The Madwoman in the Lighthouse

Even Texas Robins flee the heat

Sorry for the darkness of this picture. Mother Robin got quite irate at my flash and I didn't dare try again. She has nested outside the Wee Cottage, she and her three chicks, not ten feet from our door. Further research showed that, whatever Texans may think, she is not a Texas Robin, but an American Robin. The birds pause for a week or so in Texas every year, before deciding that Hell comes soon enough to us all and then breezing their way up to pleasanter climes.

Fiber Artists Rock

Long Islanders talk about the Montauk peninsula, it's two centuries old lighthouse and its crashing waves in gushing terms. I'm happy to report that the enthusiasm is well deserved. And visiting Montauk provided one of those Teaching Moments for my daughter and I. When we walked into the museum part of the lighthouse, the male docent was talking about some woman with an evident lump in his throat. "She was in her 90s when she passed away a few years ago," he said. "How I wish I could have met her."

Another Great Woman Hidden from History? I thought. Well, she didn't cure the pox or invent quantum mechanics, but Giorgina Reid apparently did save the Montauk lighthouse and peninsula. An Italian immigrant who had been a textile designer, she retired with her husband to a small cabin by the sea, not far from Montauk. Within a few years, the beach at the foot of their cabin was eroded away by the steady grind of the Atlantic. Without any background in civil engineering, Reid came up with a terracing process, which she later patented, for saving her own beach front. The process, which came out of her experiences growing up in Italy, where those gardening geniuses have been terracing hillsides for millenia, became the source of her book, "How to Hold Up a Bank". She approached the Coast Guard with her ideas and stayed in their face until they basically did what she wanted, reversing their own plans to simply demolish the lighthouse. The Coast Guard's own attempts to stem the erosion had failed. The peninsula is healthy today, thanks to Reid's efforts. Her tombstone is engraved with the words, "Keeper of the Light".

The waves crashing at Montauk, against the boulders that Giorgina Reid made the Coast Guard haul to the foot of the peninsula:


Hydrangea madness

If we do end up living in the north east, I'm going to grow beauties like these:

The Family Dinner

What is patriotism but the love of food one ate as a child? -- Lao Tzu

I started this sojourn on Long Island with three thoughts in mind regarding the daily preparation of the Family Dinner: short summer, small kitchen, small ambitions. I would buy semi-prepared meals from the supermarket or from Dream Dinners (Austinites will know an equivalent company called Super Suppers). The only scratch-cooking I'd do would be breakfast. Lunch would frequently be a slice of pizza or something local. Life would be good.

But some habits refuse to die. Here I am, having just put away eighty dollars' worth of raw groceries: onions, garlic, things you chop and things you fry before combining with other things you've steamed. I'm still wondering what, exactly, happened.

I blame England. Other people hold her responsible for stealing the Elgin Marbles from Greece and bringing opium to China. I blame her for HP Sauce, an addictive, spicy, brown catsup-like condiment that makes that most heavenly of foods -- bacon -- even more divine. I've seldom known such happiness as barely surviving a climb up a rain-soaked English mountain and then celebrating my survival with a giant soft-roll loaded with English back bacon and HP sauce. My first experience with the sauce was, er, several decades ago. I haven't been able to eat bacon without a squirt of HP since. Or mashed potatoes. Or steamed potatoes, unless they're in a bhel-poori, about which more later.

So my first item of business when arriving on Long Island was MUST FIND SAUCE. Before we came to Long Island, my impression was that, since it was so close to New York city (so close it's actually, you know, under parts of the city), it would be positively lousy with international markets. There would be no need to cart HP Sauce in my luggage, I thought. Surely I can get it up there. They're Yankees, after all.

And then I discovered that Long Island, much as I love it (I've convinced myself that I was switched with a New Englander at birth) is, well, a bit set in its culinary ways. And for good reason. The local, Italian-influenced food is hands-down fantastic. There are plenty of ethnic restaurants if not grocers locally. And, if you feel the urge for something really exotic, it's only an hour on the train into town. But an hour is too far for me to go almost anywhere. It's all I can do to persuade myself to go into NYC one day a week. So, while in Huntington, I came to realize, I'd have to live without the essential oases for an Austin foodie. No Fiesta. No Central Market. No Phoenicia Bakery. And no HP Sauce.

But, thank the kitchen gods, there are South Asians everywhere. And there aren't many Indian grocers where you can't get some English foods. Yahoo Yellow pages was not too helpful on the subject of Asian grocers, but it seemed there was one cluster of Asian shops not far from the Wee Cottage, in Hicksville (never, ever, stay at the Days Inn there). Bravely, GPS in hand, I set out.

After a mere twenty minutes' drive, I found it, the Vatican of Indian grocery stores.

You know how Central Market or Whole Foods has bin after bin of flour, of rice, of eighty different kinds of granola, and in Central Market's case, twenty different types of chili powder? Patel Brothers has twenty different bins of Indian Crunchy Bits, snack foods that are eaten as is or are mixed into other dishes. I was weak just looking at it all.

Staring gape-mouthed at this abundance, my resolve to walk in and just snag the HP Sauce and a jar of mango chutney -- brilliant on cheese toasties -- crumbled into ashes. I could make a bhel-poori. I've written about this before, this salad that heroes surely eat on Olympus. I'm so attached to it and other Indian foods because of my years in London, when I could never feel so lonely or despairing that a quick trip down Brick Lane, the curry mecca in those days, couldn't fix. There was also a bhel-poori stand behind Euston station, the station where I would get trains to Liverpool. I would feast at that stand and be prepared for what was sometimes an awful journey, standing all the way, for the whole 3 or 4 hours. I'll never forget that time I managed to get a seat and a middle-aged nun, saying she had back trouble, asked me to give my seat up to her. Of course, I was happy to oblige, but why did she have to pick me?

Anyway, before I knew it, I was taking a hand-basket and filling it with potatoes, frozen panir, frozen spinach, fresh parathas, a string of garlic (Patel Brothers' clientele rightly goes through garlic too quickly to justify buying one globe at a time). And, kitchen gods help me, I nearly bought a crate of mangoes because it was going for a mere $25. Briefly, I wondered if I could sell the mangoes I wouldn't need on the streets of Huntington. But I came to my senses.

Somewhat. As I stared at the shelves, I noticed the boxes of PG Tips tea. The wee cottage is equipped with enough tea already, one might argue, but I've lived for years with PG Tips in the house. Mark Twain said a house without a cat may be a perfectly good house, but without the cat, how can it prove its title? For me, PG Tips tea means the same thing. If you don't have a box in your cupboard, you haven't really moved in yet.
And, no, Patel Brothers didn't have any HP Sauce. We'll just have to make do.

More Stuff, More Work

Life in the Age of Limits

Back when William Shatner was young and I was younger still, American family life revolved around the TV schedule. Star Trek, the version without any qualifiers, was perfectly emblematic of its era. We stared at our little ovaloid screen and the Star Trek characters, week after faithful week, stared into their big flat one. Aided by some mysterious spy technology, the Enterprise's crew could see anything on their command deck's TV, no matter how distant or how heavily cloaked by gaseous anomalies. They looked out on a universe of infinite possibility. By proxy, so did we.

Now, four decades later, I'm a Battlestar Galactica (BSG) fan and I can't help noticing that there's no screen on the ship's command deck (Note to anyone who might feel the urge to disclose how the final season ended: don't make me HUNT YOU DOWN). Admiral Adama and the post-racial cutie whose name escapes me, have naught but some WWII-style blips to look at. No big TV for them because there's nothing to see, no infinite plenitude to gape adoringly at. The universe is dark and unknowable and shrunk down to the size of whatever galactic conduit will get the human refugees to the Earth of legend. Humans live small and make do. They recycle everything that the slavering Cylons haven't yet managed to strip away from them. This summer, when BSG has wrapped up its final season against a back-drop of limits, limits in food, limits in oil, you can't help being a little infected by the series' sense of dread.

At least, that's how I felt in Texas. Now, living on Long Island, many miles and two weeks away from all the stuff and all the square footage we had back in Texas, here's what I want to tell Adama and the gang: lighten up, people! Before the Cylons stripped your planet off of you, it was all work, clean, trim, rake, prune, pay bills, work again, ad exhaustium.

When I first wrote about the Wee Cottage a few blog posts ago, I was putting my game face on, hoping, contra the evidence of past experience, that I really would be happy without the two-person shower and the jacuzzi tub and all the other amenities that grace our lives back in Texas. Whatever its faults, our home in Austin certainly has stuff: the frequently used bread machine, the never-touched pasta machine, the two side-by-side fridges, the garage choked with out-moded phones and retired keyboards, with A/V cables, USB cables, component cables, and extension cords (two- and three-wire, American and English). Without all this stuff, would it be like living in a cave?

(My mother had declared that it would be just like "camping out", which was her way of signaling again that any time spent away from her should amount to no more than a long camping trip. But that's a story for another time.)

Well, it's been two weeks and I haven't felt deprived, at least not much. And to understand how I frame my thoughts on this issue, I have to confess what I do at night to fall asleep, confess how dull and predictable it is. First, I mentally recite all the poems I can remember by heart. There aren't many so it's rarely enough to send me off. Then, and instead of deep thoughts about world peace, I run through a mental outline for a novel that's part SF and part bodice-ripper. My current favorite is one where a starship's minor lieutenant, devoted to her duty and indifferent to romance, and who is some kind of alien half-breed, falls in love with a creature very like a Vulcan in his stoic ethos but who looks a helluva lot like Viggo Mortensen. It's important, when trying to fall asleep, not to over-stress the bodice-ripper aspects of this novel. Instead, I dwell on how I might disguise the elements so obviously ripped off from Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and The Rings trilogy. My consciousness, now confronted with the demand to get a single original idea, usually, mercifully, puts me to sleep.

But not always! And that's when I'm driven to indulge in the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, thinking about what my ideal house would be like. On the subject of automobiles, I've always held to a former boss's philosophy that "We don't staff to peak." Lots of families pay hundreds or thousands of excess dollars on a vehicle large enough to cart the volleyball team around exactly two weekends out of the year. That's fine for them, but we haven't found it much trouble to just rent big when we need something big (and some cities have car-sharing schemes now, which is even cheaper).

But despite my miserliness towards automobiles, I've never taken the same attitude towards houses. Next time I'm shopping for a house, I'm going to try to think differently. If we've learned anything living in the Wee Cottage, it's that in the age of headphones, the one-man-one-laptop family can hang out in the same room. Equip a family room with decent cabinetry, enough to hide all that gear and all the docking stations that everyone requires (okay, we're a one-man-one-laptop-one-IPOD family), plus a commonly used TV, and you've saved yourself 300 square feet right there. That's possibly 20% less of your home to clean, to heat, to cool.

I think a lot of people, let's face it, women specifically, would have difficulty giving up on the idea of a formal dining room. But why? This morning, on another splendid walk that has become my substitute for my daily ride back in Texas, I came across a yard sale, where, as always, the natives were more than willing to be drawn into an extended yak-fest about the area. They were selling an exquisite set of bone china, the kind you never come across when you're actually looking for formal china to buy second-hand. The elderly gentleman trying to flog the set to me shook his silvery head and said, "My daughter got that as a wedding gift. She hasn't used it even once. Nobody ever wants to leave the kitchen table, not even at Christmas."

It struck me that an area as nice as this part of New England, where there's a pretty restaurant on every corner, must have plenty of private party rooms one could rent. For the money you saved on roughly 200 square feet of construction, heating and cooling, you could easily rent a hall for that one holiday dinner where all your relatives show up. And, maybe, by hosting the dinner in a separate building, they'll be less inclined to spend the night with you. At least not all at the same time!

As for the small bedrooms, they're big enough. I'll concede that the size of bedrooms and bathrooms complement each other. The 50s 'vanity', where a lady dolled herself up, was a necessity because the bathroom was always tiny and always used by someone else. I could easily adapt to a scheme where I had a bedroom large enough to contain a lovely old vanity (not that I need the work, mind you) and the bathroom could be nothing more than a sink and a capacious tiled shower (a separate WC is essential to me now, after years of having one.) For a bath, I'd like a hot-tub outdoors when I need a soak. I know, I know. People in hell want a glass of ice-water, too.

The only room I can't imagine ever reducing in size is the kitchen. While the lack of any counter-space in the Wee Cottage hasn't been that much of a hassle -- there's plenty of pre-prep around these days -- I miss making my own bread and turning out a stock or a curry from scratch. I realize that 50s housewives in Britain worked at a single detached cabinet, called a larder, but I can't imagine how they did it. My former mother-in-law had one. Larders were smallish cupboards that stood maybe six feet tall and a yard wide, with a pull-down shelf providing a kitchen's only work surface. I remember staring gape-mouthed as my mother-in-law would bring out one course after another: a soup, then a proper English roast with at least four side dishes (my mouth waters as I write), then the Bramley Apple pie with the traditional pouring custard, then the coffee. Perhaps I should have paid better attention to how she managed such a feat in so little space but she didn't like me and as a kid who was moved from house to house every summer, I had never learned how to make anyone like me. Finding common ground around a love for cooking never occurred to me. So her skills parted this earth with her.

I think the main reason I'm so receptive to reducing the size of our house is that so much time has been freed up. Just beating back the Tide of Crud in our Austin home takes at least a couple of hours a day. The Wee Cottage can be made spotless in two hours flat. Per week. And that has given Jesse and I time to feed baby goats, write blog entries, and learn to torture more expensive yarn in new and creative ways (Progress! I had to rip out the sock I've been knitting only five times this week).

But who am I kidding? There's no shelf I can clear that Mike can't fill with books. If I free up the time, I'll just fill it up. After petting this little fellow, I'm thinking how lovely a small goat farm would be . . .

A Day in the City, A Day in the Country

Our Teen Hell-spawn, posing at MOMA.

I've never read Michael Moorcock's novel Mother London, but as a former Londoner, I understand the sense of the title, the sense that your city feeds you, cradles and rocks you. Walking around a few streets in Manhattan, I tried to appreciate the qualities that might make a native of the Big Apple think "Mother New York". But I'm also a Texan and all that damned jostling kept distracting me. No one intentionally jostled me, but there was a Darwinian competition for space on the city streets, even on what I suppose was a relatively "quiet" Sunday afternoon. I kept sympathizing with the older buildings: graceful, functional at one time, and now starved for light and air by the glass towers around them. I could never live in such a crowded place, but visiting is just fine.

But forget about living in NYC, just getting there proved difficult enough. As other ex-Austinites have described our area of Long Island, we're in the Round Rock of New York. But this Round Rock has the wonderful feature of the Long Island Rail Road at its disposal. Can two Texas-London hybrids possibly find their way around? We drove to the station that was recommended to us, found it closed or at least suspiciously quiet and without any ticket kiosks. What to do? Mike, noticing the road along the tracks, decided to just keep driving until we found another station. Which we did, two minutes shy of the arriving, hourly, train. Clearly, a little web research will not be enough in future. If there's a Douglas Adamsian New York Pan-Galactica, we need to lay hands on it. And actually read it.

Our goals on our first visit were modest. Visit MOMA, walk through Times Square, get to Little Italy. Dinner! That was the plan, anyway. Jesse, whose physical education has been somewhat neglected of late, tired early, just when we got to the Greatest Hits of Art on the fifth floor. The adults will have to return. We dragged her through Times Square, bought her a hoodie, got jostled quite a bit more, returned to Huntington.

Less Jostle, More Green, and every other color

All this glorious weather has had me casting about for more rural pursuits than NYC can provide. Longing to walk some formal gardens and sit down to a formal tea, we went to Westbury Gardens, a fine and huge estate surrounding a Charles II mansion. We strolled for a long time around the exquisite English-style gardens, choked with blossoms, carved with paths and small hedges.






The estate included an unmissable Dog Graveyard, according to the sign. There were a half-dozen or so gravestones around, most with multiple names, thus leading to unappetizing images of digging up old graves whenever there was a fresh corpse to be added. The evident expense reminded me of an enormous gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London, inscribed with the name, "Lucky" and featuring the head of a German Shepherd. Seeing the lavish funereal appointments, you couldn't help thinking the animal was bloody lucky indeed.











A Tree Peony (I think). Most of the flowers, except for a separate rose arbor at the side of the mansion, were cultivated in an enormous walled garden at the side of the house.



And some Martian Flowers (just kidding, I haven't a clue what these are called). I loved the spookiness of them.

Flowering clematises

Vicious Predator Alert!

After much strolling and aimless chatting, we were gasping for a cup of tea. Sadly, this was one thing that was not done well at the estate. True to American form, 'tea' was hot water in a paper cup, with a tea bag handed over at the counter. The cellophane-wrapped cakes looked villainous. This is jarring, because the food elsewhere on Long Island has been so very good. This indifference to the art of tea and cakes is the sort of thing that has perversely delighted some English visitors I've known. They were almost gratified to see Americans squandering such an obvious profit center.

I don't know if Brits make any money off of the little cafes that accompany almost any museum or country house available for tours, but you'd assume so given the care that's taken over them. Tea is served properly, in a pot. You don't have to place your wet tea bag on your saucer, thus hazarding stains on your clothes as you sip your cup. And the cakes are marvelous confections, tiny layers of sponge, there to give the vast clouds of cream something to grab on to. You need the scalding hot tea to cut the unctuousness of the cream. Glorious.

I imagine that Charles Phipps, the original owner of the estate, had many a fine tea, either while at home or while sitting on one of the fine benches placed inside the walls of the garden.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Does Sudoku

The rhododendrons, a few of them, are still in bloom here.

We've been on the north shore of Long Island for a week now, and still have many plans before us, like getting into the City to see if it is the Sodom and Gomorrah we were promised. And there's much research to perform: do they really not sell Pace Picante anywhere? More mundanely, I plan to do all the run-of-the-mill stuff (see Big Stone Woman with Torch, see Large Museum with Truckloads of Art). And I want to visit a shop specializing in Celtic instruments. There, I plan a plink-plonk on an Irish harp. And I want to find six decent curry houses. And I want to find a bhel-poori stand (bhel-poori is an outrageously good Indian salad of potatoes, crispy cereals, tamarind and cilantro). If I find a decent pub near the curry houses, I may never leave.

But we still haven't done any of those things.

The first obstacle was the heat. But even when it kindly receded, real life kept happening. Our trip to the closest beach had to be sharply curtailed when, after paying my ten bucks to park there, I realized we'd left the sun block behind. Plus, I hadn't taken my dose of steroids that morning. The doctor back in Austin had emphasized how important it was to take the pills on the schedule and as directed. So we quickly ate our sandwiches, remarked on how the seagulls were as big as a West Texas buzzard, and then generally whined and moaned about how much we missed our friends, dogs, house, etc. My daughter tells me every ten minutes how much she misses her chums. You can hear mouse-like noises emanating from her room all day as she texts them.

So that's another reason why little progress has been made on Generally Getting Out. The kid is still in shock from having any free time at all, and from being away from home. I can understand why she needs to stay at sub-light speeds for awhile. Unwilling to leave her alone for any great length of time, I content myself with doing Sudoku and teaching myself to knit (I suck slightly less at it than I did a week ago).

The drop in temperature has meant some lovely walks, where I glimpse venerable houses and placid gardens that excite all my Martha Stewart instincts. Meanwhile, I find out that Long Islanders are friendly. When they see me trotting down the hill, all but skipping because I find the breeze so lovely and the plants so lush, they don't run and hide, as an Englishman would (married to one of them, I'm an expert on the breed). The people here seem happy right back at you. And I'm finding that if you give a New Yorker the slightest nod, then they're more than up for a stroll and a chat, knowing full well they may never see you again.

Despite all this contentment and these many reasons to be happy, I was still really looking forward to last night. Our daughter was off to a sleep-over and Mike and I intended to take a guilt-free walk into town, there to find a pub, then a cafe, then a pub again. We would plan our daughter's future (she loves that) and just talk. At our age, couples have to talk more because they forget everything each other said. Yes, I was looking forward to last night.

But somehow, I found myself running late to get my kid off to the sleep-over. This was because I had found myself in a deeper eddy of confusion over just how ribbing works on socks (this after days of realizing that I'd been purling the wrong way). Looking up at the clock, two things hit me: "I'm late" and then, "Damn, I forgot to take those mother-flummoxing-blasted steroids again!". Boom! Off the couch. Boom! Into my nice clothes. Boom! Take the pills.

And after that, it's all a fog. I remember Mike coming home from work. I remember lifting my weary head long enough to explain something about steroids and not enough food. Alarmed, he got me a cheese sandwich, which fell from my hands as I fell back to the couch. His mind -- which at such times works rather likes mine -- turned instantly and without evidence to thoughts of strokes, aneurysms, yellow fever. He called our family doctor in Austin but naturally couldn't get through. He googled like mad but could find no evidence that steroids should cause my symptoms. After an hour of panic and with his hand all but ready to dial 911, it occurred to him that, yes, there were steroids in the house but there was also at least one and probably two bottles of Ambien around. Ambien, it's the traveller's friend and the athlete's god-send.

Now, if I'm making myself look like a perfect idiot here, I will say in my defense that I'm the one you love to hate, the one who stands there dry-faced while you sneeze a bathful. I get the occasional cold but until this winter, when all hell broke loose, I'd had the flu twice, maybe. So I don't have much experience with doing anything medical on a regular basis. When I was pregnant it was an almighty struggle to remember to take pre-natal vitamins. So I'm going to forgive myself, this one time and as long as it never happens again, for not checking the label on the steroids and for taking three sleeping pills instead.

Realizing what I'd done, my husband at last exhaled. Ordinarily, he'd have been a little annoyed with me for such carelessness but since I wasn't dying of an aneurysm, he felt quite giddy. Now that's true love. I want a knock-off Vespa for Christmas. Oh, and a celtic harp, just a little one. Do you think this is a good time to ask?


The garden at left, a few blocks from the Wee Cottage in Long Island, is the sort of thing you'd find in Austin, if only Austin had the rain.

When Teenagers Wash Dishes

Some years ago, with a new baby in the household, we decided we were fed up with commuting all the way from Hutto to Austin. We gave up our grand but demanding century-old Queen Anne for a spotlessly unused spec home, closer to town. We couldn't wait to move in. The A/C would be correctly sized! The plumbing would all work all the time! The closets would be huge!

Within months, we felt weird there. None of the windows had any molding. The Swedes who had built our former home had believed that a length of egg-and-dart fixes any problem. The new house looked bare naked, more like an office than a home. And nothing felt right under foot. After years of pine floors, we had no idea that carpet could feel and smell so odd and dusty, even when freshly vacuumed.

After two years in the new house, we more or less fled to our post-war home near Shoal Creek in central Austin. There, I felt at home again, despite the eight-foot ceilings. Oh, and a master bath big enough only for the presumed master of the house, the harassed 50s dad who wants a small space for shaving in peace. While the little woman gets the kids ready for school. I live for these echoes of the past. On the first night in the Shoal Creek home, I carried my 3-year-old to bed and felt the swaying of the floorboards as I stepped into what surely must have always been a kid's room. The floor creaked, right where it should do, a record of all the parents who for five decades had felt the need to check in on their little seedlings at all times of the night.

Now, ten years on, I still have a weakness for the somewhat funky. The wee Long Island cottage we are now living in was perhaps an easy choice over the corporate apartments that were also available. Glorified hotels, they struggle to present themselves as totally new-for-you. Maybe it's the deception, the deliberate act of lying that I find so objectionable. The Wee Cottage makes no pretense of newness.

Finding the place was itself an adventure. For the first time in twenty years, I had to travel alone. I was so used to the company of Husband Mike on all forays involving more than two-hundred miles, I wasn't sure I'd pull it off. I knew I'd cope alright, but I doubted that I would succeed. I was certain that I would fly up to New York, get lost somewhere two miles from JFK, spend the night back at the airport, return home empty-handed.

Indeed, things did start out rather ominously. The nice lady at the Budget Rent-A-Car counter, despite the sort of fake fingernails that could rip up carpet, was able to push the right buttons on the GPS system, thus getting me started. It was an easy matter to tell the machine to take me to an address in Huntington by the quickest route. You'd think "Quickest Route" would involve an expressway, wouldn't you? For some reason, my GPS showed an affection for Queen's seamier parts, and a dislike of the highway that I could see less than a hundred feet from where I was travelling. I didn't dare stop to ask for directions. Texans expect to be knifed the instant they speak in New York, and I wasn't taking any chances. Eventually, I decided to ignore the GPS and to follow my nose onto the big six-lane that was beckoning. "Recalculating," said the weary GPS, resigned.

I made it to my friends' house to stay the night, then roared out of bed the next morning to get started on hunting for the cheap-but-good rental we'd need for the summer. Looking at four places in one day, driving up and down Highway 110, notoriously crowded and almost useless after mid-day for the purposes of mobility, I found myself too strung-out and exhausted to wonder if my family shared my love of the funky. I somehow got back to the real estate agent's office and signed a contract.

Now that my family is here, I'm heartened to say that they are as happy as nits on a human scalp. Even my teen, understandably put out at being taken from her friends for much of the summer, is gaily adapting to the new regimen, one where everyone pitches in and washes the dishes. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little. She thinks I'm more evil than Snow White's step-mum. But at least it's the work that she objects to, not the funky house I've chosen. I'm a dazzling success!

And it's not like she even has to wash dishes, not really. She merely has to prep them for the teeny, tiny dish-washer. I didn't know that they made them that small. Is this a New York thing? Of course, had the machine been any bigger, the installer wouldn't have been able to get it in through the front door of the Wee Cottage, the layout of which you can stroll around in 3 seconds or less. It's, like, small here. After the top floor, you can go down to what my grand-father would have called the 'half dug-out', i.e. the basement, there to breathe in the mold. The landlord doesn't attempt to rent out this lower apartment because it's not safe.

If Long Island landlords are overly burdened with electrical inspections, there's no evidence of it here. I'd take a picture if my camera hadn't died this very day, but to get an idea of what I'm looking at, especially in that region of the living room where modems and wireless routers and lap-top cables do inter-breed, just think of those episodes in The Simpsons where a dozen appliances, sharing a single outlet, shoot sparks. In the Wee Cottage, every single outlet is either cracked or is set into plaster that is cracking all around. Many of the outlets tilt ominously as you try to plug anything into them. Only a few are grounded, so we have to run an 80 foot cable from Jesse's room's window-unit to the kitchen's grounded plug. They say Yankees are too fond of safety regulations but I'm thinking: to Hell with regulations! The point I want to make to my landlord would best be conveyed with a small side-arm.

But I sleep well, nonetheless. I've lectured the new dish-washer on correct behavior around faulty wiring. She still stands too close to the toaster-oven with that soppy rag in her hand.

Swapping Climates

Life is what happens while you're making other plans.

On the day my husband decided to skid off-road as far as his bread-winning trajectory was concerned, I had lived in Texas for 24 years, London for 7, Wales for 2, Texas for another 19. It seemed like this last phase would persist for at least another few years, until our kid was out of high school. I've long had mixed feelings about such a long stay in somewhere so blasted blistering hot. In past years, I was often given to wondering just how I got stuck living somewhere about as hospitable as the moon, at least for 3 months out of the year. The heat leaves you feeling beaten up, wrung out.

To cool off, you go to a watering hole, Austin's famous Deep Eddy pool, but it's crowded. And if you do find it in yourself to venture out in the cool hours of the day, then you're treated to the din of A/C units and the whir of sprinkler systems struggling against the brown despair. And that's how I feel about summer in Austin, one of the greener parts of the Lone Star State. You can only imagine what I must think about West Texas, where I grew up. Mostly. (photo courtesy of Steve Hopkins, Wikimedia)

When my husband announced a 3 month contract in Long Island and an uncertain future after that, I found myself ignoring the uncertainty and drooling over the prospect of long evening walks at 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here is our wee rented cottage in central Long Island.


Here are the temps predicted for our part of Long Island, where we now reside for the summer.

Sunday: 85 Monday: 95 Tuesday: 90 Wednesday: 83

Meanwhile, temps in Austin are dropping and for the first time in weeks the weatherman is talking about steady rainfall back home. Monday it will be hotter in Austin that it is here in central Long Island. It moves me to fashion a haiku on the malice of butterflies and other insects who won't stop flapping their damn wings and thus making all this weather:

Eddy and then a
Deeper eddy while June Bugs
Re-make your fine plans