The house next door is for sale. It has a strange history. Before we moved in, more than ten years ago, the elderly couple who had raised their children there lost it, in some kind of shady mortgage deal that was engineered by their daughter. It sat vacant for five years, owned by one bank or another, or a house flipper who paid $815,000, no money down, who lost it to another bank. It was staged more than once, and one of the stagers' assistants was using it for hookups. Then it was bought, maybe five years ago, by a young guy who was looking for an investment. He did a lot of work on it. He converted the bad 70s addition into a small one-bedroom apartment. He tried to sell it a couple of years ago but could not get as much as he wanted for his investment. The market now, though, is very hot, so it was open this afternoon for prospective buyers and nosy neighbors.
The big problem with this house is that the layout is irredeemably screwy. The living room and dining room are tiny. The kitchen is tiny but it has three doors, so you can't so much to rearrange it. The two tiny bedrooms have only one closet between them. The bad 70s addition did something odd to the one original bathroom, so it has no window and the toilet was flushing with hot water at one time. There's a tiny unusable loft space, and to get to the bad addition you have to go down three stairs - and hit your head if you are over 6 feet tall.
It makes me uncomfortable just to be in that house for any length of time. The layout and the ceilings make it so cramped and weird. That's why it's been so hard to sell in the past, and that's why the person who bought it was someone who just wanted an investment, not a home. I can't imagine that house being anyone's first choice.
K across the street needed help bringing her recycling to the curb, so I sent B out to do it. He came back with a bag of apples from her tree. She is always lightning-fast in returning a favor. She doesn't want to be beholden to us.
The apples were terrible. "Can you do something with these?" E asked, making a face. "Or should we just feed them to the chickens?"
As it happens, we had something going on tonight that required applesauce. I put the terrible apples in the pressure cooker with salt, vanilla and a tiny bit of water. I had thought I would add lemon juice and maple syrup when they were cooked. It didn't need it. It was possibly the best applesauce I have ever made (and I make amazing applesauce). It didn't need any sweetener or lemon. It tasted so astonishingly perfect with the latkes. It was twelve small apples and we ate almost all of it.
Our houses are very close to each other. Each structure is separated by a narrow, single-car driveway. When all of our windows are open - which they are ten months of the year - we can hear our neighbors' conversations. I know they are right there when I am yelling at E and R is screeching at B.
Next door is a toddler, less than three years old. Her older father is home with her a lot. His kids from his first marriage are my age, and he is way more hands-on with this little girl. I heard him say this yesterday around 5:30 and then again today, "No milk! You have to eat your food before you get your milk. And you have to drink your milk before you watch TV."
For the new year, we had Asian pears from Ra's garden across the street ... and honey from the women who took the swarm of bees out of our tree this spring.
I wonder how we got so lucky with our neighborhoods twice in a row. Adams Morgan was so totally different from our block in Berkeley, but they are fantastic in so many of the same ways. Actually, two of the same ways. The first is structural: we can walk or ride our bikes to everything we need. The second is how we are surrounded by so many crazy characters who move in and out of our orbit. In DC, it was Jean-Paul upstairs, Abdul the painter, Bobby in the park. Here we have RA across the street, H next door and the nutty but always enthusiastic H-W family across the street. We all gathered on the sidewalk to observe the eclipse this evening, just as we gathered a couple of weeks ago to watch the bee lady knock the swarm out of our tree.
RA was just here getting some raisins. "Ima, I know you don't like coconut, but would you like to taste just a little bit of the pudding anyway?" he asked. I love that he calls me Ima, that he knows I don't like coconut, that he wants to give me some of his coconut-raisin pudding anyway. Last night when E was out at a movie and I had to pick B up for a party at 10:30, RA came over to sit in the house while I went to get B. When R was falling asleep she said, "RA will be here, right, when I am asleep and you are gone?" I assured her that he would be here. On Saturday afternoon when B came home from the Bat Mitzvah on his bike, RA flew across the street. "I can't stay!" he said. "I just saw B on his bike and I had to come over because it reminded me of being 12 years old and riding my bicycle all day on the streets of San Juan!" He was so happy to see B do something B does every day of his life. I feel like the intimacy of it, talking to H every single day over the fence or through the window, breeds more intimacy.
It happened incredibly quickly. I was deep in the couch with the kids watching Korra when our next door neighbor came to the back door.
"There's a swarm of bees in your front yard," he said. "Don't go out your front door."
We ran through the house to the front. The bees were as thick as fog and we watched them through the window. We could hear them, too. "Shut the mail slot!" I said to B.
Our neighbor came around to the kitchen window. "You could call the cops or the city," he said. "They probably deal with this stuff."
I wasn't about to call the cops about a bunch of bees. I was more thinking of the biodiesel station a few blocks away. We get our chick feed there and they sell beekeeping supplies, too. I figured they would know someone who could come get bees.
Then the phone rang. It was our neighbor across the street. "One of the parents in my daycare gave me a phone number," she said. "It's a woman who keeps honeybees. She will come and take them if they are bees, but she won't take wasps or yellowjackets. I already called her and she's waiting for your call."
"Thanks," I replied. I had to call the number five or six times before the woman would pick up.
"I'm at work in the city. I can't come until after I get off around six. I'll have my friend come by on her bike to make sure they are honeybees," she told me and then we got cut off before I could give her the address. Eventually she called back.
Yet another neighbor came to our back door an hour later. "There's a woman in your front yard taking pictures of the bees," he reported. By that time, they were clustered tightly and clinging to the Japanese maple.
When the bee women finally came back after six with their bee suit and a big cardboard container, we all gathered on the sidewalk to watch. The woman I talked to on the phone shook the branch and they fell into the cardboard container.
"I was expecting something more dramatic," someone said.
We gave them eggs and they drove off in their Honda Insight.
B made his own breakfast this morning. He makes quinoa pasta for himself most mornings, but because we were hanging around the house waiting to go to services, he got a little more elaborate.
"Can I fry some tofu?" he asked with his head in the fridge. I get this extra-firm tofu we crumble and pan-fry.
"Sure," I said.
He pulled green onion and sweet peppers out of the bin and shoyu out of the door. "Wait, how about the cabbage pickle? Can I fry that?" he asked.
"I'd fry the other stuff and then put the pickle on at the end," I said. It's the cabbage, onion, ginger and chile pickle I made for the banh mi the other day.
He cut up the vegetables and put it all in the hot frying pan with some shoyu. The green onion smelled great.
"Wait! The nori!" he yelled. He got out a sheet of nori and lined his dish with it. When the tofu was cooked he put it on top of the nori sheet and sprinkled the cabbage on top.
I wanted an It's-It last night, so I walked down to the corner store.
I say this about our neighborhood all the time, and it's true every time: it's the perfect balance of the urban we want and the suburban we need. When architects and urban planners design walkable New Urbanist neighborhoods, they are just trying to recreate what we have here: dense single-family homes with porches in front and garages in back. A block away we have a coffee house, a corner store, two Indian restaurants, a breakfast place and a karate studio. Three blocks in the other direction are fancier restaurants and coffee, plus gift stores, the express bus into the city and a bank. Inside a mile, there are two full-blown grocery stores plus every other kind of retail you could imagine, libraries, parks, two BART stops and the high school.
For me, though, walking in the with It's-It's for me and E (holding them by the edges of the plastic wrappers so as to not melt the ice cream too much) in my hand, the magic of the neighborhood was that there would be a box of It's-It's in the freezer at the corner store next to the B+Js and all the other national brands. It's-It's are made in San Francisco (since 1928, says the wrapper) and I ate them at summer camp as a child. I like the facts of our neighborhood, sure, but I love it because it's here, in northern California. The details that make it not the generic New Urbanist design but the thing I am made of: the floor plan of our house is the same as my great grandfather's, the cheap ice cream sandwich you can only get here, the cool evening air that sweeps past the East Bay all the way up the river to my parents in Sacramento.
We talk about what we are with the kids all the times in so many words: we are Jews! We eat good food! We make things with tools! because I want them to be able to state without hesitation our family identity. So far, I have never brought this up with them, that we are from northern California. I say it about myself all of the time. E and I made a huge effort nine years ago to move here so that we could raise our children here. I don't know why I have not added it to the list of declarations about our family identity.
I wanted an It's-It tonight, so I walked down to the corner store.
I say this about our neighborhood all the time, and it's true every time: it's the perfect balance of the urban we want and the suburban we need. When architects and urban planners design walkable New Urbanist neighborhoods, they are just trying to recreate what we have here: dense single-family homes with porches in front and garages in back. A block away we have a coffee house, a corner store, two Indian restaurants, a breakfast place and a karate studio. Three blocks in the other direction are fancier restaurants and coffee, plus gift stores, the express bus into the city and a bank. Inside a mile, there are two full-blown grocery stores plus every other kind of retail you could imagine, libraries, parks, two BART stops and the high school.
For me, though, walking in the with It's-It's for me and E (holding them by the edges of the plastic wrappers so as to not melt the ice cream too much) in my hand, the magic of the neighborhood was that there would be a box of It's-It's in the freezer at the corner store next to the B+Js and all the other national brands. It's-It's are made in San Francisco (since 1928, says the wrapper) and I ate them at summer camp as a child. I like the facts of our neighborhood, sure, but I love it because it's here, in northern California. The details that make it not the generic New Urbanist design but the thing I am made of: the floor plan of our house is the same as my great grandfather's, the cheap ice cream sandwich you can only get here, the cool evening air that sweeps past the East Bay all the way up the river to my parents in Sacramento.
We talk about what we are with the kids all the times in so many words: we are Jews! We eat good food! We make things with tools! because I want them to be able to state without hesitation our family identity. So far, I have never brought this up with them, that we are from northern California. I say it about myself all of the time. E and I made a huge effort nine years ago to move here so that we could raise our children here. I don't know why I have not added it to the list of declarations about our family identity.
"You know you have to get the sukkah done by Wednesday night," I said to E this morning.
"I'm going to get it done. Where's your lulav?" she shot back.
It's an excellent question. Sukkot is early this year, so there's no etrog at the grocery store. It won't be in for another three weeks, and there's no point in the palm and the willow and the myrtle without the etrog, too. The ritual is about gathering the four species, not three of them. I was going to skip the lulav this year; I just hadn't told E that, yet.
"You have to have the lulav," she said. "It's the whole hocus-pocus magic." She's right. Shaking the four species in the six directions really is a lot of the magic of Sukkot. "We have lemons from our tree," she continued. "You don't need a $50 lemon."
An etrog isn't a $50 lemon. It's something way more special and precious. I love my etrog, every year and its smell is also part of the hocus-pocus magic of Sukkot. As much as I love our Meyer lemons, they are in no way a stand-in for an etrog. Still, I went out and got the right kind of palm tonight. Our neighborhood is full of willow and myrtle I can get tomorrow, too. That's the reason I began gathering my own in the first place, because it's all growing right here, ready to be gathered together and shaken in the six directions when the moon is full.
