It’s a wet, dreary Sunday as hurricane Isaac plays itself out over the midwest. The RNC has played itself out as well. Good riddance to both, though we need this rain. Another academic year has begun. I met new groups of students this week, new to me anyway, and enjoyed them. When I turned 75 a week ago I wondered if my mind would turn again to Montaigne’s question, que sais-je? But I guess not. I’m still far too engaged with he world to stop and take stock.
Here’s the entrance to the Missouri Botanical Garden as we saw it over the fourth of July weekend this year during the Lantern Festival, a collaborative effort between the garden and a group of Chinese artists. There’s a video here, if you want to see more of what it was like at night, a magical experience. And here’s a picture I took of the Gateway Arch that same weekend. We went for a boat ride on the river with out-of-town guests one morning and in the afternoon attended a naturalization ceremony at the old court house (slideshow here).
As I write today, my beloved is talking with her sister in Phoenix in the next room. I’ve just been invited to a fund raiser for a friend of a friend who has been stricken with leukemia. That will take place after a trip we will make to Texas the first weekend in October to attend my 57th high school class reunion. We’re having them every two years now, reunions that is, we being the geezers in the class of 1955 at Abilene High School. As soon as things dry out I’m planning a comprehensive effort of home maintenance. We need some concrete work and tuckpointing here at the old house. A deal of clearing out and discarding needs to be done as well.
There’s a great deal to be said for ordinary life in the city: buying and preparing food, mowing the grass, sleeping and waking, work. I look forward to sitting on my back porch and watching the sun set as fall draws on. The view out my back way is a cityscape and not a very romantic one at that, lots of wires and the poles that carry them, other people’s back yards—but I love it. We live in a neighborhood of row houses. I like to wonder what it was like a hundred years ago when our house was new and women swept their sidewalks in the early mornings.
There’s a wonderful 1876 map of the city that shows our area before it was built up. Henry Shaw‘s Tower Grove Park is there, and the early Botanical Garden; but the residential areas in the surrounding environs are yet to be built. Our street, a major north/south artery then and now, runs a block past the Compton Hill Reservoir and stops. Our area, half a mile south, is open fields. A map of 1911 shows our street and our block, where our house had been built in 1904.
I expect our immediate neighborhood housed brewery workers in those early days. Pestalozzi Street, immediately to the north of us, runs right down to the old brew hall at Anheuser Busch, no longer locally owned. After a long decline, our neighborhood is regentrifying. Our block is now almost entirely rehabbed. We no longer sweep our sidewalks; there are no more coal furnaces or fireplaces
Our house was piped for natural gas from the beginning and seems to have had at least one gas light, although it was originally wired for electric lighting as well. An old gas outlet has been capped at the top of the front stairwell, the original entrance to the second-story flat. My beloved hangs a wreath on it. We have the original gas units in the upstairs and downstairs fireplaces, though we’ve never tried to use them. I keep thinking I’d like to have modern gas units, but the old ones are beautiful. Here’s the downstairs fireplace as it looks today.
So it’s good to be breathing in and out and able to savor these good things. We may even go to the pumpkin patch outside Iowa City next month after we get back from our other adventures.