new city neighborhood, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this sweet mountain trail is about the equivalent of eight blocks away from my new country neighborhood. I can’t wait to share my explorations here with you too.
Bless The Neighborhood
Everyone knows about New York’s neighborhoods. You emerge out of the train in Sunset Park or SoHo or Chinatown or the Upper West Side or the very edge of the East Village and somehow even the air feels different. It’s something that is uniquely New York, a distinct feeling, palpable, from the architecture to the contents of the bodegas… But, there’s a funny thing about New York, which is that within the oft-discussed boundaries of each neighborhood, every single solitary New Yorker has built their own world. A constellation of grocers, wine stores, dive bars, pizza places, cheap chinese joints, laundromats, and coffee spots that is ever-shifting and truly personal, a perfect alchemy of your cross streets and your heartstrings. You are fiercely loyal to your go-to spots… until they’re a block or two out of the way. We moved a mere eight blocks from our old spot, hop-skipping due east, across TWO actual, proven neighborhood boundaries, right into Bedford-Stuyvesant. Eight blocks is not a lot, but with that slight geographical maneuver came a great shift. A brave new world. Just eight blocks up Fulton street is the difference between Provisions’ grass fed beef from local New York farms and a man loading a freshly skinned halal goat from the back of a truck into a shopping cart (I would like to eat both of those, please). I spent a few days just walking around, eating tiny warm pastries from the bakery up the block, falling in love with the strange pizza-making Frenchmen listening to Nina Simone AND the soccer on the tube both at top decibels, triangulating trains, testing the air, exploring… I’ve had a few excellent adventures already, and can’t wait to share them with you. Soon.
Brooklyn map from Ork– we’ve had this hanging in our kitchen for years now, and I actually use it almost daily as a reference map.
New Year, New Karstad
So, it’s just two days into 2013, and we are going to IKEA. We moved down south at the same time we moved into our new Brooklyn space, a shared 2 bedroom apartment in “Clinton Hill” (which is actually smack dab in Bed-Stuy, whoopsie!), then, two weeks later our sweet roomie gave her 30 days notice. We promise we were very nice? In the woo-woo world of excellent karma and the right things happening for the right reasons, it has all worked out for Sweetheart’s sister and her husband to take over the larger-2nd-room-with-a-heretofore-unused-attached-office-room-that-will-be-perfect-as-a-nursery-for-their-pending-bebe. It truly couldn’t be better. We get to hang out all the time, they don’t have to put their infant to sleep in a bathtub, we’re in a whiskey loving family compound (now Nate is drinking for two) perfect for built-in-dinner-parties, and when that little peanut arrives we can hold it in our arms and sing it Tom Waits songs right off the bat. Shangri-la…we just don’t have a sofa. So, in the grand tradition of Liz Lemon and freelancers everywhere, Sweetheart and I are taking a day trip to Red Hook to survey Karstads and measure Endorps and try not to break up.
More Liz Lemon here.
Happy New Year
Happy New Year, my dears. Whether you’re braving the chill wilds of the wind-funneled Brooklyn streets, snug and warm next to a fire somewhere surrounded by friends and music, or simply breathing deeply in the twilight surveying the past and the future in the prism of waning light, may your new year be always full of the best kinds of adventure.
Where the garden will go
Sweetheart got me THREE big, thick, gorgeous books on starting a vegetable garden, so the day after the Christmas snows, I went out to walk the land. I’ve been thinking about this garden for years. Thinking big. rows of fruit trees and berries and tender lettuces and cucumbers and new potatoes and strange roots. I want them. And, I’ve decided: this is where it will go. This huge swath of gently sloping earth that gets full sun all summer and has enough funny nooks and tree-lines to the sides for any guys that like shade. This knobby, untended, johnson-grassed stretch of impermeable Albemarle Clay. I’m pretty sure it’s a good plan? Hmm.
I don’t really know what I’m doing in the garden. But, it’s in my blood. My grandfather used to cultivate flowers from cuttings and would eat a warm tomato off the bush like an apple. My mother lines her beds with precious Poet’s Laurel and twisty Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick and knows about blossom end rot and how to kill slugs (answer: with beer) and a thousand other secret earthy mysteries. Me? I’ve just stuck as many plants into whatever containers I can find, cross my heart, and know I can shake my fist at Brooklyn if it fails. Not so, this year. Perhaps it’s too much. To go from herbs planted in coffee cans to almost a full acre of possibilities? Oh. Man. BUT. We are not ones to be thwarted, we will get our hands dirty, we will grow. And- the books, with their maps and charts and diagrams, are ready to be devoured and the seed catalogs arrive next week. So now, in the time honored traditions of anyone working the land, we thank our lucky stars we have the rest of the winter to get it all together.
White Day-After Christmas
How marvelous to be still with family, the snow coming down, hunkered safe and warm and quiet next to the woodstove.
Feather By Feather 