Now He's Ruined It For Everyone
May. 28th, 2003 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lawnrrdIt's Really Lots of Fun
May 16, 2003
RITUALS; Green Acres, Not the Place for Me
By JASON TANZ
ONE or two Fridays each year, a group of friends and I leave work a half-hour early, pile into a rented car and drive four hours or so to the quiet Catskills town of Bovina. My friends Tom and Maria Lauricella own a small second home up there and are gracious enough to share their mountain idyll with us city-choked wretches. These weekends invariably pass too quickly, filled as they are with lazy sunsets, gently swinging hammocks, and Tom and Maria's excellent cooking. In the winter, we build a life-threatening sled run on the 37-acre property. In the summer and fall, our energies are spent on intensely competitive bouts of whiffle ball home run derby.
But whatever the season, the centerpiece of the weekend inevitably takes place on Saturday morning when, after a breakfast of homemade pancakes, we nervously eye Tom and ask him our plans for the day. Tom's response is almost ritualistic. He smacks his lips, passes his eyes over the table in front of him, and says, "Well, we've got to go into town to pick up some groceries for tonight. Some of us might go for a jog. And then I've got a couple of chores for us to do." Make no mistake: these aren't chores of the lick-envelopes-and-vacuum-the-den variety. Try seed-the-lawn-and-dig-an-irrigation-ditch.
How did backbreaking physical labor become a staple of our idyllic weekends? First, Tom and Maria may be successful young professionals in the financial industry, but they are also weekend hippies. (You can tell this from the peace flag that flies from one of the house's corners.) And so, yes, this chore ritual does carry with it an air of old-fashioned 60's-style communalism. When we work on improving the house, the thinking goes, we become more than houseguests; we become caretakers, members of a kind of Catskills kibbutz. (Did I just hear T. Coraghessan Boyle cackling?) Furthermore, Tom and Maria are extremely generous with their property and it is only right that the rest of us show our gratitude and do our part.
I will not lie. Most of us do not actively look forward to getting our Bovina chore assignments. We would rather be napping on the deck in an Adirondack chair or admiring the rolling greenery. Did I mention whiffle ball home run derby?
At the same time, my fiancée, Denise Cante, and I embrace the opportunity to get some of that Bovina loam under our fingernails. Normally, I'm not one for yardwork. I moved to New York City from the Pacific Northwest with the expectation that I would never have to face that region's ruddy-cheeked outdoorsy types ever again. But on these weekends, I can assume the role of rugged handyman, wielding expensive machinery and forcing nature to bend to my will.
That being said, there are good chores and bad chores and -- for me, at least -- it's pretty easy to tell the two apart: good chores involve chain saws. Perhaps everyone else in the world is familiar with these machines' subtle pleasures, but until Tom handed me the firewood-cutting assignment, I was not. The whole thing starts with a vigorous, manly yank on a rip cord, which is met by the satisfying growl of a motor, a sound that taps into the Jungian subconscious of even the least manly man. (I am speaking of myself.) Once you dig into your first log, your senses are overwhelmed: the smell of freshly cut wood, the ear-shattering roar of the saw, the wood chips flying down the front of your shirt. And, of course, there's always that nagging voice in the back of your head, the one that mutters, "If I wanted to, I could slice through pretty much everything within my field of vision."
The bad chores? Well, here's one: painting flower boxes. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was somehow picked for this duty a couple of years ago. My companions Rich ten Wolde and Jeff Garigliano were digging ditches and carting things around in wheelbarrows and I was left to lug the paint cans out of the basement, arm myself with dainty brushes and splatter paint all over Tom and Maria's deck and myself. This turned out to be a much tougher job than the more masculine assignments. Nevertheless, it's tough to beat your chest over a nice even coat of paint on a box of pansies.
No matter what chore I'm assigned, I always find myself exhausted by the time I finish it and ready to partake in Bovina's more restful offerings. For a few hours, it's fun to engage in the charade -- however pitiful -- that I am some kind of handyman, but that's enough for me. The green-thumb world is a great place to visit. I just wouldn't want to live there.
The worst for me was the time Tom had some excavation done to fix the house's drainage problem and put us to work afterward with rakes, trying to remove all the rocks the excavation had brought to the surface. After about two or three hours of our digging, raking, and carrying off rocks, his neighbor the farmer drove up on his tractor on other business and mentioned that he had a machine that would do that in about fifteen minutes.
May 16, 2003
RITUALS; Green Acres, Not the Place for Me
By JASON TANZ
ONE or two Fridays each year, a group of friends and I leave work a half-hour early, pile into a rented car and drive four hours or so to the quiet Catskills town of Bovina. My friends Tom and Maria Lauricella own a small second home up there and are gracious enough to share their mountain idyll with us city-choked wretches. These weekends invariably pass too quickly, filled as they are with lazy sunsets, gently swinging hammocks, and Tom and Maria's excellent cooking. In the winter, we build a life-threatening sled run on the 37-acre property. In the summer and fall, our energies are spent on intensely competitive bouts of whiffle ball home run derby.
But whatever the season, the centerpiece of the weekend inevitably takes place on Saturday morning when, after a breakfast of homemade pancakes, we nervously eye Tom and ask him our plans for the day. Tom's response is almost ritualistic. He smacks his lips, passes his eyes over the table in front of him, and says, "Well, we've got to go into town to pick up some groceries for tonight. Some of us might go for a jog. And then I've got a couple of chores for us to do." Make no mistake: these aren't chores of the lick-envelopes-and-vacuum-the-den variety. Try seed-the-lawn-and-dig-an-irrigation-ditch.
How did backbreaking physical labor become a staple of our idyllic weekends? First, Tom and Maria may be successful young professionals in the financial industry, but they are also weekend hippies. (You can tell this from the peace flag that flies from one of the house's corners.) And so, yes, this chore ritual does carry with it an air of old-fashioned 60's-style communalism. When we work on improving the house, the thinking goes, we become more than houseguests; we become caretakers, members of a kind of Catskills kibbutz. (Did I just hear T. Coraghessan Boyle cackling?) Furthermore, Tom and Maria are extremely generous with their property and it is only right that the rest of us show our gratitude and do our part.
I will not lie. Most of us do not actively look forward to getting our Bovina chore assignments. We would rather be napping on the deck in an Adirondack chair or admiring the rolling greenery. Did I mention whiffle ball home run derby?
At the same time, my fiancée, Denise Cante, and I embrace the opportunity to get some of that Bovina loam under our fingernails. Normally, I'm not one for yardwork. I moved to New York City from the Pacific Northwest with the expectation that I would never have to face that region's ruddy-cheeked outdoorsy types ever again. But on these weekends, I can assume the role of rugged handyman, wielding expensive machinery and forcing nature to bend to my will.
That being said, there are good chores and bad chores and -- for me, at least -- it's pretty easy to tell the two apart: good chores involve chain saws. Perhaps everyone else in the world is familiar with these machines' subtle pleasures, but until Tom handed me the firewood-cutting assignment, I was not. The whole thing starts with a vigorous, manly yank on a rip cord, which is met by the satisfying growl of a motor, a sound that taps into the Jungian subconscious of even the least manly man. (I am speaking of myself.) Once you dig into your first log, your senses are overwhelmed: the smell of freshly cut wood, the ear-shattering roar of the saw, the wood chips flying down the front of your shirt. And, of course, there's always that nagging voice in the back of your head, the one that mutters, "If I wanted to, I could slice through pretty much everything within my field of vision."
The bad chores? Well, here's one: painting flower boxes. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was somehow picked for this duty a couple of years ago. My companions Rich ten Wolde and Jeff Garigliano were digging ditches and carting things around in wheelbarrows and I was left to lug the paint cans out of the basement, arm myself with dainty brushes and splatter paint all over Tom and Maria's deck and myself. This turned out to be a much tougher job than the more masculine assignments. Nevertheless, it's tough to beat your chest over a nice even coat of paint on a box of pansies.
No matter what chore I'm assigned, I always find myself exhausted by the time I finish it and ready to partake in Bovina's more restful offerings. For a few hours, it's fun to engage in the charade -- however pitiful -- that I am some kind of handyman, but that's enough for me. The green-thumb world is a great place to visit. I just wouldn't want to live there.
The worst for me was the time Tom had some excavation done to fix the house's drainage problem and put us to work afterward with rakes, trying to remove all the rocks the excavation had brought to the surface. After about two or three hours of our digging, raking, and carrying off rocks, his neighbor the farmer drove up on his tractor on other business and mentioned that he had a machine that would do that in about fifteen minutes.
