Prospect: A Year in the Park

Solstice shadows

It had been an appalling morning: shoveling out the driveway again, driving through snow-choked streets to buy a new faucet at a plumbing-supply store (a cheerful Yuletide errand after a Bad Kitchen Event), and processing the realization that I was too dysfunctional this year to get Christmas cards out in time for, oh, Christmas. As on most days of 2009, as astute readers (presuming you exist) would have noticed, I simply did not have time to cross the street into Prospect Park.

But I did anyway. Well, at least as far as the Parade Grounds. I crunched across the frieze of sculpted tiny drifts, and the traffic noise quickly grew distant. The fences bisected the white into countless grids; for once, not even the hardiest soccer guys were out. The baseball fields lay muffled and pristine. The wind whistled across the picnic tables.

And I wondered what the hell happened. In 2008, when I started this blog as a little Julie-and-Julia style daily challenge, I dragged myself to the park and posted almost every day, and regretted not a single one of those visits. No matter how overscheduled, stupefied or anxious I was, and no matter how brief the encounter, the park made life profoundly richer and inarguably better. I spent a year less depressed, more fit, more curious. I trained for a bicycle century, made a beautiful Park calendar, and got covered in the New York Times. (Unlike Julie, I did not return home to an answering-machine tape full of book deal offers after my profile ran; but given the personal overshares in her follow-up book, maybe we should be careful what we wish for.) I figured that in 2009 I'd just sort of keep up the habit, without the pressure of the daily commitment, and keep this journal open to chronicle Year Two in the Park.

Instead, I backslid to my sluggish and avoidant ways. It was too hot, too cold, too rainy or too windy; I was too tired or busy. In fairness, I did more gardening this year; on many days, I had energy for one or the other but not both. But mostly, I just "didn't have time," surely the world's sorriest excuse for anything.

Prospect Park is my Narnia, an inexhaustible kingdom of beauty, mystery and occasional menace; and this past year, I seemed to grow too old and boring to play about in the back of the wardrobe as much as before. In 2010, I stand for being Lucy again, and starting out from the Lantern Waste to see how much time has passed me by.

Merry Christmas; I wish you a happy and healthy New Year; and I'll see you in the park.

Winter? Bring it on

This shot was labeled "Boys Ice Skating, Prospect Park, NY" on the original glass plate negative by photojournalist Jenny Chandler, sometime between 1890 and 1910. I'd never heard of Chandler, a real working photographer back when most ladies pursued it as a genteel hobby; the Henry Ford Museum's archive of her work (left behind in her Washington Ave. townhouse after her untimely death in 1922), includes fascinating shots of the park and other New York City environs.

These Urchins on Ice look like troublemakers to me, laced up to wreak carnage on the park's frozen lake. There's no more lake skating, but the doomed Wollman Rink is open for at least one more season starting this weekend; for hours and more info, go here. My favorite time to skate is very early on weekdays, when the ice is almost empty except for a few fellow oddballs. To meet the 21st-century counterparts of these rascals, however, the weekend is your best bet.

Image: Jenny Chandler, Henry Ford Museum. Creative Commons license:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehenryford/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Glory to God for dappled things

...not just "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls," but the last stand of Indian corn and pumpkins before the harvest is swept aside by a marching forest of bling-bearing conifers. As a kid, I loved Indian corn--it made me feel so Last of the Mohicans, as if I lived in one of the little bark diorama longhouses we constructed for our unit on the Iroquois. I still love it, and bought some at the Greenmarket last Saturday.

Love the illustrated signs in the background of these acorn squash. Wonder exactly where each one winds up getting eaten this week?

 

No dried flower wreaths for us; the cats will contrive to eat them and hurl them up again, no matter where we put them. Speaking of injudicious consumption, before and after tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast, I will gamely suggest a restorative walk in Prospect Park to our extended family, and they will all look at me as if I had grown a third eye. They will then retire to the living room to await the creation of Room for Pie. I will not get to the park because I will be cooking. But to anyone out there doing the Turkey Trot, Happy Thanksgiving!

Balancing act

Five o'clock, the end of October, the Long Meadow. With daylight savings time almost over, I struggle to keep the melancholy of the season from overshadowing the golden radiance of it. Discovering this guy practicing his mad tightrope skills between two flaming trees did the job.

I was drawn to the mesmerizing elm grove, below, the one on a knob of land near the "dog beach."

The knoll is carpeted with leaves, and the mostly bare branches seem to wave overhead like a circle of dancers. See the guy on a bike at right, in a gray jacket? The two other cyclists had asked him how old Prospect Park was, and he was telling them a little of its history, with perfect accuracy and great zest.

One more shot of the elms, from the other side...towering over dog walkers, stroller moms, kids walking home from school. The moon was out, a little pale disc, but it's just out of frame.

Lord: It is time

Autumn Day

by Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Edward Snow

Lord: it is time. Your summer was superb.
Lay your shadows on the sundials,
and in the meadows let the winds go free.

Command the last fruits to be full;
give them only two more southern days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house will never build one now.
Whoever is alone now will long remain so,
will stay awake, read books, write long letters
and wander restless back and forth
along the tree-lined streets, as the leaves drift down.

 

(This morning I made two simultaneous felicitous discoveries: the above poem, from this book, and a perfectly delightful blogger and children's author named Sara Lewis Holmes, who is also a powerful poet in her own right. Her blog, Read, Write, Believe, retains all the freshness, invention and quirk of the blogosphere at its best; it's technically about "kid lit" but spangles out in all sorts of lovely digressions, including a fine blog carnival idea called "Poetry Friday." Sara is most welcome to walk in the park with me any day!)

Singing in the trees

A fortnight has passed without a park visit, while I hunker down beneath the madness of our Great Roof Replacement Epic. Yesterday, my painter friend, sensing an orgy of color nearby, dragged me to the Nethermead for a blissful hour of escape.

Four little trees in the Parade Grounds, clustered near the baseball diamond, have turned the exact same color simultaneously.

 

I like park squirrels; they do nice normal squirrelly things, like eat viburnum berries and bury acorns. Our house squirrels play bocce between the walls and "bury" half-eaten Jamaican meat pies on our windowsills, which I do not like.

A birder with a foot-long telephoto lens alerted me to the Blurry Bird of the Day: a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet. Had he ever seen their little ruby crown actually raised, I asked? "Only when they're really mad," he replied.

My vote for best leaf-peeping goes to the lake's south shore drive.

 

A haze enveloped the Lullwater. Painter Friend and I turned for home, where I looked up Ruby-Crowned Kinglets and William Blake's Autumn:

The spirits of the air live in the smells

Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round

The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”

 Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,

Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak

Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

--William Blake, "To Autumn"

Gala, Fuji, Crispin...

...Macoun, Honeycrisp, Winesap. The names are pure poetry, and the eating is even better, now at the peak of Greenmarket apple season. For some buying tips for your next visit, go here.

 

Today was Summer-Prepares-to-Surrender Day. Despite the brave face (and ears, and tail) of this ludicrous eggplant, the time for warm-weather bounty is winding down. There are still peaches, but they have somehow lost heart, as if they know it is the time of Apples Ascendant. There are still emerald-green and crayon-yellow zucchini, but they're sitting alongside piles of tough and robust winter squash, and we know who's going to make it through winter storage.

And of course, there are roots in all their glory. No one else in the family shares my demented glee at piles of carrots, turnips, and beets, but at least I can share it with you.

Empty playground

In a week it will be October, but it felt like summer at the Imagination Playground around 5 o'clock.

Well, not really. The long shadows spoke of fall. These chalk names left behind made the deserted playground seem even lonelier. Were Ella, Noah and Eva at home by now, tousled in a nap, or up and ready for supper?

A few early leaves had fallen onto Pete and Willie, the Otto Neals sculpture of Ezra Jack Keats' little hero. Perhaps inspired by the new TV show "Fast Forward," I imagined the little bronze dachshund capped with fresh snow.

Daughter and I walked a half-loop around the park; we encountered a warbler (unidentified species), a saxophonist, more bread-tossing Tashlich celebrants, and a Brazilian soccer team on the Parade Grounds. We walked about 2 miles, just enough to get good and hungry for dinner. I made butternut squash flavored with sage, because, well, even at 80 degrees, it's fall.

Philosopher hearts

As Daughter runs around Prospect Park with a track team, Mother pitches camp under an oak and lets the world unfold on the Long Meadow.

Little girl to father, left: "If you built a really big kite, you could attach yourself to it and fly into the air! I want to do that!"

The September sun gilds the grass tenderly; these pictures, frustratingly overexposed, don't capture the gold, or the tenderness.

Perhaps this artist did, despite the distraction of her lounging friends.

How can such sweetness be shot through with melancholy? Poets and dogs understand.

 

September's Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets--Crows--and Retrospects

And a dissembling Breeze

 

That hints without assuming—

An innuendo sear

That makes the Heart put up its Fun

And turn Philosopher.   

--Emily Dickinson

   

                        

The beginning of the journey

At three o'clock in the afternoon on the very last day of its life, June underwent a deathbed conversion and, hoping for salvation, poured forth blissful sunshine upon the Long Meadow. (At least until it tossed forth a final storm two hours later.) These day campers set forth into the fresh new summer, having been instructed to form "two neat lines" as they were unleashed upon the greensward. As if!