David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Before the Roses

Call me a bit warped, but a well crafted rose garden can be most beautiful when not blooming with showy grandifloras and floribundas.  If you’ve visited America’s oldest municipal rose garden in Hartford, Connecticut’s Elizabeth Park as I did recently, you might agree.

Without the distraction of bright colors and perfumed air, the engaging geometry of the garden comes into full relief.  Angled grassy walkways beneath arching trellises covered in rambling rose bushes lead to a central rustic gazebo from which paths radiate to all compass points.  Liquored with recent rains, the lawn alleys are plush underfoot, leaving a visitor  
feeling as if they’re walking just slightly above ground.

Full of thorny, still somewhat skeletal but intriguing canes, the beds are cut in a variety of rectangular, arcing and triangular forms.  The emerging leaves tantalize with the hope of June’s blooms, but in the meantime have their own subtle beauty.  The small, slightly toothed ovals are glossy and almost iridescent with hints of russet, purple and orange.

Of course, if you can’t wait for startling color, tiptoe to the gaudy tulips which blossom in colors generally found in candy or plastic children’s toys.  With most visitors distracted by these shameless Dutch beauties, it leaves more time in the rose garden for the lost art of quiet contemplation.

Constellations (poem)

In night’s moonless deep I climb Cemetery Hill’s steep
terraces, my body fading into darkness, a slender shadow
among shadows, insubstantial as the shades beneath
the inscribed stones.  Pumping legs strain against the slope
as I fall further into my breath, just a heaving chest feeding
hungry lungs.

I’m dizzy on the crest, eyes buzzing with sparkling
pinpricks of light, a chaotic whirl connected by shepherds
who long ago tattooed the sky with images and stories.
Overhead, Orion hunts beside his dog Canis and Hercules
forever faces snaky Hydra who spawned two heads
for each severed.  A winged horse gallops across galaxies,
a ram’s gold fleece glows, and a scorpion, crab, and dragon
terrorize the dark.

Twinkling in the valley below is a firmament
of incandescence, sodium vapor and chalky fluorescence
spilling from street lamps and windows. These
constellations gossip about women hiding bruises, couples
holding hands at dinner, babies conceived in backseat
trysts, buddies gathered for beer and boasts behind
pretzeled neon, and children who lug textbooks
and learning disabilities to school while dreaming
of Fenway’s outfield.

Staring into two worlds blinking at each other,
I make a wish and realize at last that I’ve
caught my breath.

Asparagus Crazy

My spring reached its zenith last week when I spotted the first braid-like tips of asparagus nosing out of the soil along my garden fence.  Sure, the first robin, tulips, and the day you’re finally comfortable in a tee shirt are great, but those delectable sentinel green spears are the top.  Among all the seasonal phenomena you can see, smell, hear, and feel, here is spring you can taste.

Asparagus has been my most reliable crop ever since I planted it over 20 years ago.  Perhaps I’m in thrall to its perennial persistence, since of all cultivated vegetables it requires the least amount of sweat and backache to bring to the table.  Capable of shooting up inches in a day (up to ten inches according to the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board), you can practically watch it grow.

Probably due to their phallic shape, the green spears engorged with chlorophyll have enjoyed cachet over the years as an aphrodisiac.  I can’t vouch for their effectiveness with any certainty, but surely they couldn’t hurt.

After harvest season, asparagus remains useful by growing into tall feathery, dill-like ferns that form a beautiful natural fence dotted with red berries.  In the heat of summer they’re a soothingly cool backdrop.

Asparagus is one of those near perfect foods loaded with fiber and nutrients including folic acid, potassium, and vitamins B6, A and C.  Some research indicates asparagus can alleviate hangovers, protect the liver from alcohol, and prevent heart disease, birth defects, and cancer as well as ease arthritis pain.  If more people knew about these attributes, surely this is one vegetable that might be shipped in armored cars.

Better than it’s alleged miracle medical properties, hurried from the garden to the kitchen and onto the plate asparagus bursts with a unique full flavor that feels particularly plush in the mouth.  But, the asparagus experience doesn’t end there.  Soon after eating, many people find their urine scented with a funky sulfur-like odor because of the digestion of certain amino acids.  A strange reminder of a delicious meal, but well worth the olfactory encounter afterward.

Directions in Stone

Hartford Courant, April 11, 2010

Scores of stone tablets inscribed with numerals and initials stand quiet sentinel along Connecticut’s two-lane blacktops.  Marking distances along roads that have served since colonial days, many of these milestones are over two centuries old.  Some are obscured by brush and detritus, but many more—though rarely noticed—are clearly visible to thousands of motorists who pass them each day.

 Typically two to three feet tall, a foot to eighteen inches across the face, and three to six inches thick, these mile markers resemble modest headstones with their inscription turned toward the pavement.  Though most commonly made of brownstone, some are cut from local gray gneiss or granite.

Generally, they are marked in Roman or Arabic numerals with the distance to the county seat given as an initial, such as “H” for Hartford or “N L” for New London.  Thus, travelers passing through an area of houses, small shopping plazas and offices on Route 10 in Plainville will find a monument marking 12 miles to Hartford at the junction of Betsey Road since it lies in Hartford County.  Further south on Route 10, a weather-worn stone in front of Hamden’s Mount Carmel Cemetery reads nine miles to New Haven because it’s located in New Haven County.

Tapping into Four Centuries

If you stop by the sugarhouse at Bolduc Farm in Gilford, New Hampshire when the sap is flowing, you’re likely to be served a dinner plate-sized flapjack with maple syrup hot off the evaporator, just for the asking.  Sometimes there’s also a side of kielbasa or bacon, but always there’s heaping portions of welcoming hospitality.  When I passed through a few days ago record temperatures had ended the season early and brothers Ernie and Armand Bolduc were in the process of cleaning their equipment and calling it a season.  Fortunately, warm conversation remained in abundance despite the year’s poor maple crop.

Sugaring has been a rite of spring on the property since at least 1779, making it the oldest continuous operation in the nation.  Now in their seventies, the men began sugaring at age four or five, helping collect sap with a gathering tank pulled by horses in snow that was deeper than they were tall.  There’s little money in their small-scale operation, but sugaring is in their blood and there’s joy in carrying on a long, unbroken tradition.  They delight in introducing school groups to the mysteries of maple, especially kids in the local Head Start program.  The sugarhouse walls are decorated with drawings, photos and thank you notes from their youthful fans.

The sugarhouse is a cozy, low building sheathed in weathered shingles and sporting a classic cupola rising above a metal roof.  Built in 1983, it replaced a much older structure up the hill, parts of which may date from the eighteenth century.  The old barn-board building sits in the midst of the maple grove, a little lopsided, the roof picturesquely rusting.  Unwilling to see the venerable sugar shack suffer demolition by neglect, the Bolducs restored it almost a decade ago, replacing rotten siding and sills and giving it concrete footings.  Marked by generations of use and repair, who knows how much of the building is original.  Undoubtedly, it partakes of four centuries of imagination and hard work.

Ernie and Armand treat their trees with reverence and take pains to care for them by keeping the brush down and proper thinning.  Walking the sun drenched woods with them, it seemed every tree of any size bred stories or had family associations.  When the state built a highway bypass in the 1950s wiping out most of the sugar orchard, their father was devastated.  It was the first time they’d seen him cry.  Though they are gentle folk, there’s hint of bitterness in their voices when they describe the loss of the trees to macadam.

The Bolducs may have the country’s oldest sugar house and sugar bush, and the brothers, too, are getting up there in age.  But it takes only the briefest visit with them along with a slight nip if their fine syrup to make even the most superannuated among us feel young.