PopWars

Elizabeth told us a few times that if we ever sold our house in the city she would buy it. The thought was unthinkable, but twenty years ago it came to be.

She recently contacted us to say that two letters, addressed to us at her address, had come from a Paul Taylor. She left them between the two front doors, and we eventually picked them up. We learned Paul had moved back to the area. He included a photo of his artwork on an invitation to a dance performance he had commissioned at MUCCC.

We left the house for the eight o’clock performance just minutes after watching Spain defeat Uruguay. Our names weren’t at the door, but we went in anyway. The house was full, and we took two seats down front, close enough for one of the dancers to brush my leg. We looked around for Paul, but we could only vaguely remember what he looked like forty-five years ago when his wife, Jeanne, danced behind the screen at Personal Effects’ multimedia show at the Community Playhouse.

There were nine short pieces. Some were cringe, but most were startlingly good. A Taiko drum and woodblock piece performed in coveralls. A dancer in a backlit, scrim-covered cage performing to a spoken-word piece. Paul Taylor’s piece, performed by Claire Spenard to Jonah Kreitner’s atmospheric “Spiral Jetty,” was our favorite. Spenard opened under a blanket and, with movement that was at once physical and graceful, shed it, commanding the space in a dreamlike dance before rolling herself back up inside.

I startled a fawn the other morning as I went out to pick up the paper. It was sleeping in our pachysandra. It jumped up and ran headfirst into our deer fence.

We went down to the garden this morning and heard a clicking noise. Something was shorting out the four strands of electric wire that surround our garden. We were prepared to find a toad with one leg on the wire or maybe a chipmunk. Sometimes they’ve been on the fence so long they are charred.

This was different.

A deer leg was pinning one of the electric wires against the metal fence, and the rest of the deer was missing. The thigh was still showing spots and the leg was small, so it must have been a fawn—maybe the same fawn.

Our garden is in our neighbor’s backyard, and they both came out at some point. Everyone had a different theory as to how the deer met its quick demise.

A few hours later a mama deer and her newborn twins sauntered by our front window.

The Landmark Society’s spring tour took us (and hundreds of other retirees) to Beach Avenue in Charlotte where we toured four homes on Lake Ontario, the Secret Sidewalk and Holy Cross Church. We learned Beach Avenue used to run behind the houses on the north side of the street, where the Secret Sidewalk is today. And a street car ran where the Avenue is today. When the City of Rochester annexed Charlotte in 1916 they moved Beach Avenue to where is today. Some of the homes still show signs of being oriented to the north. Of course most have been either rebuilt or added onto beyond recognition.

One of the homes, our least favorite, was brand new. Solar panels on the roof, heat pump for air conditioning, an elevator, a full bar and rec room in the basement and this painting. You are not supposed to take any photos while in the homes but I couldn’t resist sneaking one of this.

The homes on the tour were spread out so we walked along the Avenue to the destinations and then back along the sidewalk with the huge back porches, decks and outdoor living areas on one side and the the boathouses and lake patios on other. The lawns all seem to run together back there. I was picturing a croquet tournament and gin and tonics but it wasn’t even noon.

The face cords of firewood we have are normally stacked closer together than this. The stack to the left collapsed over the winter, and all this debris gathered between the rows. I started to clean it out and disturbed this snake. I kept poking him to scare him off, but he had apparently made this his home and didn’t want to give it up.

Instead of restacking the fallen row, I decided to distribute the wood to the neighboring stacks, pile them higher, and leave this opening for the new wood we have from the trees that fell on our property over the winter. This took the better part of the day.

That night the stack to the left of the snake caved in. The extra weight collapsed the support I had used, an old pallet. We tore the front end of that pile down. Peggi stood on the end of the biggest board we have and, like a teetertater, we lifted the remainder of the stack and rebuilt it.

So this is the better part of three days spent restacking firewood that had already been stacked. I’m trying to recreate that saying about firewood—how it warms you three times: when you chainsaw it, when you split it, and when you burn it. I’d like to add the days we spent restacking it.

As we neared the end of Zoo Road Peggi said, “I bet we find people swimming today,” and sure enough we did. Mostly kids, and they seemed pretty comfortable in the water. We were unable to walk along the beach, though, because the lake level is so high—more than a foot above its long-term May average.

There was an article in our paper today that referred to Lake Ontario as the smallest of the five Great Lakes. I felt sort of slighted. I had always believed Lake Erie was the smallest. I looked it up to make sure it wasn’t a typo and found that Lake Erie is the smallest by volume, but Ontario is the smallest by surface area. Together the Great Lakes contain one fifth of the world’s fresh water. Don’t spread it around.

This year, for some reason, we had the hardest time getting our most cherished seeds to germinate. We moved the tiny starter pots with the Padrón pepper seeds down to our neighbors’ house while we were in New York, and they sat in their sunny solarium for a week, but nothing sprouted. Fearing we had bad seeds, we ordered more from Hudson Seed. This time we kept the small pots on our bathroom floor, where they were warmed by the radiant heat. We banged into them a few times, but they sprouted in just under two weeks. And those original seeds—they eventually sprouted as well.

We’ve been chipping away at the fallen trees out back. I had to tackle this portion carefully because the big Y-shaped oak on top was only touching the ground at three points: the root ball at the top and the blunt ends, which are just out of the picture. The limb in the foreground was the most manageable, so I worked my way up it, cutting log-length sections but not all the way through because I was afraid the cut would close and pinch my saw. Mostly, I was afraid that if I shortened the foreground limb the big trunk might roll toward me.

Sure enough, my saw got trapped.