Dead Flowers Redux

Redux is from the Latin for "to bring back," which is funny, in a way.

I ripped these geezers out of the wet earth, along with fistfuls of dead grass, gill-over-the-ground, baby dill and bolted arugula. It was like what I imagine when I imagine bushwhacking through the jungle, if the jungle were dead; I smelled my way through a wasteland of bristling stalks on hands and knees. I shook seeds from dry pods onto the ground. I emerged with mysteriously bloody hands. I lost both my earrings.

I wrote about dead things a year ago, when I was exposed this way to the elements, raw-handed every day. This year I'm cushed and propped in a desk chair, mostly, but last night I slept the serious kind of sleep, deep and thick and twitchy with dreams I don't remember. I feasted with good friends in a wintery way, put my scarf on a dog, saw my breath in the air on the way home.

This wasn't the season I imagined I'd have, nor the jungle garden. Dead flowers are a relief: I give up the grief of this messy season, pile the debris and let it rot. Break out the planning notebook to reimagine what Flower Scout can be and is. Got ideas? It's a good time to tell me. 

The Time Change

Tomorrow I'll go to my garden for the first time since this week's frost, to bear witness to the dissolved protoplasm my flowers have surely become. But just a few nights ago, looking out toward the river, the whole world seemed filled with improbably resilient cosmos and velvet-stemmed tithonia. 

It's a sea-change kinda time. I left a very sturdy houseplant outside and its cells froze and gelatinized overnight. Though today was warm and lovely, I can hear the heater kick on again and again. For me, that means it's time to drink whiskey and eat chocolate and start stockpiling books.

I put this together for my friends at The Grocery, in celebration of their grand opening on Tuesday. It's a beautiful new shop, full of tiny delicious necessities and completely unnecessary nearly-necessities. Flower Scout arrangements will be there on the semi-regular throughout the winter months, should you need some tabletop love.

This is Home, NY

My friend Emily, maker of crocheted carpets and teacher of children and drawer of smart zines and general genius, made a video about this PLACE I LOVE to LIVE. I'm in it, in front of the waterfall that's across the street and through the small woods near my house. A ton of my friends are also in it. We talk about what it means to live in community, in a rich changing place that loves and challenges itself. In which "the bar for entry is low"  ( and don't I know it, wink wink ).

So watch it, if you have the time.

I hope wherever you are loves itself as much as we love this land/people/place here.

These are ways to feel

about flowers. From Beouija

Sometimes if you put yourself in the right place, things you've always wanted find their way to you effortlessly.

I came home the other day and found this in my yard:

I don't know how it got there, though I have rational guesses. What I do know is that the workers who live inside of it have been busy, as you'd expect, bustling incessantly so long as the sun is shining. Which it has been, a lot.

Here are some shots from my tiny autumnal shack, for your viewing pleasure. There are spiders everywhere, I've got a new (old) down comforter that I may be allergic to, bowls of apples and garlic and delicata and spaghetti squash, emerging scarves, a yawning dog. It's good over here.

 

 

 

The Equinox is Sunday, and I've been meaning to write about late summer for what feels like forever.

I've been thinking about writing about it for months, the apex of the duldrum of our changeable year, about using the word FECUND (which I don't know how to say, exactly, except I've been saying it a lot, to a lot of you) to describe the wet, lush, green, overabundant, dense, suffocating, mold-and-moss-and-fungus-and-lichen-covered woods, the tomato blight, the rich stink of rotting wood and cardboard and grass clippings, spiders all over the corners of my apartment, slugs on the staircase, the aired houseplants swimming in their pots, blah blah blah I've been meaning to comment on how a gardener becomes ready for frost, but then AUTUMN seems to have crept up while I sat anticipating it, and all my first-seasonal-world whining remembered its winter self and shut up.

So what I'll do is just give you some pictures of a walk I took in Great Barrington, where someone is growing a ton of dahlias. Someone with persistence and smarts, as dahlias won't overwinter in this climate and have to be dug up, wrapped in burlap or buried in soil/sand, and kept in a basement all winter. Needy beautiful bitches.

So get it while you can, is I suppose the point of this post. We all love autumn, and have the most beautiful autumn in the world around these parts, and so we all start knitting and stuffing our face with cider doughnuts and whiskey with vast enthusiasm, but pretty soon we'll be wrapped in burlap in the basement (creepy! No, but you know what I mean.).

So here's to sun worship,
xoC