Blame the interminable cold, but I haven't been walking in Prospect Park for ages. (Hey, even my crocuses are lagging this year.) With more proof just in that parks ease brain fatigue, I bestirred myself. There weren't a lot of takers for the strong sun and stiff chilly breeze, but these boys of would-be summer gave it their best.
Nearby, these guys practiced some sort of thing with long, shiny metal sticks. Mostly, they dropped them.
Nothing is greening up yet; the park seemed bleached and bare in spots. The recent loss of hundreds of trees has made a palpable difference in the feel of things: more sky, less sense of remove from the surrounding city.
Babies remained bundled. By now, green leaves, sandals, and the smell of barbecue grills all seem like a distant fantasy.
However, I did find a very cool decommissioned wasp nest, just lying at my feet. Its marvelously engineered pods were all vacant. I was grateful to be carrying an empty tote sack—one looks a bit absurd carrying a wasp nest down Prospect Park West—and bagged it for my cabinet of curiosities. The Daughter found it fascinating but disgusting, and said that if a wasp roused itself from within and invaded the house, "we will kill you." (For even more disturbing Kunstkammer specimens, go here...if you dare.)
The arctic temperatures, not the token snowfall, were the story at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket, where the lettuce was frozen and the snakes were grumpy at being made to wear lacy mantillas.
Over
on the Long Meadow, the parents and kids of Park Slope and environs
bundled up and set forth in search of snowy fun. Everyone sort of kidded
themselves that there was much more snow than there actually was. In
fact, even in the frigid air, it was still muddy enough to smell the
earth.
Spouse and I reminisced about bringing Daughter and her snow-saucer contraption over to the park in far deeper snow; meanwhile, across the street in the public library, said Daughter gamely endured an interview for a prestigious university.
Everyone talks about "surviving" various phases of early childhood, but by the time people are hounding your child for the umpteenth recitation of her scores, talents, grades, clubs, and "passion," the years when happiness could be bought with a snow saucer and a restorative lunch of Spaghetti-Os seem exquisitely simple. Today, we warmed up with a Thai lunch, assuring her over dumplings that it would all work out fine.
I was holed up inside on this dark and misty day, but my friend Karen the Intrepid Artist headed over to Prospect Park, where apparently God is shooting day for night in old-fashioned Technicolor or something. She insists this has not been Instagrammed or otherwise messed with. In a bit of typical Today's Tech, she posted the picture to Facebook as I sat at my computer a few blocks away, making me feel both cozy and deprived at the same time.
...we will follow up Hurricane Sandy with lots of heavy, wet snow. Yes, it's purty alright; this picture was snapped by Peggy Knipp, an indomitable old friend, who (when not planning celebrities' honeymoons) can be found zooming around hard-hit areas with trunkloads of donations...and, often, scooping up my child for a lift to school, because she has never met anything she can't rescue. Somehow, amid all this, she managed to get a beauty shot of Prospect Park under its fleeting mantle of snow. It's forecast to be sunny and in the 60s by Sunday...if there are any trees left by then, I think we'd better all go out and hug them.
As Sandy prepares to make landfall, and we worry about the giant tree over our own house, Prospect Park is already feeling the wrath. The park's Facebook page posted this picture (I know exactly where this is on the Neathermead because of that unique tree behind the fallen one), and they report:
There
is a very limited staff working in the Park today and they are using
extreme caution while they check on the condition of the Park. One of
them sent in this photo during their inspection rounds.
Several
branches and 2 trees are down in the Park so far as a result of the
gusting winds. We have a report that one of the downed tress nearly hit a
runner. Please stay out of the Park for your own safety and the safety
of others!
The western edge of Prospect Park only appeared deserted on a rainy morning in late September. This is Brooklyn; there's always somebody around.
In the playground, a lanky young person in striped socks and ponytail swung high and low through the downpour—whether with careless cheer or grim determination, I couldn't tell.
Steps from Prospect Park West, a loner with a backpack seemed very alone indeed.
Closer to Bartel Pritchard Circle, what I first took for a cardiac resuscitation turned out to be a trainer stretching her prostrate client.
The rain beat down the first ranks of the color guard, although it still felt like summer.
Rainy day people always seem to know when it's time to call Rainy day people don't talk, they just listen till they've heard it all Rainy day lovers don't lie when they tell 'ya they've been down like you Rainy day people don't mind if you're cryin' a tear or two.
This was yesterday afternoon, the Lilac Collection, Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Tonight, listening to cold rain lashing the windows and gusts howling, it seems long ago.
Every year, it is my stated mission to inhale lilacs from every single bush, allegedly to detect nuances of scent among different varieties. (For example, white ones have a very light scent; blue ones are incense-like.) In truth, I am just drugging.
In the Cranford Rose Garden, a few bushes were already crowned in glory. Roses in April, really?
Our native wildflowers in the Northeast are delicate debutantes, all in white. Left to right: Solomon's seal, false Solomon's seal, and trillium. The shady floor of the Native Flora Garden was carpeted with them. Trillium is also called wakerobin, and there were plenty of wide-awake robins marching around in the undergrowth.
We observed sadly that Streamreach, our beloved Ent near the BBG's wandering waterway, who shaded many games of "float stuff downstream" during Daughter's childhood summers, had sustained two mighty wounds since we last paid him homage. But he's standing, half an Ent still nobler than another tree whole, and I hope tonight's brutal winds do him no further harm.
Gotcha! A week of late-May-like weather had everything bolting into bloom, but after a freezing night, some blossoms, like these magnolias on Wellhouse Drive, appeared to regret the hard-partying spring break.
In my own garden, the hyacinths pumped out their heavy blooms seemingly overnight, then dropped face-forward into the dirt. In the park, the daffodils seemed impervious to extremes, nodding in the chilly late-afternoon sun.
Songs of red-wing blackbirds richocheted around the lake shore, along with those of doves, cardinals, robins, geese, gulls, and a helicopter. Yet a deep stillness seemed to envelop the little Wellhouse, a building that always feels haunted to me. Perhaps it's because a vast well actually lies beneath here, its outline traced by a sunken circle in the ground.
Two weeks of late May mysteriously land in the middle of March, and I manage not to get over to the park more than once or twice. The reason: My own garden has been bursting out and yelling at me to perform every manner of service for it. A dozen rosebushes alone have been screeching to be pruned, and without the excuse of being miserable in the cold, I have been their slave.
But I've got to get over there because all sorts of stuff is going on. From my front porch, I can see that the trees are greening up, smudged with verdant pastel, a full month ahead of schedule. And that's not all.
* The Lakeside project is shaping up to be pretty damn amazing. Here's the Animated Architect Sketch; I love the snowy part, and the part where the trees drop down magically on Music Island. And the part at the very beginning where the Robert Moses crap building just disappears. (Thanks to the Q at Parkside blog for the heads-up.)
* The "Googa-Mooga" festival is stirring wild interest among the hip; it's some sort of food and music fest on May 19 and 20 that mysteriously, while "free," requires a ticket of extraordinary scarcity. Spouse has managed to acquire at least one of these prized tickets, which has him very excited even though we have yet to learn what bands are playing. Oh well: The festival's website proclaims that "food is the new rock," so we can dance along to the artisanal pickles.)
* And on March 31, the Carousel reopens for its hundredth anniversary. It's been given a nice tune-up by Todd W. Goings, a carousel doctor (what a dream job!), nicely profiled here. (Photo, right: Chester Higgins, New York Times)
* At the Prospect Park Zoo, the Golden Tamarins have a wee baby riding around on their blond backs. (Photo: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS)
Meanwhile, check out a nicely researched gem on the park's mysterious Vale of Cashmere at the wonderful history blog of the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklynology. This is the long-gone "Children's Shelter." The Vale, that haunted and troubled gem, looks very different than the playground envisioned by Vaux and Olmsted. Time to get over there and see for myself.
I wish people would stop saying, "Winter? What winter?" as if it were something to be missed. Daffodil buds are plumped to bursting along Prospect Park Southwest.
Even at 56 degrees, there was no mistaking it for spring. A stiff breeze blew scuttling leaves in eddies along the Center Drive. Near the Quaker Cemetery, and fresh from Ash Wednesday ("remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return"), I peered inside for a glimpse of mortality.
But a radiant forsythia distracted me from the rows of plain tombstones. So did the evidence of debauchery just outside the historic cemetery's perimeter fence: a scattering of beer cans, lighters and condoms. At least they weren't festooned on the grave sites.
Ah, that's a better offering for the deceased: a cluster of snowdrops.
Throughout the park, the number of recently hewn trees is shocking. Glades have turned to clearings; the sharp smell of sawdust is in the air. A year of storms has exacted its toll, but this log's frosting of exuberant lichens was a reminder that decay is transformation.
