Matthew Gallaway

Winter Flowers

So far, it seems like 2022 is off to a rough start. 

But not everything is bad. We have two orchids that are blooming. 

Even better, they're both orange. 

DeathCulture@Sea ‘Cassandra’

Here’s another new song that falls into the category of sitting around the basement with some friends and not worrying too much about getting everything perfect :)

Link.

Snow Day

One of the things I like about clearing the snow from the garden path is how the names of the companies who manufactured the bricks a hundred or more years ago are brought into relief. I realized that I'm capable of enjoying commercial branding and advertising, so long as the company in question is dead. Sometimes I worry that today's companies will never die, which is one of the reasons they seem so inhumane. Twenty or thirty years ago, the internet was supposed to make us free, and now it's a quagmire of shopping, advertising, surveillance, and misinformation. (And some pretty funny memes, to be honest, but I'm not sure it's enough to push the internet into the 'good for humanity' category.) 

Yesterday we had our first snow of the winter. It wasn't exactly a blizzard, but it was more than a dusting. I wished that there were no cars blocking my view of the street. 

I took a 'before' picture of the steps, which I then shoveled. (I forgot to take an 'after' picture.) 

I next tackled the sidewalk. My neighbor came out we complained about the city's failure to shovel sidewalks. Apparently they do it in Jersey City, where they also have many protected bike lanes. What's wrong with New York City? We spend millions cleaning the streets for cars (and billions on the police), but pedestrians are (get ready) 'left out in the cold.' My neighbor has two children under the age of ten, so we also talked about his fears about the planet they're going to inherit. 'Maybe they'll get angry,' I said. 

The garden looked very pretty under the snow. 

I shook the branches free and cleared the path, thinking that Clio might want to frolic in the snow, like all the happy dogs I saw on Twitter. 

It was hard to tell if the statue seemed concerned or not concerned, and if so, about what.

Clio poked her head out of door and turned around. We're all getting old, I thought, as I followed her inside. 

 

Mulching Leaves (Best of 2021)

For this year's annual roundup of my favorite culture and entertainment, I have one item: mulch. 

In past years, we rented a car and drove to a nursery in Westchester, where we bought six to ten bags of mulch. Each bag was staggeringly heavy, and I always dreaded carrying them from the car to the garden. This year, however, we didn't get around to buying mulch. Stephen was no longer working at home, the summer seemed to extend into November, I injured my knee, and Elektra was not doing well. (Also, the world was ending, which is distracting.) The idea of renting a car and driving ninety minutes (each way) to get mulch was too much to contemplate. Looking out at the leaf-covered garden, I was inclined to just leave them ('leaf' them lol?) and see what happened. "It works in nature," I said to Stephen, who (via the internet) learned that while it's fine to leave leaves, you must first chop them up into tiny pieces if you don't want to encourage the growth of unhealthy molds and pests, which we did not. 

Three days later, after borrowing a leaf mulcher at our local, government-funded organic recycling facility (part of our divisional commune), we had a leaf mulcher. That's all fabricated, but it's something I thought about as we clicked 'buy' on [massive online multinational corporation]. Why couldn't the government, in addition to offering healthcare for everyone, have a lending library for tools and hardware? But that's another discussion. In any event, we were soon equipped with a leaf mulcher. (I meant to take a picture of it in action, but I forgot, so here it is in our basement.) 

I might have been more embarrassed about using such a loud, suburban apparatus if I had not already acclimated myself over the past few years to using a leaf blower. This thing is definitely (hopefully) the closest I will ever get to using a grenade launcher. But with apologies to my neighbors, I had within about twenty minutes corralled the leaves into a big pile, which I spent the next twenty minutes feeding into the equally loud mulcher. It worked. As promised, the leaves were chopped up into small pieces (mulch). Instead of setting out five or six large garbages of leaves on the curb, I spread the transformed leaves (mulch) around on the garden beds. For me, it was the highlight of 2021. 

The garden was transformed. The mulch looked very natural and organic, unlike the aggressively red, brown, or black tones you often see in store-bought varieties. 

In a few days, 2021 will be just another year lost to the fog of our dying society. It's not a year I will remember fondly, except for one thing: mulch, and specifically mulching my own leaves, henceforth known as 'self-mulching.' [I'm open to suggestions on that front, however :)]

Next year and every when that follows, I will remember 2021 and think, it was not such a bad year ... for mulch. 

[NOTE TO REGULAR AND SEMI-REGULAR READERS: I have *mostly* stopped cross-posting to third-party social media. If you'd like to keep up, please bookmark the site or subscribe by email at the link below. Happy New Year -- I'll hope to see you in 2022!] 

DeathCulture@Sea (Spirit Town)

I've always enjoyed the week or so before Christmas, and this year is no different, even though I don't have any plans beyond staying home and doing my best to avoid the Omicron variant. But work is slowing down, it's warm and sunny (let's just pretend it's not a harbinger of the end of civilization), and there are leaves to be picked up and mulched in the garden (more on that later). For now, here's my latest DeathCulture@Sea song, something I like to think sounds like me and some of my imaginary friends sitting around in a basement or maybe a barn playing songs and sipping whiskey :)

Link. 

 

The Dogwood Report (December Edition)

I was hoping to rake up the leaves and mulch them this weekend, but the dogwood isn’t quite ready. 

This tree is the ‘problem child’ of the garden. When we bought it, we thought we were getting a dwarf variety of a Chinese dogwood, but it now seems likely that the nursery sent us the wrong one, because ours is too tall to be a dwarf. 

It’s also supposed to be covered in white flowers in the spring and red berries in the fall, which has never happened. We’re not sure why it doesn’t flower. It could be that it doesn’t get enough light or that the soil isn’t quite right, or that we planted it too close to the birch tree. These are the challenges of gardening in a small, urban space. 

But for all of its flaws, the tree has elegant, twisting branches, and the leaves turn a nice shade of burned orange in the fall. For the past few weeks, it’s been a cloud of color hovering over the garden. 

Like most of us, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. 

 

DeathCulture@Sea (Light Between The Clouds)

For years, as the nights grew colder each fall, Stephen would say how nice it would be to have a fire pit. A few months ago, for his birthday, I bought him one. The first time he tried it, there was a lot of smoke, but last week he tried again and had more success. 

When I went outside to join him, I was surprised. 'Is it supposed to be an angry volcano?' I asked, trying not to sound alarmed. I had pictured something more sedate -- something the cats might enjoy with us -- but I now envisioned the fire department busting down the doors after receiving a 911 call from one of the neighbors. Stephen showed me some pictures online of other people's fires, which were a similar size. I was somewhat reassured. 

After a few minutes, the fire died down sub-inferno levels. It was nice watch the flames as we contemplated life in 2021. 

I also considered the trees. As much as I love the fall colors in our garden, I'm also looking forward to having all the leaves on the ground, so that I can rake them up and try out our new leaf mulcher. 

The birch is pretty much done, but many of the other trees and plants are just beginning to turn, like this climbing hydrangea. I've learned that there's no point trying to reason with trees, so I'm going to have to be patient. 

While waiting, I recorded a new song. I didn't really have anything in mind when I was writing the lyrics, but in retrospect I think it's pretty obvious that it's about negotiating daily life during a period of great uncertainty (to say the least). It's sort of a 'watching the flames' kind of song, I guess, or maybe being in the flames. I also downloaded a new video-editing app, which means that for the first time in a while, this DeathCulture@Sea rock-music video has moving images :)

Link. 

If I were more literal, I would have written a song about light between the leaves (or needles, in the case of the dawn redwood), which is what I love the most about this time of year. 

Life Is Short Opera Is Long

The house felt very subdued after Elektra's death, but outside the fall continued its very slow march across the garden. Somehow we didn't get around to buying mulch this year and instead decided to buy a leaf mulcher. (What's the expression: give someone a fish and they'll have dinner, give them a net and they'll have a fishing career.) I didn't want to sweep up all the leaves, though, until they had fallen off the trees, which may take another two or three weeks. 

Meanwhile, a single bellflower bloomed in a crevice between the bricks and the house. 

On Saturday, I went downtown to see Eurydice at the Metropolitan Opera. It was my first time attending a performance in the city since I went to see Torche at Saint Vitus at the beginning of 2020. (My ears are still ringing from that show.) I arrived early to the Met and took a walk through Central Park. It felt good to be outside in a different part of the city. 

It also felt good to be back at the Met. I felt like a teenager, just by virtue of being decades younger than most of the attendees. The opera was beautiful; the music was grand and modern as it moved between lush and melodic, crashing and playful. It took me into and out of myself, in the way that only opera can do. I thought about the differences between this version of the Eurydice myth -- which focuses on Eurydice's relationship with her dead father -- and the one I told in my novel #gods, in which Eurydice is a singer and Orpheus -- who is also gay -- is a musician who accompanies her. 

Back home, I saw the garden with new eyes. 

Fountain Maintenance

This morning was sunny and warm (for November), which was enough to entice me outside. Many years ago, we bought a fountain, which every spring must be filled with water and every fall drained of water. Today, after many weeks of procrastinating, I was hoping to complete the latter. 

It's one of those chores I dread a little bit more with each passing year because the fountain must be disassembled into two parts, each of which is made of concrete and weighs approximately two thousands pounds. 

Lately, while recovering from a knee injury, I've started working out with elastic bands, which I like to think has been helping my upper-body strength. But I'm not sure it made much of a difference when I picked up the tower of the fountain, which was as excruciatingly heavy as I remembered. But it didn't seem *more* heavy, so maybe my strength work was paying off. In either case, I only had to move it a few feet, which I managed to do without dropping it on my feet or the ferns :) 

I reached into the cold water and dislodged the pump, which allowed the water to drain.

Then I picked up the tower and repositioned it on the base of the fountain. 

The concrete weighed a lot, but it looked good. Like the rest of the garden, it had weathered nicely over the years, which made me look forward to spring. 

Notes on the Autumn Garden

It got cold enough this week to turn the heat, which along with the birch leaves covering the brick path makes it feel like fall. 

The Japanese maple turned red overnight. 

And the Boston Ivy -- a work in progress -- turned a *bit* more red. 

We might have tried to keep the heat off a bit longer, but it starts to feel pretty cold in the house when the outside temps don't get above the low fifties. We also didn't want the cats to be shivering all day. Clio's still recovering from dental surgery, which is going to take some time. She's on a multi-day painkiller but seems alert. The biggest problem is that Zephyr doesn't quite recognize her, which means she's dealing with a sore mouth and a hostile cat she's known for years. 

Here's Zephyr looking down the stairs with suspicion at the strange cat sitting in the ferns. Why do cats not recognize each other? Apparently it has something to do with smell; it's one of the things about that makes them seem so foreign to each other after they've been separated for even a short period of time (or by a window). They make even the most basic interactions very complicated. (Unlike humans, who never complicate anything lol.) 

Mostly we wanted to keep the heat on for Elektra, who in addition to chronic kidney disease is battling an untreatable polyp, which started in her ear and is now affecting her left eye and mouth. These are both conditions that commonly afflict older cats. 

One of the hardest things about adopting animals is knowing that one day you're going to watch them die, and I fear we've reached that stage with Elektra. Over the past few months, she's been losing weight and her balance is precarious because of her ear. But she seemed mostly comfortable, going through her usual routines with feline diligence. But yesterday she seemed to be in a new kind of distress -- she was agitated and trying to drink out of the bathtub faucet -- which our vet attributed to dehydration. This wasn't unexpected (we went through a similar process with Dante a few years ago) and we still had the supplies (except for the actual bag of liquid).  

We started giving her subcutaneous fluids and she already seems much calmer. It's hard to say how long she'll last. Dante only made it a few months once he reached this stage, but I have friends whose cats have gone a year or two once they start taking fluids, which almost seems like enough time to pretend that it's not really an end. 

Right now, she's sleeping, and it's a bright day in -- or at least above -- the garden.