The house is finally painted. It turned out well. It’s going to be a great background for the deep evergreens and subtropicals that I’ve put in.
Saturday I went to downtown farmer’s market and got a really beautiful and beautiful-smelling ginger which I put on the north corner. The grower said it will get 6 – 8’. The dwarf palmettos are slow-going but a really wonderful blue-gray green and eventually will anoint the walls with their tropical fans.
I still have a windmill palm that I haven’t planted. I think I’ll hold off and eventually put it on one side of the front path with the oleanders, rose, cactus and yucca that I have planned for the big street-side front bed. I propagated a super-white oleander from a cutting over on Arroyo Seco, but I think it will be a year or two before it’s large enough to put in ground. The shrub on Arroyo Seco is very dark blue-green foliage and milk-white blooms. I could buy another oleander but the nurseries don’t have this variety and you never know what you are getting. Most of the white oleanders in the stores have yellow-green foliage and white flowers with yellow centers.
Another 1-1/2 inches of rain!

A Baker I Shall Never Be

Tomorrow is the annual pie social where I work. Only last week I had been chatting with the two Brits in my office and somehow mentioned my grandmother's treacle pie. They both started to swoon. I realized that among the many things I never made for my children when they were growing up (popovers, Pavlova cake, the list goes on and on) was treacle pie.

So I decided to rectify this by making a treacle pie for my co-workers. Logic, along with baking, not being one of my strengths.

Almost every one of the online recipes was identical, so I thought I was safe. I went to Central Market and got the essential Lyle's Golden Syrup. It's been a long time since I have done a lattice top pie, but I figured it would all come back. While the pie shell was doing its prelim 10-minute bake, I cut a batch of pastry strips. I vaguely remembered draping the lattice strips over halfway and alternating them. I do know that I never worked with pastry strips on top of a hot-from-oven pie shell that has been filled with a simmering pool of molten lava filling.

Suffice it to say, I gave up attempting to do a legitimate lattice. Let's call it a plaid piecrust, shall we?

The dark side of baking is not something we like to confront.

Deep (Eddy) Thoughts

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad time at Deep Eddy.”

A remark I overheard today made by a man carrying a floatie and a tote bag, climbing up the steps with his young son. I second that emotion. Other than the off year when the cottonwoods were dropping giant limbs due to age and had to be taken down, there’s not much wrong with Deep Eddy. In lieu of a photo, here’s a gouache done last summer. Nothing has changed; all the people are still there in the same position.

The Case of the Mysterious Doorbell

Ever since I moved into this house the doorbell hasn’t worked. I put a sign over the button warning people it didn’t work and that they needed to knock. Sign fell down. If someone’s coming over, I have to keep an eye out, because they’ll stand on the porch ringing the bell futilely.

A related oddity is that there is another doorbell button on the kitchen pantry door. It’s clearly an old button, many times painted around, and when pressed, activates nothing. Again, it’s on the inside of the house, leading to the pantry closet. A mystery that has no ready explanation.

Today the carpenter came to the house to lower the microwave, and after it was all done we talked about the broken doorbell. He said it might just be transformer problem, easy to fix, and where was the doorbell chime? I suddenly realized I’d never seen the usual ceiling-mounted doorbell appliance anywhere in the house.

But there was an odd little metal box in the hallway close to the floor. Again, like the pantry doorbell button, this metal box looks like something from the 50s; it's that funky old dull aluminum or tin material they used to make pie pans out of. I hardly even noticed it unless I was sweeping the floor and it caught my eye and I’d wonder what the heck, and then forget about it. The carpenter took the box casing off and there it was: a loose wire and some strange looking mechanism. He reconnected the wire and voila! Doorbell works.

Although it’s not actually a doorbell—it’s a buzzer, in every respect a relic from another place and time. Imagine Ethel standing at Lucy's door and hitting the button--that's the sound we're talking about. The wire may have been disconnected on purpose because it’s loud as hell. I’ve found a wav file that approximates the sound.

And one final bizarre note: the button on the pantry door is LIVE as well.

Why would anyone have a doorbell on the inside of the house? Even if this were once the back door it makes no sense. A friend mentioned possibly it was to summon a servant or to get people to come to the dinner table--again, rather idiotic in a house this small.

I'll have to ask Bertha, my 90-year old neighbor. She may have some insight into the past.

Flight of the Firefly

With August rapidly coming to a close, I must give a shout out to the fireflies who have kept me company since April. Never in my life have I seen so many and it appears to be a phenomenon related to the immediate neighborhood.

Observing them every evening wafting up in droves from the ground, has caused me to wonder about their biology. I’ve learned that they are first of all, not flies but winged beetles. Here’s their life cycle:

Larva stage: up to 1 –2 years they live underground as worms. The worms are also luminescent; hence the glowworm. At this point they eat grubs, slugs and snails.
Pupa: 10 day period of living in a mud hut before emerging as
Firefly! At this point, life is short; a few days to a week. The emergence of beetle stage starts in spring and tails off in August.

Apparently not a lot is known about why they give off their light; most likely a mating dance. The chemicals luciferase and luciferin that make them glow is used in a number of ways by scientists in diagnosing and researching diseases. The chemicals have also been used in spacecraft to look for life in outer space, as the firefly’s luminescence cocktail is a particularly effective detector of another chemical, ATP, found in all basic cells on earth.

Bringer of beauty, joy and light. Disease fighter. Outer space explorer.
All hail the little firefly.

Paint It Black

Have to get the house painted. The painters were supposed to start on Friday but in the time-relative cosmos of the building trades, Friday apparently is often confused with Monday (or possibly "next week sometime.")

The painter was recommended by a friend.
He does not live in his van, like a former painter I have employed.
He drives a brand-new pickup and is well-groomed.
And yet he has failed to show up at appointed time and date, or call to explain his absence. (I had to track him down via phone; I won't even bother to transcribe his lame excuse).

As a form of distraction from this outrage, let's obsess over trivial surface details. Here is the before all-white house and it's soon to be new color scheme.


Manila-folder walls, white trim, and black shutters. Next summer once the bananas are gently stirring against this backdrop and the bird of paradise are stretching their wings along the front path--my vision of subtropical shanty should be well along. It'll be sad to say goodbye to the dog-shit mustard trim currently gracing litle Aurora, but all things must evolve.

Notice the front path has turned in to brick. This is going to be a faux paint job that I saw done in a magazine and many posters at ivillage have thoughfully provided detailed how-tos and before/after photos. Mean Rachel in a careless moment has promised to assist with this. Can't you wait?

Secret Garden

There’s something about a garden hidden from public view. If you stumble onto it unawares, it’s a magical place. A secret garden is almost always defined by walls, so finding one and entering into its realm is a revelation in the truest sense. Discovery, surprise, and mystery are the foundation plantings of this garden.

They are rare. Most American gardens are about openness; the front yard, an American invention, is all about exposure to the public.

My mother had a friend in San Antonio named Candida Merriweather (real name). Her home was in an unfashionable part of the city and from the street appeared over grown with untended native shrubs, vines, and trees. Toward the back of her jungle-like property was an ivy-covered compound that sat on a little elevation. Its appearance was not in any way distinctive. You entered this enclosure through a little gate, also covered with ivy, and found yourself at once transported—utterly unexpectedly—into a tropical paradise. The centerpiece of this secret garden was a swimming pool and it was surrounded by banana trees, rustling palms, and the hot pinks and oranges of flowering cannas, bougainvilleas, and crepe myrtles. From the street or anywhere on the grounds of this home you would never know this garden was there.

There’s a secret garden next door to my house. It’s a little patio wedged between a house and studio apartment which are both completely overgrown by fig ivy. Between the creeping fig ivy and massive banks of agapanthus lilies, the space is barely big enough to hold a wrought-iron table. Giant Boston ferns hang from the eaves. It looks like some pleasantly decaying Italian villa.

I didn’t know it was there until shortly after I moved in and my two daughters were visiting. I saw them in the backyard on tiptoe peering through a gap in the fence, whispering to each other. They looked like little children once again. Such is the magic of the secret garden.