Staying Out of the Heat

The hundred degree temperatures have kept me indoors...so has my first incident of poison ivy. This work, painted on Rives BFK, had its genesis in a page from my sketchbook.

Its a look backwards, to my Brooklyn days in the forties. I thought of the many summer days my friend, Jessica and I spent sitting on her fire escape, reading comic books, playing board games, chatting. It was a short ride to Coney Island on the trolley or on the open air cars of the BMT. I recall stretching my neck to watch the daredevils who rode the amazing, hair raising parachute jump, walking on the boardwalk with an army of friends, seeing so many men in uniform, listening the latest music coming through the sideshow's speakers, eating hot dogs at Nathans, enjoying days at Steeplechase, matinees w. newsreels of battles and victory.

In full bloom

Here are the crinum in full bloom. Note that there are more flower buds emerging in the midst of the cluster. I think that if you look closely, you'll also see some bug enjoying the bloom's retention of water.

Crinums Start Blooming

Its really miraculous! Yesterday the crinums in the front flower bed were just a mass of long freen leaves. This morning, five inch thick stalks appeared bearing many large red buds, even one bloom. Though not very long lived, these flowers are spectacular and I know that summer has truly arrived when they bloom.

When Ira and I were in Amsterdam, traipsing in and out of each of the shops in the famed Flower Market, we saw crinum bulbs for sale. Each was two to three times the size of my fist! Our crinums are pass downs and I'm quite sure weren't anything approaching that size, but may be so now. We'd have loved to have bought a few, but our US Ag laws prohibit bringing in any bulbs that are not from a certified grower....I never did find a "certified grower", even in the Keukenhof.