Category: Beauty

Jamestown: Reserved Parking

En route to a dear friend’s wedding, I came down to south early this week in the name of TCB: seeing Miss Ann Marie’s new digs in DC and handling some doctor’s visit nitty gritty (did you know that under the small provisions of Obamacare that have already been enacted my insurance is required to cover my lady-doctor checkups!? Pretty stellar considering how essential these things are. But I digress.). It has been glorious Indian Summer in Virginia, maples just starting to change, the last yellow wildflowers and British Soldiers brimming over well kept yards and highway medians alike, beautyberries shining purple, zero humidity (!), and glorious sunsets. Last night we went out to the original Jamestown landing site for a party. Bluegrass (played by my dad’s band, featuring the head archeologist for the active Jamestown dig on banjo), BBQ, and this view through the magnolias. This 1607 landing spot was the place of the first permanent English settlement in America, where the first vote was cast, the first beads traded, the first oyster eaten. Yesterday it seemed as if they may have picked this location for its beauty, its softness and light. But, then you’ve gotta think they picked this spot essentially because this island is the only place on the James river between the Chesapeake and the impassible fall line at Richmond where they could pull their boats right up to the land, tie their bowlines to the trees, and hop ashore. In essence, and perhaps with the most American impulse of all, they stopped here because it had the best parking. In fact, I think that’s why New York wasn’t settled until 1625, those guys had to keep circling the block looking for a spot.

Working on a Building

Sweetheart and I had the distinct pleasure of going to this benefit concert yesterday. It wasn’t just an afternoon of fabulous music (though the Aoifa O’Donovan-Noam Pikelny-Chris Eldridge-fueled cover of “Don’t let it Bring You Down” really made my day), it felt like the Gowanus equivalent of a barn-raising. Put together by our late-night favorite high-lonesome crooner (and good god-fearing man) Michael Daves, the concert was put on to raise money to replace the coffered plaster ceiling at the Old First Reform Church in Park Slope. The church was founded by our favorite high-lonesome (and good-godfearing-pegleg) Peter Stuyvessant in the 1650’s (around the same time as the Elmendorf Reform Church up in Harlem), and moved around Brooklyn as the congregation grew, landing in its current location in 1891. Loosened over time by the rumbling of the yellow line under its buttresses, the plaster ceiling of the old church started falling, Chicken Little style, just last year:
The whole story- of how the ceiling fell and how it’s being fixed (a little bit at a time) is poetic and human and beautiful. Learn more here, and if you have a few bucks, put ’em in. We’re working on a building.

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!

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).

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.

Things of Beauty

My dear Charlotte sent me this cinemagraph at the tail end of a nitty gritty logistical e-mail regarding me possibly borrowing this glorious harlequin jewelbox tent (as Charlotte says, in her infinite old-soul wisdom: every backyard bacchanal needs something like this). I know she just sent it for the mundane purpose of giving me an idea of its dimensions, but I can’t stop looking at it and wishing to dive into this world of strange and beautiful contortionist vagabond poets. She made it for this video (which she directed), for the band The Hill and Wood, which I simply can’t stop watching:

The HIll And Wood — The Call from Ryan De Franco on Vimeo.

Amen.

“A bad day of hiking beats a good day of work”. Amen.

From the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park (4 miles up, picnic lunch with Maine-made blueberry soda at the summit for a treat, 4 miles back to a swim in the very cold ocean, not too shabby).

Night Magic

One of those nights of the incredibly full moon we all walked from the river’s edge inland to the no-lane road that lopes along the border of Canada to light giant sparklers and dance in our own circles to their woozy comet trails. When the last one burnt out, we lay in the middle of the road spooling out in either direction knowing, somehow, no one would be coming along and looked up at the stars, made almost dim by that huge moon. It was night magic.