This year’s hibiscus crop has come in.
This summer’s hibiscus crop…
… bursts out with amazing, very brief, blooms.
The Container Hibiscus-in-Progress…

… on UD’s deck has put out tons of buds, which, dedicated readers recall, soon unfold into massive red blooms. (Images are from last summer.) UD tried getting a picture of the pale green crab spider on one of its leaves, but as she approached, it jumped away. Praying mantises, you may also recall, loved last year’s hibiscus, and I found a baby mantis on this one the other day, but there aren’t any on it at the moment. (There are probably ten on it, but, you know, camouflage…)

As UD took pictures of her hibiscus, two chipmunks on the grass near her did that frantic little dance where they take turns hopping into the air and then race off.

Yesterday, early evening, Les UDs were startled by a large dark snake on the garden pavers. I’m thinking water snake. (We live near Rock Creek.)

Camo/Mantis/Hibiscus
When you can’t bring yourself to throw away wilted hibiscus flowers…
Dappled Mantis
On UD’s profusely blossoming hibiscus.
UD, who I guess likes surprises…

… seems to have tossed some Deep Red Hibiscus seeds into a pot awhile back. Do not remember this, and am not even sure I’m correctly identifying the three feet tall stalk with massively about to bloom flowers all over it.

Once I realized it had big plans for itself, I moved it to a bigger pot and an even sunnier spot on the deck. Plus I’ve put some bracing on the stalk. Now I sit back and watch enormous flowers unfold.

Even so… UD has always preferred the recitative to the aria, the prelude to the fugue. She already knows that this phase – the slow velvety emergence – will be more exciting than the full bloom.

Snapshots from Home

On my walk to my Intro English Lit class on a spectacular early autumn afternoon, I saw, on our greenest quad, two couples lying on the grass. They made a kind of a square, with the men’s heads in the women’s laps, everyone blissful and calm with their eyes shut under the sun.

This was pretty to see, as were all the happy upright people taking in a highly lit day.

Now on the metro, going home from campus, I see across the aisle from me two young men, sweaty from I guess construction work, sprawled asleep on their seats. Their feet are wedged up against the sides of the car, their heads (under baseball caps) hanging off the seat edges.

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Neighbors of UD are retiring to a house they’re building in the very north of the Adirondacks (Les UDs, you recall, have a house near Cooperstown), and Mr UD and I wondered about this, about making it virtually impossible for yourself to take what Saul Bellow called a “humanity bath.” Their house, like ours in upstate, has no visible neighbors, and though the sense this gives you of owning the earth is wonderful for a week or two (we’ve never stayed upstate longer than that) I wonder about it as a way to live every day of your life.

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“Well,” their neighbors’ daughter told us when we chatted with her last night, “the house is one hour from Montreal.”

A French-speaking humanity bath! Sounds refreshing. But how often, really, would you go there?

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UD’s talk about Charles Wright (current poet laureate) at the Georgetown Library was a pleasure. Good turnout – the day was rainy – and people laughed at my jokes. Very satisfying to peer out at the group and see old friends, new students…

UD’s chats with people after, at the reception, were equally gratifying. One guy in particular:

“I don’t read poetry. I don’t get poetry. I go to these things to accompany my wife, who loves poetry. Yours was the first talk to actually help me understand poetry.”

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If you look out the library’s back windows on the second floor, you get a spectacular view all the way down Georgetown to the Potomac River.

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UD‘s stroll to the library from Dupont Circle took her along Q Street Georgetown, one of Washington’s most beautiful residential walks. And since it was a dark, wet Saturday morning, she had the place pretty much to herself. Yum.

UD is partial to small, somewhat over-planted city gardens – the sort you see spilling onto the sidewalk with herbs and hibiscus. These are everywhere on Q. Again, yum.

Buzzed by a hummingbird.

Christa, our innkeeper, has hung mucho hummingbird feeders along our deck. As I stood out there a moment ago, one of the birds – weird, thrumming, gold-green – buzzed my head, wondering if it contained sugar water. I shooed it away before it could put a beak in my ear.

Below the deck Christa has planted blowsy stands of pink hibiscus… I’m seeing hydrangea in there too… Down the hill a butterfly garden with plenty of purple buddleja vibrates.

The sun is hot, but there’s a breeze outside. And inside. In our room, where we’re resting up after breakfast, a quiet ceiling fan rotates.

Very peaceful, in other words. Even the black bears, according to Christa, keep to themselves.

The view? Wave after wave of bluegreen mountains.

‘Lost in the Sixties.’

The pathos of that statement lightly hammered onto a bicycle sculpture in front of a house on Olivia Street.

A sign by the entrance of a house on Southard: Hippies Use Side Door.

The music drifting out of a house off Duval: Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I leave Key West in a few days, and as I walk it now, I see it — to paraphrase Humbert Humbert — through the mist of my utter acceptance of it.

I love the man who smokes and drinks while riding his bicycle. If he could swim and smoke and drink, he’d do that. The body culture here is softened by self-indulgence, by a loose-limbed exuberance that will crowd three more palms in front of the porch and take in two more cats and lean for hours into a hammock, just looking around.

And why not look around at white houses thronged with green plants, and at the peculiar markings of each specifically loved outpost along the hot breezeways of Key West.

Toward the end of Love Lane, I smell incense and omelets. I hear windchimes and falling water and parrots whistling from hidden stoops.

Happiness feels fully elaborated here; you can read, in house and garden, the way this person and that person have worked out their way to live; and it’s all you can do, sometimes, not to walk down their hibiscus path, press open their unlocked door, and live with them and be their love.

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At seven this evening — thirty minutes from now — they’re reenacting the independence battle that made the Conch Republic a republic. I guess I should go, for your sake. Later.

A Hot April Sunday in Key West

It’s Open House, and many Key West properties – glorious green islets with small pools behind ship carpenter’s cottages – are available for viewing. On Fleming and Elizabeth and Eaton, on hidden lanes like Poorhouse and Catholic and Gecko, Key West’s white eyebrow houses release their shutters and let you in. They’re on the market.

From the front hall you see clear to the blue water in the back, where cats and doves and lizards live. The massed palms and hibiscus hide the house and its water garden from view, so it is your world, your sunny windy palm-sheltered world alone.

How to convey the joy and comfort and excitement that this kinetic self-contained world makes me feel? I see myself so clearly, leaning into that chaise, typing on a keyboard on my lap and listening to the purling of water. I smell honeysuckle in the heat, and jasmine.

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Even when it’s not Open House, I’m sidetracked always, on my long daily walks, by the mysterious beauty of the half-hidden islets of Key West. Some have little lettered signs by their front doors (One Martini Two Martini Three Martini… Floor!). All have bicycles thrown against the thin white columns of the facades. Seabirds stand on the tin roofs, and potted geraniums on the porches.

On the street in front of the houses very old women on Vespas wave at you and speed by.

The heat is enormous; you feel as though you’re walking through a mobile steamroom, a sauna tricked out just for you, steady hot air pushed through to make you sweat. There’s wind, but the wind’s hot too. So you pace yourself. You have to pace yourself.

You’re carrying a citrus smoothie you bought at Help Yourself, a food market so pure, raw, natural and organic you could plotz.

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At Help Yourself, heat-addled UD ordered not a smoothie, but a coolie. I’d like a coolie, please. I’ll have a coolie. Maybe she was thinking about how nice it would be to be cool.

The woman at the counter understood what UD meant but looked at her funny, and it came to UD that she’d not only made a mistake, but used a derogatory word for an Asian laborer.

While she waited for the salads she’d also ordered, UD looked at two articles in a natural living magazine.

One was about a 57-year-old Danish former Playboy playmate who looked 27. She’d had no surgery, she said, but attained this result through eating “raw.” UD stopped reading at the word raw.

The other article was about a woman who left her bathroom every morning in an ecstasy because her shit didn’t smell since she started eating raw.

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When she got home, UD eyed the ceiling fan hard at work in her bedroom and wondered if she could figure out a way to hang her damp bra from one of its blades.

A Woman in a Dark Cafe in the Middle of the Day…

… sang Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, and her voice drifted out to Duval Street, where UD was walking.

This drift of Dylan made UD happy, and she stopped for a moment and sang along, and she kept singing as she walked on.

Duval’s dark caverns seem strange to UD. She doesn’t understand why anyone would want the inner depths when the sun shines the way it does in Key West in the afternoon.

But maybe these are bars more than cafés, and maybe people want to get drunk out of the sun.

After yesterday’s long snorkeling expedition, UD spent most of today inside, working.  Midday, she left to get lunch, and on her way to a little restaurant on the harbor (while she ate, she watched a man throw fish to a crowd of pelicans), she marveled again and again at the white palmy houses of Key West.

Some are yellow, and other pastels.

This is by Greg Little.

The houses on Key West are green retreats, small self-contained flowering jungles.  Hibiscus and coconut palms throng their facades.  Asian fountains pump water in hidden corners.

On the porches of these houses, cats curl on wicker chairs, and peonies color the front door.

Behind the houses are pools, not long, and rather narrow, but a perfect emblem of the ocean.  The pools complete the impression of a world boxed and shipped to the self-contained Key West houses.  Flowing and overflowing nature in the flowering palms; culture in the landscape and architecture; society in the pink bicycle that leans against the shed, and in the Conch Republic flag.

“We must be light!” writes James Merrill (whose own entry to Key West he recorded in Clearing the Title) in his poem about the Greek island, Santorini.  Human beings almost seem a species of light.  They brought light to the world.  They crave the light the world sheds.

He also means we have to remain as light – as young, clear, and buoyant – as we can, as long as we can.  We have to respond to the world’s overtures.

Countdown, Key West.

UD leaves very soon for the next leg of her year-long sabbatical from George Washington University: Key West, Florida.

When we last saw her, UD was living in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in an apartment overlooking the Atlantic. Cold winter weather meant the town was largely deserted. She had trouble finding convenience stores whose doors weren’t locked.

But there were quiet cafes, quiet walks along beaches, visits from friends, and long hours for writing and thinking. She loved the sunrises and sunsets and the placid change of skies from morning to noon to night. Cargo ships and contrails reminded her of a world in transit. She herself had gone gloriously aground.

Now she goes to a subtropical island in high season. Although her apartment’s near the quiet end of Duval Street (It’s 2:28 AM and the place is hopping.), she’s about to enter an all-night party. (A pink cab just drifted by the live cam.) Key West is warm and awake and UD‘s ready for that.

A couple of days ago, the New York Times featured a small Key West house and its owner. The article gave UD a sense of daily life there.

For Murphy Davis, getting away means leaving the front door to his Key West cottage open — not just unlocked, but flung wide open. Tropical breezes blow through the house, bearing leaves from sapodilla trees, hibiscus petals, even sand. The presence of these elemental bits of nature is a sign that he is truly at home.

… “One of my favorite things about being in Key West is the physical environment,” said Mr. Davis, seated barefoot in a blue canvas chair on his front porch, a glass of iced tea in hand. “I like the sand on my floor. I don’t understand people who close up their houses and crank up the A.C.”

In these cold winter months, Key West beckons to him. “I have always considered Key West my second home,” said Mr. Davis, 52, who first became enamored of the island as a child.

He vividly recalls a fishing trip with his grandparents when he was 8 years old. “We left freezing Long Island, and in one day it was hot,” Mr. Davis said. “That was magical to me.” Even today he can point out the booth where he sat with them at Pepe’s Cafe, the oldest restaurant on the island. Mr. Davis first bought property here in 1997, with his partner at the time, along with the playwright Terrence McNally; they had identical side-by-side cottages on an idyllic lane

… The cottage, on the corner of two quiet lanes, is enveloped by lush foliage. Its one-and-a-half-story design is typical of the island’s smaller residences, as are the original louvered windows.

… A typical morning begins on the back deck, where Mr. Davis drinks coffee and spends time reading scripts — usually on a futon that has been draped with an Indonesian sarong. “I’m partial to futons because as a young actor I was a futon salesman in New York City,” he said with a laugh.

He gardens, goes to the local movie theater, and mingles with friends who include actors, writers, massage therapists and the park ranger who works at the entrance to the local beach. Cooking for small dinner parties, where guests flow easily through the house, inside and out, is another ritual.

Mr. Davis relishes his time alone here. Long afternoons include trips to the beach, to swim and read. He has no car and says he would not consider owning one. Instead, he prefers to travel by bicycle, in thrall to the sea air, the tropical foliage and multicultural spirit of Key West, a city of 25,000 permanent residents.

His travels by bicycle have brought him closer to the distinctive architecture of the 4.5-mile-long island, particularly the historic district, which contains 3,000 wooden structures, many with two-story porches and Victorian and Queen Anne architecture.

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