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).

10q

Remember when you were in elementary school and you were supposed to write a letter to yourself to be mailed at a later date? An exercise in self-awareness (if you took it seriously) or silliness (if you wrote about boys), maybe embarrassing, maybe revelatory, maybe a little bit of both. I’ve never been a diary keeper (this here is the closest I’ve come), so for me that sort of time-capsule exercise is the only private kind of rumination I might have had. Until I heard of 10q. It’s sort of amazing. Once a year you answer 10 questions, and then a year later, your responses are e-mailed back to you (and if you keep it up, all of your past responses are saved for posterity). I did it last year and just got my responses back.

To the question: What are your predictions for 2012?

My Answer:

We may move, we may nest, and there will be a terrible election that will take over everything and solve nothing (really).

 

See? You should do it. Get started here.

 

image of Gramma’s beautiful watercolor hydrangeas. Oh to have her garden!

Found Birds

Waiting on pictures from the grand festivities of this weekend, in the meantime, it’s officially fall and my need and want to nest has escalated to epic proportions. I am especially coveting Katherine Wolkoff’s amazing photographs of FOUND BIRDS. The silhouettes are striking, austere—sort of like an Audubon mug-shot—and each has the description of where the bird was found, under what circumstances (brought down by a storm, taken from a cat etc. and by who. There is something sort of morbidly curious but also noble and honoring about the series. As always, it’s the story behind them that makes them matter most.

Above: left: Black-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus erythropthalmus. Killed by flying against a lighted window, presented by Alice Northup. May 6, 1925. right: Yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus. Killed by South East Lighthouse, salvaged by Charles Rogers Jr. September 23, 1935

Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis. Found beneath wires by Stanley Stinson. December 11, 1929.

Barn Owl, Tyto alba. Blind in one eye- telephone wire victim. Found by George Grime. December 25, 1943Great Blue Heron, Ardea hernias. Found dead in road by Richard Conley. November 15, 1947Great Egret, Casmerodius albus. Brought to Block Island by Captain Alfred Jacobsen. Alighted on fishing vessel “Friars” at Georges Bank during N.E. storm. April 2, 1931Greenbacked Herons, Butorides striatus left: Immature: taken from a cat by Mr and Mrs Herb Winsor. September 23, 1944. right: Male, Wired victim found by Mary Elizabeth Lewis. May 18, 1944

Dinosaur Love

Hello Dear Ones! Just a short note, Sweetheart’s dear sister is getting married this weekend at a summer camp upstate- it should be a perfect Indian Summer weekend full of joy and love and music. Typical to their laid back selves, rather than hire a whole complement of staff and rent linen napkins and have everyone check chicken or fish, the bride and groom have decreed that whole shebang is going to be super mellow, campfires and marshmallows, craft beer and soul food, Sweetheart and I singing and playing the first dance song…and yours truly in charge of all decorations. So. I’ll be signing off here today, packing up these dinosaur cake toppers I made the bride and groom as a surprise, and heading up to the land of the pines to cut flowers and string ribbon until it’s time to kick off my shoes and dance the night away under the stars. See you next week!

Silent and Great

Sweetheart was born and bred in Rockaway. A slender wrist of sand between the vice-grips of the Atlantic and Jamaica Bay, his part of Rockaway (nestled between Riis park and “The Buildings” far off in the distance) is a safe haven, a real old fashioned Rockwellian neighborhood, boys on bikes tearing around the 20 or so square flat blocks of small but well maintained white-shuttered bungalows, well kept lawns, geraniums, impatiens, front porches, and everywhere, American flags. A neighborhood of teachers, cops, firemen. From the bay side, you can see the entire languorous spread of Manhattan, the Empire State and Chrystler buildings standing, silent and great, for the old guard in midtown, and the riot of downtown seemingly (and actually) miles away. A distance you can’t really feel when you’re in the city, but from afar seems silent and great. We were there last night, visiting his Mama, getting some supplies for his sister’s wedding this weekend, the mundane. From afar, streaming up from downtown the light was on, the beam shining up, up, up endless into the heavens, silent, and great. I didn’t take a picture. My heart was silent, and great.

 

image of Manhattan from Rockaway from here

Butterflies

Couldn’t get enough of this bush literally coated in butterflies. I thought it was a bushy butterfly bush, but Lucy told me it was salvia. Add to my “must plant in eventual dream garden” list (which is getting quite long).

Fingers Stained Red

Sweet. Fancy. Moses. “Hot Cheetos and Takis”. I know I’m a little late to the game on this, but if, like me until this morning, you haven’t clapped your ears on what is the hypest summer jam since this one then you. must. watch. All your questions (are these kids real? yes. did they write this song, really? yes. as part of an after school program. What’s a taki?) and more answered here. I’m on point like an elbow, Hands red like elmo, My mama said ‘have you had enough?’, I look and I said ‘no ma’am’. Happy Friday, indeed.

Lime-Aid

Despite the white-pants moratorium and the sweet chill in the air that has me playing “Autumn in New York” over and over, SUMMER IS NOT THROUGH. I repeat: DO NOT PACK UP YOUR JEAN SHORTS AND HEADSCARVES JUST YET LADIES! I love fall (it’s secretly my favorite), but I’ve also been wanting to cling to the seemingly endless twilit seaside days of the most adventuresome season. And, like-minded tactile and sense-memory based souls, I’ve discovered the best way to do that is with homemade limeaid. This is actually, technically, just lime simple-syrup, one of those non-recipe recipes that takes three things and through some magical alchemy turns it into a world of taste and feeling. Add rum and ice and you have a classic daiquiri, add tequila and you’ve borne the perfect margarita, vodka makes a sideways Tom Collins (a shaken egg-white and some mint and you’ve got yourself a sideways Southside), or just add a few healthy pours into a pitcher of still or sparkling water and you have the most divine, freshest, bracing-but-tart-sweet concoction that’s ever come straight out of August.

Ingredients:

Lime juice
Sugar
Water

Squeeze limes. Boil equal parts sugar and water and cool. Mix lime juice and simple syrup. Voila!

 

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

So. I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. Seeing as how it’s Sweetheart’s favorite book and taking into account how much I loved The Red Pony in my girlhood, East of Eden in James Dean-tickled high school, and Travels with Charley in my burgeoning, adventure-loving adulthood, I have no idea how it slipped through the cracks. But, oh my, it’s been a long time since a book tore my heart up like this, made me wistful and lonely, chest-full with beauty and loss, and angry over how little some things have changed. If you haven’t read it, the changing of the seasons is a good time, and if you have, then you’ll love these incredible Dorothea Lange photographs of the Dust Bowl Migration (from the really fabulous Oakland Museum Archives). Because you wish you could pick a guitar, it’s a gracious thing, because you walk for the family and hold your head straight for the family, because you get use’ to a place, gets use’ to a way of thinkin’ it’s hard to leave. Because home is the center but not the boundary of affection. Home.

Obamacare

I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent and well educated person, self-aware and theoretically aware of how the world works… It makes me crazy, then, that I have such a hard time understanding healthcare- as it is now, as it will be, what that means for me and Sweetheart, nomadic and self-employed but (thankfully, for now) healthy as oxes. Amid the furor and electioneering, I found this extremely/necessarily simplified breakdown of what Obamacare actually entails and what that actually may mean for me. I found it to be super helpful and enlightening… and if you don’t feel like delving into it, enjoy this video of a cat knocking over a bottle of pills instead.