Yeah But Well the Weather. And Cupcakes.

I'm running way behind in everything everywhere. It's true that I have become a world-class procrastinator lately, but last week was really not my fault. See, I was interrupted.

Last week I was all set to write a post opening up with Yeats:

                                         The trees are in their autumn beauty,
                                         The woodland paths are dry...

but to be honest, our trees aren't in their autumn beauty yet. It was mainly that the woodland paths were dry. Everything was dry; the landscape was beginning to look like the moon.

By this time in the growing season, my general unruliness has collapsed into an unsavory blend of laziness and indifference. We only used the automatic sprinkler three or four times this summer, and by early September I have always quit watering altogether, my attitude hardening into its most rigid thrive on your own or die position.

So I'd planned to spend a Friday morning taking a few dried-up-garden shots and writing a little piece about the end of summer - even though it was still in the upper 90's. Here in Zone 8, dryness changes the landscape long before nights cool and leaves begin to turn. But then clouds arrived, and filled the sky from end to end, and the purple sage announced that rain was really a possibility.

Between Thursday and Friday we got three solid inches, and by Saturday the woodland paths - or at least our garden spaces - weren't dry any more. When you are interrupted by rain in Texas, it is very unseemly to complain about it. And no matter how long I've lived here, I hope I never get over my amazement at the way a landscape can go from beige to green overnight. The corner bench space transformed into its complete hideaway mode.

I swear I'm getting more like an animal running on instinct every day: interrupt me in a task and I will have to start the whole thing all over again, unable to figure out what in the world I was doing in the first place. I'll be heading off to the front bathroom with an armload of towels, hear my phone ring, wander off in search of the phone, and...well, I just don't know what happens after that. Towels on the dining room table, and me heading out the back door to put sunflower seeds in the feeder. This kind of thing, and sore body parts, seem to be the Story of Aging.

On the other hand, getting older is very permission-giving. I loved my 40's because in that decade I discovered and embraced the strength and power associated with being an older, solid citizen. I had experience, I had a voice! I could trust my instincts, blast out my opinions, and feel a sense of holding onto the bigger picture. From the night my father took me out onto Central Avenue in the faint hope that we might catch a glimpse of Sputnik, to the night I was making out with some cute guy as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon; from Watergate to 9/11; from Vietnam to Afghanistan - I finally believed I'd lived through a great many things. I felt I had permission.

So, interrupted by rain and a birthday party, I thought I might just post a few random scenes from around the yard. I've been immersed in Thug Kitchen this morning, so it's amazing I can even be polite about the idea. (If you are unfamiliar with Thug Kitchen, be forewarned: lots of people would have had their keyboards washed out with soap for typing language like that.) If I were writing Thug Garden, I'd write, "I don't give a @#$% what you think! I'm posting this !@#$% !@##$ whether you !@#$% like it or not!"

But I'm not a thug. Just unruly.

Our American Beautyberry lives at the end of the driveway, in a truly neglected corner of the yard. It was here before we arrived, and I was really glad to find it. I'd only seen one at my mother-in-law's Nacogdoches house. Just as in a vineyard, the purple and green make a combination no painted interior could ever pull off. I'm sure AB prefers the humid conditions of east Texas to our tropidesert offerings, and I'm also sure that this one thrives because of our next door neighbor's generous watering schedule. Smart location you chose, there, Miss Beautyberry!

While we're on the subject of color, this Agave Harvardiana is the prettiest shade of silver-green imaginable. It just POPS out of its deep green surroundings, reminding me that I don't pay nearly enough attention to planting foliage in a wide range of colors. Make a note.

Nearby, the butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) - remember her? -

- has gone the way of milkweed. I won't even think about aphids till next spring.

Sometimes, impatient as I am, I scoop a handful of these silky seed-feathers and deliver them to various sunny places in the sidewalk garden. I like to think I've contributed to their appearing here and there around the yard.

A little way up the street, at the corner by the stop sign, the Inland Seaoats (Chasmanthium latifolium) have produced these graceful fronds of seeds. Which is nice, but I've never had the "problem" of aggressive spreading that my gardening book warns about. Annoying. This is a plant that thrives all over the greenbelt; you know I believe "invasive" is a dreamy characteristic in landscape plants; and I can't get it to reproduce itself even once.

This guy, on the other hand, stirs to life in all sorts of places that aren't actually flowerbeds. Why do you prefer gravel walkways and sidewalk cracks, you lovely thing?

We had magnificent weather this past weekend, once the rain passed through. Think of every synonym for "perfect." Think solid blue skies, zero humidity, cool breezes, cool shade, brilliant sun. No way in the world was I going to be sitting indoors with a laptop. Whatever indoor time we had was spent getting ready for Floyd's 60th birthday party, then the party, then the dishes. Procrastinator's heaven. No blog post again.

When I throw a party that merits decoration, I like to use it as an excuse to pick up a few new items for the landscape. When I went to the nursery Friday morning after my Italian lesson (Sledd's, right across from Nau's Pharmacy up on West Lynn), I had to hustle: the nurseryman said hail was on its way. So I only had time to grab a few things:

A couple of cactus bowls to perch atop the room divider Floyd had just finished;

one "San Pedro" cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi) because, well, you know - San Pedro;

and a few plants for the autumn garden: basil, arugula, and kale:

Other decorations were found at Central Market, including some gnarly gourds

and autumn-looking stems that will pay for themselves by making it seem like I've paid attention to Halloween, when in reality all I'll have to do is hang our ghosts from the live oak and buy a couple of giant bags of candy.

I'm no Martha Stewart, that's for sure. I would have loved to do the baking for Floyd's birthday, providing him with two of the sour cream pound cakes that are his favorite; but last week was so crazy I couldn't put a couple of hours together without putting myself way past my bedtime. And I'm too old for that.

Fortunately, I know a beautiful woman who has a vegan bakery called Celeste's Best, and she was able to provide three dozen assorted cupcakes that were utterly delectable. No one, no one would have guessed they were made with zero dairy (and even vegan sugar that is not ground through bones) if I hadn't been running around bragging about their vegan-ness.

It turned out to be a wonderful party, with Floyd's brother and sister-in-law down from north Texas for the night and a couple dozen friends and family members in to celebrate. Our house held an assortment of mountain bikers, speed skaters, world travelers, small children, and musicians - the kind of eclectic bunch that my multi-talented sweetheart would naturally pull together. We ate pizza, veggies, a quart of Torchy's queso, and lots of cupcakes. We drank beer and Malbec and Sauvignon Blanc and juice boxes.

It was a splendid interruption.

Flowers and Other Things

I still haven't written my last post about Italy.

You know how sometimes you are eating something so delicious, so far beyond delicious, that you want that last bite to last forever?

I have that regarding my last post about Italy. I know what it's about. I just don't want to write it because then the writing about my first trip to Italy will be over.

Maybe it doesn't seem like much in comparison, but I also feel that way about this year's last batch of photographs about SoCal. It's just a post about some of the flowers I saw on walks, and one stop at The Corner Store; but I savor the savoring, if you know what I mean. On any late summer walk in a temperate climate, you're going to encounter some picturesque flowers and very nice landscapes. I love to just walk around and see who wants their picture taken.

As you know, I am attracted to gardens that look as if they were put together at the end of a night of too much champagne. What if Jimmy Stewart's character hadn't  gone over to CK Dexter-Haven's house after the engagement party to conspire with Cary Grant in one of the great drunk scenes of all moviedom? What if instead, he'd woven his way into a large nursery, zig-zagging up and down the aisles, circling the display tables, and putting some of this and a few of those into a shaky-wheeled red wagon? 

Later, having been dropped at the house by a very patient chauffeur, he sets to work in the yard. In the dark. Digging holes and tapping plants out of plastic pots. 

What would Katharine Hepburn say?

Because their sole purpose in life is to be attractive, flowers possess that compelling "Notice Me! No, Notice Me!" about them. But with no egos, no perfect legs that go all the way up to here, no fish-face selfies posted all over Facebook and Twitter, flowers have none of the annoying qualities of attractive humans. They are simply color and pattern that have made you wait: through the sprouting green stems, through the tight buds, hopeful. Hopeful.

Then for a day, or a week, there they are: a perfection no human could hope to create. You can't even hope to capture most of them; cut, they shrivel and disappear almost immediately. These are flowers that keep their place outdoors. You either see them to appreciate their brief beauty, or you don't. I feel badly for the people who are allergic to them and so must give them wide berth. I like to poke my camera lens as close as I can get and still focus.

These are some of the specimens that caught my eye last month. For the most part, I don't even know their names (I think photo #2 may be foxglove).

I know that last one is a Rose of Sharon, a flower that appeals not only because of its wide range of colors and bloom types (single versus double, for example), but also because she has proved difficult to pin down. Experts have variously categorized Rose of Sharon as a type of crocus, a type of tulip, and a type of lily. Which is ridiculous, for it is perfectly obvious that she is a type of hibiscus. Or not. This purple and white number resides near the Point Fermin lighthouse. Isn't just the thought of a lighthouse romantic?

I don't know what you used to play when you were little, or what children play now when they aren't fused to a video game of some kind. But when I was a girl, nothing appealed to me like playing "olden days." 

This may have been related to the fact that my favorite reading matter was biographies of historical figures. At our little town library, there was a whole bookcase devoted to a series of blue-covered biographies, and I read my favorites over and over: Louisa May Alcott, Juliette Low, Dolley Madison, Clara Barton. The books were illustrated by silhouettes that looked as if they could have been cut out of black paper and pasted on the backgrounds of old-fashioned striped wallpaper, or houses set right at the edge of dirt lanes. 

I grew up in an old house, of course. Not really old by New England standards, but 19th century at least. When my eldest sister married, she joined a family who had occupied a ten-room center-chimney colonial a block from Long Island Sound that had been in the family since its construction in the very early 1800's. (Construction by seafaring men usually in states of inebriety: there wasn't a right angle to be found anywhere, and the house was famously haunted. In a cupboard in the dining room, a china cup hung from a hook and never stopped gently swinging. No matter which hook you hung it on, or whether anyone was walking through the room making the floor creak, that cup swayed back and forth. All night, all day, as far back as anyone could remember, as much as anyone was ever able to tell.) 

Nothing pleased me more than to visit Nana Darnstaedt over the summer, to wander those creaking redolent rooms pretending to be a girl from long ago in a long hooped skirt and white pinafore. All day I would clamber up and down the steep narrow hand-made spiral staircase in front, perch in chairs stuffed with horsehair in the parlor, and play at the hopelessly out of tune old piano. 

At night I slept in a sloping room with a tiny fireplace and a trundle bed, to awaken to salt wind and yellow sunlight in the elms out front. There was a china pitcher and bowl on the marble-topped bureau, and during winter visits I would think about the part in Louisa May Alcott's biography where it said they had to break the ice in the top of their pitcher of water to wash their faces in the morning. Kids can romanticize anything.

Imagine the world you could have imagined for yourself as a child in the house at Point Fermin, standing up on that widows' walk, peering out across the lawn toward the apparently endless Pacific, telescope raised to your relentless gaze as you watched for your father's ship to approach. For many, this life was no fanciful child's daydream. I remember a conversation with a very old lady out in front of Mary's house once. She spoke with a thick brogue and touched my arm as she told me about her son, lost at sea. My Charley, she whispered, he never did come back.

Between Point Fermin and Mary's house - as we walk it, at least - there is a charming place to stop for coffee and fresh pastry. It's the kind of place where people meet to sit and talk for a good long time; you get the feeling they've been meeting there for a good long time. You sit on worn couches or at old wooden tables and look around at the array of old-fashioned toys and jars of penny candy. Well, it used to be penny candy. All of the artwork portrays The Corner Store.

As we walked one day, I suspected we were in a part of the neighborhood where...was this it?...was it around here?...yes! People complain about the noise, people complain about the poop, people complain about the damage to their gardens - honestly. Some people wouldn't be happy if you hung 'em with a new rope.

Tell me the truth. Wouldn't you love to look out into your front yard and see

peacocks and their hens wandering about? I would. I regretted leaving the telephoto lens back at the house, because the sight of a peacock strolling up the sidewalk, or walking around on a slate roof is truly a sight to behold. They have lived in this part of San Pedro for generations, and I'm always glad to see they're still around, unfriendly human neighbors or no.

There's something about living on the knife-edge between wild and civilized. I think that's where entities like cats and flowers reside: you think you can manage them, direct them, get them to thrive. Often they do just what you would like, but so many times they remind us we only have just so much control. The most expert gardener suffers absolute failures, though people want to admire their "green thumbs."

Gardeners know there are no green thumbs. We do our best to put plants in the ground, give them some of what they need, back off and hope for the best. Failed efforts are relegated to the compost heap and replaced by something perhaps more promising. Almost everything I plant holds the promise of flowers: colorful, temporary, impossible to replicate. When I introduce a new plant to the landscape I do my best to create a good space for it, but always walk away with the admonition, You can be easily replaced. 

But even when I'm saying it, I know it isn't true.

Go watch "The Philadelphia Story."

What We Ate

In no time after my arrival at Mary's house, her dining room table is thrown into chaos: books, projects, magazines, maps, electronics, and beach necessities gather there, ready for any direction we might take. Receipts pile up and rows of quarters are neatly arranged, ready for the parking meters. Because we both love good food, we spend a fair amount of time talking about what we'll eat next. This way we can plan our daily excursions with one eye on sources of foodstuffs.

With the dining room given over to the flotsam and jetsam of our various activities, we eat out on the sunporch, just as Mary and her sister and their parents did when she was growing up. I don't know how four people managed in that small space alongside Ruth's prize-winning African Violets, but Mary assures me they did fine. I know we do. These days pleated paper shades billow where plant shelves once were hung along the windows.

Mary and I tend to rise early and drink our coffee in different rooms. Old friends know their own rhythms, and we understand that an hour or two of reading and contemplation fuel us for all the daytime things. I take my coffee to the sunporch, push open a few windows, and listen to the outside world waking up: people driving out the alley to go to work; trucks and buses heading up the hill; on milky mornings the fog horn echoing up from the harbor. It's as good a place as any to wake up.

One morning we drove over to the Torrance Farmers' Market to see what would appeal, figuring we'd design our menus from there. It's hard to go wrong with a southern California farmers' market. Every fruit and vegetable I could think of was represented, and all of them looked fantastic.

Two really fun things about SoCal farmers' markets: one, they abound with free samples of everything. Two, they smell like fruit. My stone-fruit cravings were stirred up: I wanted peaches, nectarines, and plums.

Naturally, a SoCal farmers' market is going to devote some space to plants and flowers. It's never easy to avoid such temptations, but this year we resolved to work with the plants already present in Mary's landscape; to bring flowers to her house is definitely a "coals to Newcastle" enterprise. So we merely admired.

Back at the house, a bowl of lusciousness for the sunroom table:

Almost every night, we celebrated salad. Mary is an outstanding and imaginative cook, and she makes my favorite salads in the world. This year, inspired by a black iron griddle she'd acquired, I rubbed slices of rustic bread with raw garlic, squiggled them with olive oil, and toasted them on the stove. Mary had picked up a "Creamy Toscano" cheese at Trader Joe's, thinking to extend the pleasures of Italy for me. Thin slices of that cheddar-parmesan tasting cheese on the grilled bread enhanced our nightly salads and left us groaning with pleasure.

However did we get along with untoasted bread?

I'm counting down the days until Trader Joe's opens here in Austin (they are telling us September 20th). As soon as I can find a parking place, I'm gonna run in there and get me some of that Creamy Toscano. I may be too unruly to ever believe a salad is a meal, but toast + cheese + salad actually makes sense to me.

One night I made Marcella Hazan's classic tomato and onion sauce, and as usual I added a pound of spinach to the pasta and four ounces of mascarpone to the sauce. Cannot recommend: it would be like suggesting you try crack just this once. Which is basically impossible, as the leftovers make the best mac-and-cheese lunch ever. And since it has spinach, it must be good for you.

We were left with half a container of yummy soft mascarpone. The next night I took that leftover cheese and whisked in some sugar, lemon zest and a few drops of lemon juice, and made parfaits with that and the fruit salad we'd put together after the farmers' market. Since that combination was delicious, a subsequent breakfast simply just had to be toasts, spread with sweetened lemony mascarpone and topped with fruit:

Yup. Uh-Huh.

We don't eat fancy at Mary's, although we certainly could. She is always on the lookout for recipes and, since she finds just about every food on the planet delicious, she creates some amazing dishes. (I may have told you this before, but a friend once complained about Mary, "She never buys food! She just buys ingredients!")

We have our traditions, though. We need to have lunch at Martha's in Hermosa Beach at least twice; we need to eat many salads; we get one pizza from Sorrento's and have dinner once or twice in downtown San Pedro. Since I only had a week to work with this year, we didn't have time to indulge in traditions like barley and cabbage with Savory Sauce from The Spot. Nor did we venture into the wayback machine to eat avocado egg rolls at The Cheesecake Factory.

I did, however, have the opportunity to remind myself to put TJ's chocolate ice cream on the shopping list for my first visit (yeah, I am so likely to forget that!).

I also learned about cooking in enamel-clad cast iron - what can I say? "Better late than never?" - and decided I must emulate Mary in taking up this phenomenon. I had always avoided Le Creuset because I figured it I can't lift the covered Dutch French oven empty, how would I ever pull it out of the oven full?

Breathtakingly slow on the uptake, I realized at last that a smaller pot would suit our needs perfectly. If Mary could use her large one to make everything from rice to oatmeal, surely Floyd and I could follow suit. As soon as I reached home I ordered one, and I've used it a dozen times already.

Mary and I have done a great deal of cooking together over the years, in her kitchen and mine. Although I love her kitchen and the deliciousness it pours forth, I must say my kitchen has certain advantages. Mary may have the fastest, hottest electric stove I've ever encountered, but I get to cook with gas. And then there are some differences in cleaning up. 

But if only I could convince Floyd to pull up all his Texas roots and pack up Travis to head for the west coast, I always know where I would rather be, kitchen conveniences or no.

SoCal Blooms

Recently I've been interested in discussions of beauty. I've never studied aesthetics in any formal way, and the only philosopher I've ever known on a personal level complained that it was the only grad school course in which he received a B, admitting he should have failed outright. No help there. 

Like almost anyone, I know what I like; I'm prone to strong opinions. Books, music, faces, poetry, works of art, landscapes, bodies, lampshades - show me anything and I can tell pretty quickly whether it has any appeal. As a senior citizen who's changed my mind now and then, I strive for the patience to push past an initial negative opinion, but that first impression may just hang on. I am definitely not of the "everything is beautiful in its own way" school that seems to be so politically correct. Some things are just plain ugly, IMO. I can't explain that, either.

But what does beauty matter? Maria Callas wasn't a classic beauty, and neither was Eleanor Roosevelt. Probably not everyone on earth is a fan of the Chrysler Building. I can't tell you why alleys and doorways are often beautiful to me, or why I will never believe that "beige" is a real color. I have certainly been around long enough to realize that the fashionable clothes we are so proud of today will be cringe-worthy when we look back at photos a dozen years from now. Fortunately, I have no fashionable clothes. My wardrobe is timeless.

Take certain plants, for example. Every rose aficionado knows you can have spectacular blooms or magnificent foliage but not always both; it's one of the choices you make when you are planning a landscape that encompasses the heartbreakers that are roses. This is one reason why when I choose roses, I employ "grows in abandoned cemeteries" as my sole criterion. 

But I'm not talking about roses right now, I'm talking about night-blooming jasmine. The foliage illustrated above looks like eight feet of burned-up basil with weird spikes all over. Just close your eyes and wait for sunset, when oh, those tiny blossoms open.

The greatest advantage to taking my San Pedro vacation during a cloudy, cool summer was this: the nights were so heavy with night-blooming jasmine I almost couldn't stand it. I haven't experienced such a flood of fragrance since grad school days, when we would spend the entire summer - rather than just the end of August - at Mary's house. Heat does the poor thing in. Its foliage is nothing much - downright unattractive, even - but when the sun goes down on a cool evening, these flowers make you believe that the world must be a wonderful place.

Paradoxically, some of the flowers I might buy for their fragrance can turn out to be duds in that department. The two plumeria Mary planted in the back yard last year are perfect examples: no matter how deeply I inhaled, I couldn't smell a thing. Really, kids? Frangipani is a fragrance, to my mind. But how can you be disappointed in a flower that looks like this?

I've seen Mary's back yard go through several metamorphoses. An enormous pepper tree used to create enough shade to render a lawn impossible; but we're not really lawn lovers anyway. She went through a phase of trying to get dichondra to thrive, but it wouldn't. Interesting: a pretty little ground cover many people designate as a weed, refusing to grow. Gardening in a nutshell.

Now that there's full sun, an array of flowers attracts hummingbirds, butterflies, honeybees, and an interesting population of yellow jackets who set up nests in Mary's bird feeders and the pipes that used to anchor a clothesline. I can't figure out for the life of me what the yellow jackets do all day. They go from plant to plant like the bees but never seem to collect nectar or pollen. They don't appear to be chewing stalks to create pulp for their nests. They never sting, although they will land on you now and then to investigate your skin - but for what properties, I cannot imagine. Watching them I thought they were just going through the motions of being bee-like creatures, with no real occupation at all.

However, Mary's garden is a pretty place to live, even without a recognizable life skill.

There are succulents all over the place. I
always wish we could have ours outside all
year around.

Mary says she had such a mass of bachelor
buttons this year, they provided much-needed
shade for the succulents.

I missed the purple profusion but took my
usual pleasure in the waxy flowers succulents
like to produce.

I have no earthly idea what this plant on the left
may be, but its sturdy red and green mottled
leaves are lovely. Nature seems to get away
with putting all sorts of colors together.

Mary has lots of geraniums around the yard: the deep orange-reds, a few pink ones, a few white. This fluffy red and white number caught my eye for sure. When I first came to visit many years ago there was a plot of rose geraniums along one fence. I had never encountered such a thing, and thought the scent of the crushed leaves was as soothing as lavender. Maybe next year I'll talk Mary into some new scented geraniums.

This orange guy brought hummingbirds from far and wide. I remember once years ago when Mary and I were lounging in the back yard, chatting idly, watering plants with a slow spray from the hose. A hummingbird came to bathe in the spray, six inches from our hands, making the thhht-thhht-thhht noise with those atomic wings. We sat stunned into silence for many minutes at such a wonder. Such a thing must be "beautiful" if only for the rarity of it, setting aside the phenomenon of the hummingbird as a creature.

For a number of years there was a big fork of driftwood suspended atop the aforementioned clothesline anchor. Birds perched on it between their dives into the seed dish. Driftwood seems intrinsically beautiful, and if you don't believe me you must check out David Wagoner's poem "Driftwood" - which I find intrinsically beautiful, although some might disagree. In which case we shall merely deem them wrong.

Two years ago Mary convinced me to attach the gnarled beauty to the side yard fence over a gate. A ladder and many strands of lashing material were involved in the effort to create a strong, enduring arch. Mary knows many highly qualified oenophiles, and she had a grapevine in mind.

Last year, predictably enough, the grapevine made its way
through the screen and up the dining-room window.
You have to be very careful about planting things in SoCal.

I doubt we'll be launching our own label any time soon, but the grapes were very sweet and flavorful. Which was a good thing, especially since the cold weather prevented the fig tree from giving me its usual generous gift of early figs. I can only be grateful for the three or four I received, and envy Mary all the September mornings she'll be standing in that fragrant shade, slurping the rich red flesh straight from the skin. (Mary does not slurp, though I certainly would; but I couldn't think of a better word for how you consume a juicy fig from the warm skin you have just split open with your thumbs.)

I'm sure philosophers have written about aesthetic value as an amalgam of elements that are pleasing to the senses. Some have undoubtedly ranked aesthetic value according to how many of our senses are pleasingly engaged. (I feel safe in making these assertions because I know first-hand that philosophers have written - and argued - about everything.) In any case, a garden must rank high among this world's aesthetic offerings. A garden has it all. In a way, all gardens have it all.

An unruly garden may lack symmetry, it may host a riot of colors you would never want to see all together in one indoor room. But a garden like Mary's, abounding with color, fragrance, textures, and unforgettable flavors, must be a treasure to anyone who has even a few senses to work with. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I have such a loving history here - where would that fit, philosophers of the world? Supermarket figs will never be beautiful to me; I can never look at supermarket figs without judging them sad imitations of these essential figs. 

Where does beauty reside? Why does it take root there? What should it cost? I've tried to convince myself that a dearth of ripe, luscious figs was a reasonable price to pay for the cool days and positively chilly nights we enjoyed this not-much-of-a-summer.

But I'm not quite there.