For one decade—now a couple decades ago—I lived in New York City. Overly (actually, frantically) anxious to fit in, I studied the natives and found three basic requisites for survival: great haircut, fashionable shoes and handbag, and serious stationery. In a city where perception is everyone's reality, that trifecta seemed to somehow kick open doors and knighted the person with a credibility unavailable elsewhere.
So, I was not terribly surprised when I opened today's New York Times and found in the Home section an article on stationery collections (titled "The Lettered Set"). The opening shot is of a beautiful secretary (the wood, not the flesh and bone, kind) reworked to house rows of boxes, each with a small tag identifying the paper inside. The die-makers range from the now defunct Mrs. John L. Strong (who used to sell to the Duchess of Windsor) to the New York stalwart (Dempsey & Carroll), as well as from Kate's Paperie and Crane.
I understand this. I may be on the computer all the time and I may use email far, far more than a stamp on an envelope but I still have my stash of stationery, from the engraved sets I ordered from Tiffany's in the 1980s
to my most recent Cheree Berry creation
and the cache of colorful Paper Petals papers created by the local and extremely talented Nancy Thias.
I love heavy-weight, simple, elegant paper. I love getting notes from my friends and seeing which piece they selected to send. But, I'll confess, I am truly terrible about using them. I'll be great for say, a month (and that month is usually January, right after Christmas) and I will dutifully pulled out my boxed notes and pick from each to write thank yous to friends. (My family has not (I am embarrassed to say) seen one of these in years.) But the other months? I think about it. I think about it frequently. And then days, weeks, months pass and welp, it doesn't get done.
But who knows? Years from now, some of you may be receiving a note from me penned on one of these—dusted off and slipped into the mail.
That is assuming there is such an antiquity as snail mail.
Photo by "Eric (and sometimes Jessica)".
Per the Buffalo as an Architecture website:
Nogging: brick masonry used
to fill the spaces between the members of a timber frame.
I thought it was so simple. We’d plop a round fountain in the center of our patio and feel like we were in Rome. Then I had lunch with Laura Lynne Dyer. Laura Lynne just happens to be a landscape designer, so I casually asked her where one shops for fountains. Her head tilted, and she listened for a minute to my babbling.
“The thing about a central focus is, it breaks up your seating,” she remarked. “You find you now have sides, or areas. Which can be fine, if your space is big enough. The trick with a fountain, though, is seasonality; it’s shut off for five months a year. So if it’s dead center, you’re detouring around this covered blob all winter, as you cross from the house to the garage.”
Mmm. That doesn’t happen in Rome.
“I’ve designed this cover in my head that’s like an artificial tree, with pine needles in looped rings,” she confides. “You could even decorate it for the holidays! I swear, one of these days I’m going to find a manufacturer for it. It came to me because I was thinking, ‘How do you make something disappear naturally? You put a tree there.”
I was already imagining it covered in popcorn and berry garland for the birds. But she was still brainstorming. “Walk the space, and watch each other. The tricky thing is scale,” she said. “If you have a large space, your fountain has to be proportioned for that.”
I gulped, thinking of money. “Align your budget with what’s most important,” she suggested. “If you’re going to change something around in a few years, get it at Wal-Mart. But if your eye is going to land on something every day of every year for the forseeable future, it’s worth a huge chunk of your budget.
“Of course, there are also ways to make it feel larger, by raising it or surrounding it with flowers,” she added. “And don’t forget the splash factor; if you’re sitting right next to it, you’re going to get splashed, but you can regulate that by getting a different pump.” It was 98 with a heat index of 120. Splashes sounded just fine.
“A fountain’s great for the birds,” she continued. “But you can have algae issues, to you can put just a little tiny bit of bleach in it.” And how do I stop the dog from drinking out of it? She smiled. “You let the dog drink out of it. I’m talking just a drop of bleach every once in a while; it will diffuse in the water.” Then she frowned. “How level is your patio?” I thought guiltily of the two lumpy seams of concrete that intersected in the middle, leaving one quadrant sunken. Hadn’t factored that in. “You can shim it,” she assured me. “Or build a frame base out of stone, or build a stone border and put sand in it to create a base.
“You really need some color, too, if you’ve got all that concrete,” she continued. “And privacy on the open end of the patio—maybe a hedge of boxwood or hollies? Nothing too oppressive—there’s a delicate balance between cozy and claustrophobic.”
By the time we finished lunch, I’d described the entire patio, including my prized little clay pots of herbs along the wall of the house. “That could be an amateur announcement,” she warned with a grin. “If you design a space yourself, there are certain things you can do—I’m actually working on a book about this—that immediately announce you’re an amateur. Lots of tiny little pots is one of them; try a few big planters, or a raised bed. Small stepping stones are another amateur announcement; if they’re big enough that it takes you and your husband to carry them, it’ll look like a pro did the job. And if you do a path from the patio into the garden, use a larger flagstone at every point of transition: anywhere you land or begin or change direction. That allows your body to readjust.”
By the end of lunch, I was more interested in getting my mind to readjust. Plopping down a fountain wasn’t as simple as it looked. The subtleties intrigued me--and the timidity of my own thinking annoyed me. That cliché about “thinking big” was true; I hadn’t dared, not with my little flower pots or the little round stepping stones or the fountain itself. I'd been tinkering, ever so tentatively, around the edges, but not envisioning any changes dramatic enough to make a compelling difference.
Yikes. If I can't have fun in my own back yard, where can I?
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
"I care more about our house than you do!" I wailed at my husband.
"That's not exactly true," he said.
We didn't even need to continue the conversation; we'd recited this play's lines so many times before. The director's notes would point out that the heroine's world is a domestic one--she works in the world, but subconsciously, she's convinced that if she keeps her home beautiful and harmonious and orderly, she will have a refuge from the world's evils and ward off some sort of danger she's never bothered to articulate. Also, she just plain enjoys a weekend project.
The hero, by contrast, throws his heart into his work in the world (you'd think this play was set in the '50s, wouldn't you?) and thinks their home is just fine already. He has grown wary, after 15 years of marriage, because each completed project seems to inspire three fresh ones. There is no end to his wife's enthusiasm, so his solution is to splash water at the first glimmering of an idea about home improvement.
The play gets rehearsed over and over again precisely because it has no resolution. But a few weeks ago, confronted with a bed of ivy and weeds and a concrete patio that used to be a basketball half-court and has no more charm than that, I decided to try once more.
Tentatively, I brought up the subject. Instantly, I felt the resistance, like a poltergeist's chill settling over the 95-degree heat.
"What would get you interested?" I finally asked.
"I am interested," he said, then saw my expression and started laughing. "Babe, I really am. The problem is, it's never finished. If I thought we could do one thing and be done with it, I'd be ready to go. But once we do something with the patio, you'll start thinking about what to plant by the fences" (rhododendron and false spotted St. John's Wort, I'd already decided) "and how to reorganize the garage..."
I conceded his point, and we made a contractual agreement: this summer, just the patio.
I went downstairs not really believing it would work. But the next day, he told me he'd had an idea: What about a circular fountain in the center of the patio?
Everything fell into place. I'd been toying with a fountain by the wall, a fountain in the ivy, a hose splashing the dog because it'd be easier and cheaper than either one ... but I'd never thought dramatically enough to stick a fountain dead center.
"It's brilliant," I said, half jealous. "How'd you think of it?"
"I stole it from the Alhambra."
Ah, it's good to have a historian around. I think too small (that domestic curse). Hadn't dreamed of going to Spanish Muslim palaces for inspiration.
So now we're looking for a round fountain, if anyone has any ideas of where to find one short of stealing it from Spain. We may not be able to afford anything grand, but I'm already happy. We're planning it together, I'm not nagging, it's 50-50, we've reached a solid compromise and drawn firm boundaries around the task.
Maybe something more Spanish along the fence, to complement the fountain?
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
A quick quiz: What does Tempe (Arizona), Carson (California) West Chester (Ohio), Conshocken (Pennsylvania), Round Rock (Texas), Draper (Utah), Stoughton (Massachusetts) have that St. Louis doesn't?
Or, put another (statewide) way: California has eight; Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas each have three, and Illinois has two but Missouri has exactly zip? Name that store.
Answer: IKEA. The closest one to St. Louis is hours away—a day trek to Bolingbroke or Schaumburg, Illinois. And as nice as road trips can be, we would prefer to be able to shop on a whim. When we are in the mood for some fun, ever-so-Swedish designs, we don't want to have to get up at dawn and spend the night in another state.
So, we have STARTED A PETITION. And if you too long for an IKEA to call your own, we urge you to sign it. ASAP.
Click on http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ikeainstlouis/.
Email your friends. Call your relatives. Nudge your neighbors.
Come on team. Let's rally around and get an IKEA in our town!
Seed-sowing season is drawing to a close, and even if you started your garden a bit late, you may have the beginnings of what will become beautiful peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and whatnot. Which means it's now the season to get vigilant about bugs.
Rather than spraying down your food plants with nasty chemicals, you may want to try growing some of the aromatic plants suggested by P. Allen Smith for natural pest control. I love the way artemesia looks, but it's VERY important to note, as this article does, that it gives off a toxin, so it's more of a flower-border sort of plant. Not every gardener is crazy about marigolds or sunflowers, but I've had luck with lavender in very sunny spots, and hyssop; both those plants offer the bonus of attracting lots of pollinators to your garden, too. --Stefene Russell
I am a survivor. For 364 days of the year, that moniker carries little weight but last weekend? You betcha. I wore my Komen Race for the Cure lipstick-pink shirt with pride. I picked up free merchandise to the right and to the left of me. Strangers congratulated me; they patted me on the back; they smiled when I walked by. They gave me way more credit than I was due.
But I'm not complaining. I am awed by the 67,000 people who turned up to support the cause. I get teary looking at all those still in treatment who carefully wrapped their heads in soft bandanas before topping them with baseball caps. I love the signs pinned to people's backs, celebrating those who successfully eluded cancer's clutches and remembering those who regrettably didn't. I delight in the variety of T-Shirts ("Save the Ta-Tas." "Fight like a Girl.") And, the best of all, I look forward to being handed a rose by one of the St. Louis Rams rookies, men who tower over me like the Arch. I loved being photographed, beaming in their substantial shadow.
But wait.
They forgot to come.
No longer are the Rams players there sweet-talking the ladies in pink but instead, it was the Rams cheerleaders bulging a bit out of their two-piece uniforms, waiting in line at the survivor's balloon festooned exit. And instead of the perfect flower, they gave canvas Schnucks bags.
Of course it's more practical. And, I'm sure there was more than just an occasional grouse from those gridiron stars of tomorrow.
But when you, the survivor, are thanking your lucky stars for being cancer-free or that you actually lived through another round of chemo and/or radiation, do you really think you want a body-perfect cheerleader at your side? With a grocery bag?
Nope. You don't. You want Marc Bulger. Or Steven Jackson. Or Chris Long. Or Will Witherspoon. Or Chris Massey.
And you want a single stem of something perfect.
Not a sack for eggs and milk.
As reported by the Lexington Herald-Leader, A Kentucky man decorated his entire basement with ... $10 worth of Sharpies. Click through to see the photos. (Via xBlog) -- Stephen Schenkenberg
My absolutely favorite seed company, hands down, is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Jere and Emily Gettle and their staff are the nicest folks in the world, their seeds always germinate (or if they have low-germinating seeds, they'll label the package as such). I also love their quirky seed pacakging and carefully written catalogs, their recreated historical village, and the fact that they are so darn young and yet have made a committment to something bigger than themselves.
So far, they've operated out of tiny Mansfield, Mo., but they've done so well lately that they are expanding and opening another location in Petaluma, Ca. -- where, apparently, the bulk of their mail-order business comes from. (Can you think of a better place to grow plants than a town called petal-uma?) They have purchased the historic Sonoma County National Bank Building and are renovating it and outfitting it as a garden store. Which makes me want to plan a trip to Petaluma later this year -- that's what kind of seed geek I am! --Stefene Russell
