Flowers in the House

I don't grow a whole lot of flowers, or think about them much, or often buy them (although when I do, I love Calyx and Corolla's arrangements). Having anything to do with flowers feels so bourgeois that the word itself often embarrasses me. So I'll get around this by supporting local, organic, family farming: the flowers I'm plunking in vases around the house come from Taliaferro Farm in New Paltz.


Taliaferro is the only CSA I've ever belonged to that has a bucket full of scissors next to rows of flowers, and issues an open invitation to members to cut their own. What could be more convenient for someone trying to fill their house with sensory homeyness (although I have to admit, ours generally has homeyness to spare) without baking and having to do all those dishes?


I'm in love with this hearty trumpet-shaped flower that grows in white, pink, and purple. It doesn't rot quickly, continues to bloom in the vase, and arranges itself into exquisite gestures.


If you don't change the water daily, you risk a house that smells like marsh muck.


Farm flower sitting on my great-grandparents' farmhouse phone from Illinois:

Morning Glories

Somewhere I read that morning glories will take over your yard if you let them, and someone had responded something like, So? Could there be a more happy invader?

It took me three years, but thanks to the torrential rains this summer, it finally happened: morning glories falling up a fence, spiraling along a railing. New residents need time to settle. Fences need flora. Mornings need glory.

Open House on a Blustery Day

There's an unanticipated expense associated with selling your house, especially if you have kids. Let's say you have an open house scheduled for 1 pm, as we did yesterday. You get up, make breakfast, clean up breakfast, run around vacuuming-dusting-mopping, change the water in all the flower vases, get more flowers, check around outside, swish the toilets. Now you're all sweaty so you take a shower and clean the stall while you're in there. Now it's 12:30 and you have just enough time to get out of the house. You forgot to deal with packing a picnic while making breakfast, so you're going to have to find something out there...

Note to self: pack picnic before making breakfast.

Yesterday it rained during our open house. That didn't seem to cut down too much on visitors, but it gave us a hankering for the Village Tea Room in New Paltz. Local food, a menu coded for gluten-free and vegan options, local meats...it's a great place. Eating good hearty food on a rainy day makes me think of travel in England. My husband had a Ploughman's Lunch, with a rhubarb chutney, a little tub of blueberries, hunks of cheese, and a lamb pie. He had a pot of Jasmine tea; I had a pot of Brazilian peaberry coffee. Our kids ate grilled cheese and pesto pasta, and I had a salad and a stew. Hearty.

Next stop was Inquiring Minds books, where I sat with my daughter looking at books about designing rooms and tiny outbuildings for kids. She got tremendously excited about decorating her next bedroom, which she plans to cover with a mural and call her Undersea Realm. Then she showed me the secret reading space, complete with magical lights, at the back of the children's section in Inquiring Minds, what a delightful cozy nook.