The World Examining Works

Tricks

 

Nothing so much fun as manipulating photos --well, obviously there are lots of things but you know what I mean.

Here are some weeds beside the road on Lake Place where we lived twenty five years ago but photographed today.

Here is a tree in the garden of a family our son used to play with

and foliage from the same garde.

Here is the park where our children played

and Henry observing the statue in the museum. Note the frog.

 

All photos taken Sept 28th in and around Heckscher Park, Huntington LI

Stuff We Keep and Stuff We Throw Away

 

 

A friend brought me this cotton boll from Alabama. I think it is very beautiful though I rather doubt I would have thought so if I had to pick cotton. I digresss.

On Saturday we were helping with a stall at a flea market and I was looking round our spare apartment for stuff to get rid of.

This character, Mr Samuel Worsley, who has lived in my desk for some years, had this  miniature done in 1821 . He seems to have lived in Orwell in Suffolk and looks a little like Wordsworth.

He was almost certainly married to poor Sarah ( above) who died aged 55 years. Where he looks bland beyond bland, she seems rather pinched and miserable. I cannot imagine how they came into my mother's possession unless they were relatives of some distant sort. However, I do not feel I can ditch them to the tender mercies of people who will feel even less connection to them than I do.

Item: two slightly sentimentally sweet French prints of children playing with animals. Kate Greenaway meets toile, much beloved by my grandmother.

I can't ditch those either.

 

 

Interior with Fruit

 

 

Forgive my obsession with

this very green jug which lives on the windowsill and is used to water plants. I think of Giorgio Morandi who painted the same things over and over again. I'm just too lazy to paint.

A cushion on a wooden chest that's now being used as an ottoman.....it used to hold paints. It was made in woodshop by my father in law in the 1930's so is probably almost an antique now.

Was at Union Square green market yesterday and bought plums, peaches, pears

and beets ( a very under-rated veg)

and a butternut squash --the first of the season -- so there will soon be a lot of soup.

Am also making a lot of elf hats see here.

The Garden of Nostalgia

 

A friend was composting in the communal gardens at Penn South ( the garden I gaze into throught the chain link fence) and said she would hang on to the dog so I could get inside.

Usually I'm exiled from this urban Eden. The beginnings of the slow decline into fall.

Yellow cosmos.

Sunflowers and herbs

Parsley in the foreground, sedum behind, I think.

Domestic and Thinking About Harvests

 

 

A jug and an unripe mango hanging out together on the window sill.

My book shelf under plastic while the room is being painted. Plastic, like fog, renders the mundane mysterious.

The painter Berch, who decorates the local diners, has outshone himself this time.

Of course he doesn't use black -- that's merely the interior of the diner.

Makes me feel warm and fuzzy about fall. 

On 22nd Street, the very clean stump of what was a tall tree - - though riddled with rot.

Yesterday evening --the Harvest moon was suitably yellow --which doesn't show up here.

 

The Time of Year When Things Begin Anew

 

On Friday, coming back from the beach

we passed through Huntington where the historical society was preparing for a little festival --very end of summery/hint of fall.

Then home to the city under terror alert. Earthquake, hurricane, floods and then people zooming about on large motorcycles trying to express whatever was impossible to express about this weekend's sad anniversary.

We are alert to a plane very high up above a building! A World War Two plane travelling so very slowly. The weekend over

 

 the light, so clear and bright, makes complicated patterns everywhere.

Even the chain link fence looks abstracty and artsy.

Our apartment floors sanded and sealed, a storage cabinet built, walls painted. Everything cleared and clean and ready to make something new.

 

In the meantime, I dug up a very old poem about my cereal bowl.

Villeroy and Boch

 

 

_{they reap the corn two centuries ago}

_{in some hot european field}

_{where two men stand}

_{bent slightly over scythes}

_{and women stoop to gather what’s been cut.}

_{it was ever thus.}

 

_{this tasteful scene}

_{congeals beneath my weetabix}

_{in monochrome}

_{(bone china}

_{dishwasher safe)}

_{atop a polished table}

 

_{the sweat! the smell!}

_{the hours under scalding sun}

_{I’d hate to be a peasant then}

_{broad-fingered, ignorant and numb}

_{to everything but aching back and shoulders’ burn}

_{I’d long to loll beside the cows}

_{in shade beneath the heavy trees}

_{I wouldn’t care to look charmant}

_{to decorate a dish}

_{my labor turned to prettiness}

 

Ground Up

 

This is the man in the street. Haha.

Photographed one wet morning last week. 

This is a manhole cover (person hole?) in Huntington with just the least hint of fall.

The dunes on Robert Moses beach on the south shore of Long Island were washed over in Hurrican Irene. The lumber must have blown in with the storm.

Such tired and twisted, half-drowned beach hair.

Man made tracks

 water made tracks

and the dunes and all the red flags warning us not to go in.

more of the same

and a vista  of all of it.

The almost anniversary of September 11th -- which seems like yesterday, not ten years at all.

 

Vegetation Alert

 

 

Anyone not remotely interested in grass may well want to skip this post.

Ah, the joy of blogging! One can indulge one's petty obsessions with impuntiy.

Herewith Piet Oudolf's magical grasses on The High Line

which get better and better each passing year....

so frothy and tumbling.

And grasses on a beach at Asharoken, near Northport on Long Island

where a chum has assembled all sorts of flotsam and jetsom

including a rather spaced out looking gnome

 

and a canoe hiding in the bushes.

Hope everyone is enjoying Labor Day.