If you’re new around here, I live in a swamp. I know I’m supposed to call it a “pristine wetland,” but if you don’t mind, I’ll call it the bog-to-hell-and-gone instead. Everything comes out of that swamp all the time, sometimes to delight us, sometimes to bite me and give me a fever of 105. The swamp will kill you if you let it. It would pull my house apart in a decade if I ever stopped mowing the lawn.
The worst thing the swamp produces is the horsefly. It’s not actually only one kind of a beast; there’s a handful of types. They appear after the midges and mosquitoes, but before the poison ivy, generally. They’re the most vicious thing I can imagine. They attack like kamikazes, and get a blood meal from you with scissor mandibles. They make the end of my yard miserable for five weeks or so in the summer. Let’s kill them.
Go down the basement and bring your heir and your spare.
You need a plan. It should contain all the information you need to build the thing, plus a list of all the items you need to purchase to make it. It should be a loopy looking long-haired- equation looking thing like that.
1/2″ plumbing pipe, a clear plastic one-gallon jug with a screw lid, a funnel, a roll of 4 mil plastic, some punky wood strapping I dumped behind the shed 5 years ago.
The kids like the tinkertoy vibe of the plumbing pipe. I like the kids.
An 8″ square of MDO left over from windowboxes.
If you can’t use things for what they’re not intended for, you have no business on the Internet.
You buy a 20″ beachball at Wal-Mart, put a blessed halo around it with duct tape, leave a tab flap to pierce and hang the ball in the center with kite string. Spray paint the thing black while it’s hanging.
Horseflies are dumb. They see the ball swaying in the breeze and think it’s a spherical cow or something. When disabused of this notion, they always fly straight up. They eventually make their way through the funnel and die in the heat of the clear jug. No bait or poison is necessary. The trap is a little more than a week old and the jug has thousands of the nasty bugs in there. For Amityville spectacle, some of the beasts lay their eggs in the corpses of their brethren before perishing, and the little sluglike larvae hatch and crawl around in there too. For a while. Hence the breeding cycle is interrupted, and next summer is made better now.
What do you know. It works. The kids can play in the yard again. If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one.
“If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one” would make an excellent epitaph for my grave, now that I think about it.
[Update: Many people read this essay every day, seven years or so after I wrote it, and wonder if the trap works. Here’s a picture I took a day or two after I set it up. Not long after that, I had to empty it because the horseflies piled up to the top of the funnel]
[Editor’s Note: Reader, commenter, Internet friend, and furniture customer extraordinaire Ruth Anne Adams has requested that we revisit the visit with the Adams family. Her wish is our command.]
{Ruth Anne paid the band a few times. Her beautiful children sit on Sippican Cottage chairs. You get to listen to her tune. There is no editor.}
I’ve only been to Europe once, but Europe is not obscure to me. In the same way that cultivated persons once used to learn French, and those of a scientific nature German, I was taught about European things while being educated. I knew how to find my way from Brunelleschi’s dome to the foot of David without directions. And yes, I know that’s a copy standing there now outside the Palazzo Vecchio.
Sometimes it seems like Europe has nothing but history. It occurs to me from time to time that most of Europe is just living in the wreckage of an earlier civilization’s works, waiting…
Never mind. I’m an American. We’re not waiting for anything. Now, it might appear to many persons in this big country of ours that nothing’s very old here. There’s no Collosseum in Quincy, where the picture is taken, after all. But just because you live in a suburb where the trees are still staked and no one’s house has been repainted yet, doesn’t mean the whole enchilada is like that. Sometimes the old sneaks up on you; you bump into it right on the street.
That’s Abigail Adams right there. That’s a monument to her outside the First Parish Church of Quincy, Massachusetts. She is that rarest of things — both the wife and the mother of an American President. But America is old enough at least to have produced two such women. That church in the background was established in 1639. Quincy is not new.
It wasn’t Quincy then, of course. It was part of Braintree, which is still right down the street if you’re interested. The city of Quincy was named for Abigail Adams’ grandfather Colonel John Quincy. And so the town is her family home, really, not those prickly men she cared for.
John Adams was not a lovable fellow, though Abigail surely loved him. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, who readers of this page know is my kind of guy, John Adams was: “Honest, intelligent, and sometimes out of his mind.” His son John Quincy Adams was about as uncompromising and hard-nosed as his old man, and gathered a few detractors himself when his presidential campaign included saying unkind things about his opponent Andrew Jackson’s wife.
Jackson’s wife died right after the election, the slur still in her ear, and it hardened Andrew Jackson’s heart; and he was already about as ornery a man as you could find in American history. I think this monument is really there to remind us how dour our lives would be without women in them, and to remind us how to behave towards each other.
They made a movie about John Quincy Adams succesfully arguing the Amistad case in front of the Supreme Court. It was a worthwhile endeavor, but it would take Lincoln to free the slaves ultimately; perhaps John Quincy should be remembered for the two most earthshattering changes he brought to the presidency: he wore long pants, and went to the bathroom indoors.
I think it’s great to happen upon Abigail right there in the street, when you’re hurtling past on the way to some hurried quotidian appointment. She personifies the importance of being well regarded as well as being respected — or feared — plus the need to cultivate as well as harvest your notoriety. And old things encountered in a new and bustling setting are terrific for framing a perspective on the trajectory of things; birth, education, toil, joy, death, legacy.
John Hancock was born across the street, two blocks down. I didn’t run into him.
I forgot who it was. Friend of my wife, I think. My wife came home from work one day, the long slog up the highway and back over, a few shekels in her pocket, a slight aureole of weariness glowing around her, and handed me one of those nasty plastic pouches that have replaced paper bags at the supermarket. In it was an awful, dirty, watery fistful of hosta, given to her by one of her coworkers. It looked exactly like some half masticated frond a stegosaur might have spit out over some perceived unwholesomeness. It was too muddy to throw away, so I planted it.
I planted it with all the hope for resurrection I had when I planted the poor cat out by the swamp when she had strayed too close to the road and broken our hearts. That is to say: none. The hosta was nothing to me, but where else would I put it, but in the ground?
Of course it grew, because we left it alone and didn’t care about it. I’ve divided that hosta four times or so in the last eight years. Our yard is very shady, and there always seems to be one more spot that could benefit from its variegated if everyday charms. There’s a period in the summer when the long delicate stalks appear like magic from the center of the plant, and wave their delicate bell shaped flowers to the breezes, causing the hummingbirds to favor our yard like an Alfred Hitchcock/Doctor Seuss hybrid project. We croak the bird book, looking for the correct term for all those little irridescent wonders. Flock?Swarm? Gaggle? Herd? Pod? A murder of hummingbirds? We’re the only people who get them like this I guess, and so we’ll have to coin the term:
We’re simple gardeners here at the Sippican Cottage. While we share your admiration for those whose gardens are overburdened with exotic cultivars, and on whose lips Latinate names trill, we just don’t want to pay too much attention to what we’re doing.
There’s more to it than that for me, perhaps. To be an expert, you have to know so much about something that you can’t even look at it for the pure joy that’s in it anymore. If you’ve ever been in the office of a really accomplished specialist doctor, you can always spot them looking at you — eventually, if not right from your greeting — as the bundle of bones and guts you are. As they say in the mafia movies, it’s not personal, it’s strictly business.
I worry about doctors that take too much of an interest in me personally anyway. I’d be in a tavern if I wanted commiserating companionship, after all. And the medicine in the tavern is more efficacious, generally. The best and most competent doctor I ever met told me the worst news in the most businesslike manner, and left the room to leave me alone with my wife. He tended to his business, and left us to tend to ours. We need more of that, and not just in the medical profession.
I can’t enjoy recorded music if it’s a selection I’ve learned to play myself. I see the bones and the guts of it, arrayed like cadavers in the music morgue, when I should be getting the lilt. I have gone way out of my way to avoid ever deconstructing any of the music of a certain soul singer, because I never want the magician to show me his trick after he performs it, and I don’t want to peek either. I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it.
I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it. Hmm. Music. Gardening. Love.
It’s a geranium. It not the genus Pelargonium of the Kingdom of Plantae of the Division of Magnoliophyta of the class Manoliopsida of the order Geraniales from the family of Geraniaceae.
I think when the sun comes out, I’ll sit with my wife on that brick step next to the pots of geraniums, and open the window a little so we can hear, indistinctly perhaps, Al Green sing on the box.
Top o’ the morning to ye, Sippicanite. Or Sippicanette, as the case may be. If you use that third bathroom at the alternative bookstore, please write to me and tell me what suffix to use to greet you properly, too. We’re nothing if not mannerly around here.
It’s a long road that has no turning, as they say, so let’s turn the corner on this window box thingie, and get back to despoiling the internet landscape with our opinion on other matters, shall we?
Well. Well, well, well. Now you’ve had plenty of advice, up to now. What with me grinding away, your neighbor coming over to critique your sawhorses, and the helpful teenager at the Big Orange Place explaining to you politely that he doesn’t think they sell four inch long, galvanized screws that are already bent. Of course, if you like, he’ll get on the intercom, and summon someone in charge to ask. You can always tell who’s in charge down there, they’re the only one amongst the clerks who can shave, either their chin or their legs, respectively.
You think you’ve gotten advice up to this point? Hold on, dear reader, for the onslaught of unsolicited opinion, for you are about to paint something.
Now people who are willing to help you paint something are a smaller proportion of the population than even the people who need that third bathroom I mentioned earlier. But everyone is ready to tell you how to do it. Actually, that’s imprecise. They mostly are prepared to tell you how you did it wrong, and ” back in ‘______’ we don’t do it that way,” after you’re done. And you missed a spot.
Now I used to paint things for a living, mind you. Small, quotidian things at first. Big, elaborate things later. And believe me, I’ve heard it all. I once painted a trompe l’oleil mural, in a mansion, and the roofer came in, filthy, unshaven, swearing, with a cigarette sporting two inches of ash dangling in the corner of his mouth, and he offered me advice. Now I suspect that his experience with two point perspective and faux marble might have been, how do I put this politely, not absolutely top shelf.
But shame on me. Perhaps I’ve got two many preconceived notions about folks who use @#$! as a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and the object of a prepositional phrase, all in the same sentence. Maybe I should have given him the benefit of the doubt. I might have missed the day he was on the Today Show and got his Lifetime Achievement Award for Decoration, along with his honorary degree from the Sorbonne.
“Why the #$%! is this like this?” He said . “I wouldn’t do this in my #$%!-ing house.”
Really, do tell. The one in the south of France, or the other one?
So take it from someone who’s been paid to render an opinion on paint. Everyone’s going to offer an opinion for free. And I doubt anyone is going to give you the counsel I’m about to.
Pick out a nice color in a water based, low lustre house paint. Open the can. Stir it until you get bored. Get a disposable 3 inch brush. Slap that paint right on the wood. Twice. you’re done.
The horror! No primer! No sanding! No expensive flag tipped tynex/orel brushes! You visigoth you.
Now trust me, it doesn’t matter. It won’t peel. Let me take that back. It might peel, but if it’s going to, because of the sun and rain and snow, it will no matter how you finish it. Remember, it’s supposed to look weathered and simple, not fussy. So don’t bring fussy into it. But here’s the hard part: Don’t make a mess. Paint never really looks right if you make a mess. Being neat is not fussy. Leave the shrubs and the siding out of it. And don’t paint it a color that competes with the flowers.
All paint brands are about the same, if you compare like for like, product-wise. Gaudy claims from the manufacturers about this or that characteristic are generally true, but one is 99% something or other, and the others are 98%, and it’s not worth worrying about.
Except one thing. Pigment cost money. Both the kind of pigment in the paint, and the very expensive pigment they use to print the sales brochures. And if there’s any difference between the brands that matters, it’s almost always the quality of the sales brochures, and sophistication of the colors. And getting rich, earthy sophisticated tones for paint requires a sophisticated approach to the pigments. Cheap paint makes grey by mixing lamp black with white. It wears well, and applies easily, but it’s Just Grey. Better paint has people educated in color, researching combinations, and using four pigments to achieve Grey. Rich Sophisticated Grey. And you can use their materials to find color combinations that don’t look like they belong in a trailer park. Just stay away from the color chip displays that look bland overall from a distance. You’ll be fine.
First, soak the innards with raw linseed oil. When that soaks in, put in some more. It will keep the water in this box of mud we’re keeping from immediately wicking into the carcass of it and speeding up its inevitable decline. Now, lay a piece of window screening in the bottom of the box, to keep the good soil from slowly sifting out through the neatly drilled holes you put there. Then put a thin layer of something that will keep the drainage good in the bottom so the roots don’t rot. I use a couple of trowels of gravel from the driveway, but anything will do if it lets water drain free. They sell nifty styrofoam pellets now, of the sort that nurseries have been using for years to mix in their soil to keep it from caking. They work well, and don’t weigh as much as gravel. Then the peat and the poop, mixed with good garden soil. And in go the geraniums, and the vinca vine. Or Boston Ivy. Put the vines nearer the front of the box, and it will droop nicely over the canted cap we put on the front of the box for just that purpose. Or you choose the flowers. Who am I to give you advice?
By the way, that’s me behind the flash, mirrored in the darkened window. I think I look great in the photo, don’t you? I should have my picture taken like that all the time. Now you know what I look like.
Now you’re wondering how we chose our color. Well, we chose it because its name, and its delicate tone, conjured up images of ancient babylonian temples, washed by the biblical sun to a delicate ivory; or perhaps the color of the finest cheese, labored over by the flinty Vermont farmer, and seen in the rich, clear beams of the first sunshine of the farm workday, filtered through the mist in the meadow; or perhaps evoking a panorama of wheat, languidly waving in the gentle breeze, stretching to the horizon on the rolling plains of Tuscany, and crowned by the regal Mediterranean sun.
Ben Moore named it “182.” Get some. You’ll love it.
Tag: gardening
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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