Woodpile

Forget what you've heard about how "wood warms you three times." Yes, I did get a bit overheated stacking all this wood--about two cords' worth. And yes, we'll be plenty warm when we burn it (if we stand near the stove--it's a very central sort of heat).

But what really gets me fired up about burning wood is the sheer beauty of it. The way these pieces, split by my arborist neighbor from the many trees he cuts all over greater Boston, fit together to make a solid stack--like the tiles in a mosaic, in three dimensions. Their heft and hardness against my chest when I bring them in to burn. The little thrill of ignition as the kindling leaps into flame, I add a few small pieces, and the fire quickens. Even the ash, so pure and fine when I shovel it out and bag it for use in the garden later on. And the smell, drifting down the street in one direction or another, speaking to passers-by of woods and campfires and the out-of-doors, so that strangers sometimes stop to tell me, when I'm outside hauling in more logs, how glad they are for the smell of it.

Wood warms in so many ways, it would be a cold season without it.

Monument

Our neighborhood is merely Allston, and yet it has a portal. You can see it from a distance: two columns rising, a domesticated version of a Brandenburg Gate. Even though--like the Brandenburg Gate for so long--it leads to nowhere, to a steep grassy slope, buttressing the Cambridge Street overpass, our neighborhood's rough edge.

We lived on this street--Royal Street--for about ten months once, long ago. This strip of no-man's-land was there then, an urban waste, litter-strewn, barren of all but the toughest weeds. An eyesore, a blight, the scene of lurid crimes. Half-hearted clean-ups, tentative planting schemes came and went. Nothing helped.

Then a few years ago the site was claimed by a local visionary. Grants followed, landscape artists arrived, volunteer crews pulled out weeds. Sprawling raised steel forms were mounted sideways across the slope, filled with earth and seeded, along with the slope itself. Last spring it turned a rich green as the grass grew two, three, four feet high. You could hardly see the forms. A debate broke out between those who found it lush, and others who thought it looked unkempt. The grass was trimmed and the forms reappeared. It has found its shape and goes on, a modest but eminently successful earthwork, a monunent.

The portals are a little cheesy. Literally--they look as though maybe mice have been nibbling away at the fragile metal plates that define the columns. The curlicues of capital and urn are derisory in their quotation of classical forms. And yet the columns, the portal, as I like to think of it, introduces the whole structure, the whole work, as a work. Gives it definition not just as a form in the earth but a work of art. Here in Allston.

Corn!

I haven't been as faithful to this blog as I intended, and my plan to document the full cycle of my garden will have to wait till next year. But I do want to show off these ears of corn I harvested a few weeks ago from my plot in the Herter gardens. They were small but sweet, and you can't get'em any fresher. Yum!

Salve Festa Dies

We went to a wedding in Allston this afternoon. Well actually it was in Watertown, but the two principals were our Allston neighbors, Rita and Carol. And actually it wasn't a wedding--it was a blessing of their relationship, 45 years strong and counting. But it sure felt like a wedding, with clergy joining their hands and saying prayers over them. Or maybe an anniversary, since at their ages the honorees were somewhat more retrospective than the average bridal couple. But whatever it was, it couldn't have been more celebratory, and in a number of details I found it full not only of joy but of interest.

First of all the location--not a church but the VFW hall. Rita and Carol are lifelong Catholics, but pairs of ladies don't get married, or even blessed, in Catholic churches. And the priests included a man and a woman who were themselves married to each other. Something odd in this picture. And a nun, who actually presided as if she were a priest. When we all joined in the blessing, we did so in the name of God, but also of the Goddess Sophia. So while in many respects it felt like a traditional Catholic service, these clergy are American Catholics, and they are moving the Church, as the Spirit moves them, in new and interesting directions.

And then there were the invitees and onlookers, family, friends, neighbors, including two of our children, who are Rita and Carol's godchildren, and like some others in the room, part of the sizeable cohort of children they cared for in their family day care. In short, it was the sort of gathering you would expect in a traditional neighborhood, where people live their entire lives in the house they were born in, as Rita has done. It is true that on the dance floor there were more couples of women than of men and women. Chatting, I heard about Rita's nephew's recent wedding from his new husband, and there was at least one couple of young wives. We in Massachusetts are perhaps a little ahead of the curve in the forms of sociability we encourage.

For all the innovations, though, the whole event, I want to say, was deeply conservative, from the boards of photographs preserving memories back through the last century, to the half-century-old recordings of crooners played by the DJ. And above all in the accounts of how Rita and Carol's lives are woven into the fabric of our durable little community. Family, church, community--these are the conservative values that were broadly in evidence, slightly reconfigured to suit the occasion, but not so much you wouldn't recognize them. It was a beautiful occasion--and I know that's something people say, but in this case it was true--and we came away enriched. L'Chaim.

Crime story

About those strawberries. All week they've been ripening just fine, but then the ripe ones would just...  disappear. 

Today I think I found out why. I was reading in my yard, a bit out of sight, when I looked up and saw my neighbor on her hands and knees in my strawberry patch. I ran over and yelled at her, and she jumped up, smiling nervously. In her hand were two prime red strawberries.

She is an older teenager, I would say, and lives with her extended family about five houses down the street. I don't know her at all though I've seen her from time to time. Her mother seems to speak only Chinese. Her grandmother grows bok choy and green beans--and a few strawberries--in their yard, and gathers huge loads of deposit bottles. The grandmother and I nod and smile when our paths cross, but otherwise my interactions with these neighbors are few.

 More disturbingly, her mother was waiting for her on the public sidewalk, not ten feet away, pushing a stroller that held the young woman's toddler son. This little heist was a family affair. Maybe that's part of why I blew up, yelling at the young woman, telling her over and over that she was "stealing," that she was a "thief."  She gave me back my strawberries and slunk off, chastened I hoped.

But now that some hours have intervened, I have to wonder about my reaction. Am I really that invested in ownership of a handful of strawberries? What happened to my belief in a communal ethic of sharing? This family of neighbors is to all appearances rather poor: why not give them some strawberries? And they are neighbors: all the more reason to be generous. Did the differences of race and language play a part here? Was this a case of "those people" taking from "us"? Maybe they bring different assumptions about property and ownership that would be interesting to learn about. Maybe I should have offered them some strawberries before they took them. Has my pride in growing things overwhelmed some more fundamental values? 

These are questions that cut in multiple directions, and I haven't reached any certain conclusions. If I see this girl or some other human predator in my strawberry patch again, I may temper my reaction, but to what degree I'm not sure. Turns out these reflexes of ownership, of "it's mine," are deeply embedded. One more reason to appreciate my urban garden, though:  as a microcosm of the urban, where these issues of anonymity, human density, strained relationship and cultural difference do arise.

Strawberries turning red!

June 1

Either it's a really early season, or these are a different strain from the last strawberries I grew. In any case they're here--three weeks earlier than expected.

Allston Skyline (2): compatible neighbors

Viewed from Allston, Peabody Terrace sets a high standard for what a riverside building should be or do. The scale is monumental, with hulking vertical and horizontal structures laid out in stone-gray concrete . And yet the details of balconies and windows are perfectly vernacular and village-like, decorative and domesticated at the same time. Peabody is the chef-d'oeuvre--locally at least--of José Luis Sert, the great Catalan architect (and dean of Harvard's design school). With its Mondrian-like boxes of shape and color, the effect is to humanize the modern and make it liveable (as Peabody Terrace has been, by most accounts, for more than four decades). The prominence of the design, projected over the flat expanses of riverway, is spectacular. 

Its neighbor directly across the river, the Harvard graduate dorm known as One Western Avenue, makes a worthy homage and pendant to Sert's achievement. Designed by the same Machado and Silvetti (Sert's successors at Harvard's GSD) who built our prize-winning Allston library, the much-belabored One Western matches Peabody Terrace not just in size but in its use of large vertical and horizontal blocks. While One Western's actual texture of patterned brick and randomized window placement fails to please my eye to the same degree as Sert's colored panels and balconies, the drama of the elevated horizontal wing, like a tower laid on its side to frame an open courtyard, more than compensates in visual interest. Most importantly, the similarities in shape communicate across the river like neighbors talking over a fence (as Robert Campbell might say), bringing coherence to this stretch of the riverway we in Allston share with Cambridge. 

Oddly enough both buildings have excited voluble opposition: out of sympathy, in the case of Peabody Terrace, for the Riverside neighborhood it displaced, or aversion to such incongruous effects as One Western's anti-gravitational illusion (and to be frank, cheap materials). Personally, I feel enriched every day my  biking, running, or walking path takes me past these buildings and their blue-collar neighbors, the Genzyme factory and the Western Avenue power plant. They do what big buildings on conspicuous sites are meant to do: make me feel like my neighborhood is something special.