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).

Oh, Hello America

Well, hello there. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, America. A long while since we’ve gotten down and dirty and traveled an expanse other than the I-95 corridor. A while since we’ve flown past cotton fields just starting to brown and jut out their soft fluffy whiteness, through soft old mountains and densely wooded hushed battlefields, across ancient migratory paths and deep silted deltas, sawgrass palmetto swamps with Spanish Moss overhead and small cool rivers gilded in a Miami-pink-and-aqua deco-copper palette sunset with geese reflected in the almost still water, heading to warmth as winter marches ever southward. It’s been too long since we heard your music, your mountain twang, your river strut, your slouching blues, your wealth of sound, as thick as the cicadas still are in October on the dark dirt byways of the Natchez Trace. It’s been a while since I’ve seen your moon from the road, watched it go from a tiny crescent over Appalachia, grand and slow over the big river, and foggy and waxing almost full over the Bywater. And, just as we were gone, now we’re home. The garden needs tending, the leaves are down, wood needs to be stacked, and America, you are here too.

map from here, it’s a very large file size, I’m thinking of maybe having it printed large scale? thoughts tousle at home…

Off to the Races

What could be better than a perfect indian summer day spent outside eating fried chicken and drinking champagne with your family and your best friends? That+horses. My nine year old self would approve.

Another Meadow

This picture doesn’t even begin to do my dear friend Jay’s meadow justice. His new house (which feels ancient and lived in and almost smoky with tangible good vibes even though they just moved in) is bermed into a hillside and the sloping greens on all sides are simply filled to bursting with wild baby’s breath, black eyed susan’s, zinnias, cosmos, feathery coreopsis, plain little daisies, queen anne’s lace, wild yarrow, sunflowers, branching asters, and the whole thing is chock full of bees. He planted it all, wide strides and a linen bag of seeds at his hip, feeding a rain of possibility across the fall-dark naked earth in last year’s chill, and now it’s this. To me it feels like magic, but he’s the kind of man who makes you see that magic like this beauty is just intention with a touch of wonder. After our last visit, just as we were leaving, his sun-kissed bride ran out of the house with one of her precious jars and a pair of Japanese shears in hand and said you must take flowers with you, take as many as you can. These are my kind of people, in every possible way.

Grammy

My cousin Todd recently shared this picture of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, that I had never seen before. I don’t know if there aren’t very many pictures of her when she was this age or whether they’re just hiding somewhere waiting to be discovered, but the only other ones I’ve seen have been sort of formal portraits, best-outfit-posed-for-a-big-occasion shots. But this is different, candid, something wistful, is she on the deck of a ship? Who took it? She looks so very much like my mother here, impossibly tiny and incredibly beautiful. And, I mean, the dress, hat, and shoes are totally perfect and wonderful. I love it so.

Bearding Ladies

Just like in the city, when it gets a little too hot in the apartment the ladies take their leave on the stoop, just chatting and gossiping and taking the evening airs.

This is called bearding and lots of people confuse it with swarming, but it’s just a few ladies hanging out, cooling off in the late indian summer afternoon.

We Heart NYC

New York City, we love you. Bold and gorgeous, loyal always, tender sometimes, kind when it’s called for, tough when you must be, honest, brave, and possessing a fierce and quiet strength and honor and beauty in the face of hardship or heartbreak…New York, you are home and everything we hope to be and everything we will always hold dear all at once. New York, we love you, and, especially today, we’ll never let you forget it.

(I originally wrote this post for Journelle…this image, which I love so much, is from my brilliant design team over there)

Oh, Bother.

So just when I’m talking about the dastardly squirrel who keeps sneakily sneaking in and stealing bird seed from my birdfeeders and what-all-I’m-gonna-do-about-it I wake up and this is what I find in the yard. Total crime scene, the two long feeders I’d swathed in cages (to thwart the squirrel) ripped off and strewn in the yard, the suet feeder that usually hangs on the right hand hook totally gone, and the poles bent and pulled down. Sir, excuse me, sir, was it you?A BEAR. Our bear? Hmmph. We spotted this wily fellow back in June and, while Nipsey Russell the cat made sure to let the bear know he meant business by hissing at him, I managed to snap this shot from the bedroom window before squeaking “scram! I said scram bear!” which was medium/hardly effectual in getting him to leave. We saw him again (at least I think it was the same bear) last week while Sweetheart and I were doing a painting project in the yard, but he was way bigger— as one would expect after a summer pillaging people’s bird feeders and eating mulberries. Sweetheart chased him away by banging our dutch oven with a spoon. Pretty good for a city boy. Anyway, like most country-type dwellers I think that the bear is majestic, terrifying, beautiful but… if he tries to lay a furry mitt on my bees I’m gonna… well… I guess there’s not much I can do, actually. I should have known better, Bears love Hunny:

Mama Bird

After last week’s post about the birds coming back (and that one dastardly squirrel who keeps thwarting my efforts to keep him out of the bird seed… my next brilliant plan: grease the pole the feeder hangs on so he can’t get purchase??), it was perfect timing that I discovered the needle-nest of the young cardinals in love in the flowering quince up next to the house. There are three little bird babies in there, probably about to fledge out of the nest this week. The red feathered daddy circles the nest cheeping cheeping cheeping and the brown feathered mama answers, and they take turns bringing back those funny little bugs that look like leaves and feeding their little sweeties. Feather by feather, indeed.

The Catbird Seat

It must be getting on fall… the dogwood started sporting red leaves back in late July, we hear the geese in chevron flying overhead every twilight, and Jeff says the wooly bears started coming out last week (the fuzzies are apparently an ancient harbinger of winter). And the birds are back. After a summer of desolation at the bird feeders, the suet melting in the heat, the millet moldering behind its squirrel proof cage, the birds are swooping in again. Chit chattering all morning through to cocktail hour, fattening up their glossy summer plumage before it’s time to brown down. Dr. Russell the Cat Scientist is constantly taking data measurements and consulting his reference tomes watching them at the window, from the catbird seat.

Fairy Lights

At the beginning of the summer we strung fairy lights in our meadow, slung in lazy arcs over the triangle of ancient oaks that top the flat little rise before the whole thing goes sloping into queen anne’s lace and deer trails. The New York City free-craigslist picnic table Sweetheart and I snagged from a strange side yard in a Yonkers adventure is going strong (even with the repairs I made after Miss Lucy and Rav and I broke it dancing on it at the first party we threw, whoopsie), and we’ve been dining under the lights at least once a week since. How easy and wonderful and magic it feels to have it set up out there, ready and waiting for us. And something about it is pretty magical, as if you are in a room made of glow. And after Miss MoMo took the above shot during Dear Miss Ann Marie’s jubilee birthday dinner this past weekend (officially the end of summer, but not the end of lightmagic), I realized that everyone who comes over takes a picture…here are some of my favorite friend’s snaps from this summer under the stars, amidst the sweet and easy shine of the lights. Thanks, of course, to mollyleddbetter, ammmr, mrsravenel, lucymcfa, aransler, likeyouwalkacross, mckaymc, and thefieldblog for coming to dinner and for being so beautiful themselves.