Moss and Brick

Time for a little bragging on my partner. A has been working with me on a strange little vision I had for a particular corner of our yard.We have this nook against the back of the house where the stone foundation creates two walls around a sheltered little garden spot. When we bought the house it was already a special feeling place.

One day while digging there, my spade hit a little china statue of St. Francis, resting in the black dirt and now he sits in the top of my china cabinet (probably some Catholic sacrilege to dig him out from under the roses and bring him in but I am none the wiser for having done it). The moss grows green and moist here and there were ferns of several varieties that didn't live anywhere else on the property. It was green and lush and the grass was even usually happy. I decided it needed to be a slightly enclosed, circular kind of contemplation garden. The kind of place where you could bring a good book and have a good cry, or a little boy could be alone with his favorite Matchbox cars which all have secret names. Eventually I want to enclose it quite a bit and have the flowers and things inside it be special lush haven. Someday there's going to be a little burbling fountain and a bench or chair for resting but for now...there's the first amazing, real piece.

Wall in progress, still a little sod on the right to be lifted and filled under.

Some of the old bricks we found on our property that got worked into the sides.

A built me a brick retaining wall, making the lawn a perfect little circle. The bricks will age and the moss will move in and sometime very soon I'll lay a set of steps. I'm rather in love with the effect. A was very energetic about the project, peeling back the sod and shoveling good topsoil underneath to raise it all the a level plain, morning after early morning before work. I am very impressed. Not bad for a guy with no masonry experience, eh? I think its all pretty magical.

Tah Dah!!!!! The finished beauty...minus steps.

Stone Walls and Kitchen Stoves

The weather is crisp, the air still and all of the leaves are starting to blush yellow and red. A and I spend the early morning hacking out the burning bushes and jet-berry that have grown up around the back edge of our property and then weeding and reassembling (in a rough way) the resurrected stone wall we hadn't known was along the back edge of our yard. Lovely to discover these little secrets. I had some qualms about ripping out the burning bushes right before they put on their amazing fall display but after the main trunks were sawed off and their various myriad sprouts trimmed away we were amazed at all the wide open space we'd been hiding there at the back of our lawn. I am still not sure what will go there to replace the errant shrubs. A second row of vegetable beds? A row of blackberries? A long strawberry bed? Who knows! But even if nothing else goes in there, it is amazing to discover that we have this hidden asset in space.

In other news, our rather ancient stove is now a bit dysfunctional. Not completely, just in a creeping sort of way. You remember this stove I'm sure...I mentioned it here and here. Well, welcome to a new stage in the saga.

First the oven thermostat is quite off...by as much as 50-100 degrees...too hot, oddly enough. I fixed that by adding a little temperature gauge that hangs inside the oven door. Then the broiler has never worked, which never seemed to matter much until our grill stopped working and then I was very sad about the whole notion. After the broiler the oven door stopped opening all the way. I had to move the racks up higher in the oven in order to be sure that I could get pans in and out without burning myself on the oven door. And sometimes it still makes me spill food off the pan, into the bottom of the oven with the angle of tilt that is required to maneuver the food in through the reduced opening. Pizzas are a particular challenge. Then this weekend two more disabilities visited our poor stove. First the oven door handle came off...fixable for now although hard to say how sturdy it is in the long run. And then one of the burners on the top of the stove had a sudden glitch which means that it now won't turn off.....worse yet, it is stuck at high power. We have resorted to popping the breaker after we finish making a meal to keep the stove from burning our house down while we're not looking.

Time for a new stove. That's expensive but also kind of exciting so, I'll go with the excitement part of it and be glad that we have a new subscription to Consumer Reports online to help with selecting a good bet financially. I am really relishing the thought of a modern self-cleaning oven, a smooth-top and another appliance with all the buttons and knobs working appropriately. Cold weather is calling and that will mean more baking and roasting and braising, and doing all of that in a newer oven sounds really alluring. I have a bunch of bananas in the freezer that want to be made into chilly leaf-kicking day, slices of toasty quick-bread with generous dollops of butter and hot mugs of tea. I can't wait to meet you, New Stove! Somewhere you're out there sitting in a giant box in a company warehouse, and soon you'll be in our house and I can promise once you come to live with us, the happy task of baking many birthday cakes, roasting many family Sunday dinners and a lot of happy wiping with toddler sponges! Please come quickly!

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Three Months and Counting!!

Our little Nib is three whole months old now. He's working hard at rolling over anytime he finds himself on a flat surface, grabbing my skirt if I sweep past within fingertip range, and putting everything (including his whole fist) in his mouth non-stop. He's a super social little guy, loves people and smiles easily. We've finally started getting those first few giggles from him which are unspeakably delightful although I  feel like I'm still waiting for a full out belly laugh chortle session. He's still extremely mellow...in bed at night and around the house during the day he's as non-invasive as I can imagine a baby being. I'm still not sure exactly where he came from.

In addition to Nib's third monthiversary, we also had one last trip to the farm today with our visiting cousins. Penny and the girls have been really, really fun to have as house guests and I have to say that even though there are a million things I wish we could have had time for, having Penny here when I moved was an amazing sanity saver. I owe her about a million times over now for the late night parenting talks, photo sessions, babysitting swaps, endless box unpacking, manic meal making and a host of other memorable lifesavers. I have no idea how I would have pulled off the move without her. I feel like a total wimp for being that weak on my own but, as I mentioned recently....it takes a village, right?

Is there anything cuter than very small people in the lush grass next a New England stone wall? 

I'm not sure.