Life Style & Travel

UNITED STATES—Shortly after germinating and producing their first few leaves, many seedlings start to produce foliage that is indistinguishable from the foliage that they will produce for the rest of their lives. Other plants might initially be outfitted with leaves that are smaller, thicker, or somehow slightly different from what will appear later. Then there are those that produce...

UNITED STATES—The sun can, at times, be so raw and unforgiving, it can give you a toothache. And the survivors of the dreams and plans stand stunned in the blinding blaze: what happened? what went wrong? They say we’re living in a desert, and the desert will make you crazy . . . A lot of things happened at Manhattan Place that spring....

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—In 2011, just before Dayna and Manni Scarso’s son, Pietro, turned three, they discovered his body was deteriorating from the inside out. The Scarsos began suspecting problems when they noticed Pietro’s younger brother, Nico, running up and down stairs while Pietro made slow, valiant attempts, but would then get stuck. Looking back, Manni remembered initially thinking, “maybe Pietro’s just...

UNITED STATES—With all the talk about replacing warm season vegetables and bedding plants with their cool season counterparts this time of year, we should also address the irony of summer squash and winter squash. Their designations suggest that they too grow in specific seasons; summer and winter. Duh. It would make sense that summer squash would be replaced by...

UNITED STATES—They are certainly not much to look at now. They are even less interesting once buried out of sight in the garden. The big and colorful pictures on the boxes that they arrive in are probably a bit more spectacular than the flowers expected early next spring will actually be. Nonetheless, it will be amazing to see such...

UNITED STATES—A dispatch from the fifth day of the Gulf War, “I picked up Betty to clean this house (on Manhattan Place). A crew of Mexicans are digging in the basement of Van Buren, raising the supports, and now the old house is maladjusted: you can barely close the doors. During the day, I showed the room to three...

UNITED STATES—A kid in South Los Angeles saying with no particular somberness, sidelit by a TV set, “The war will start in 18 minutes,” blew open the thing that had been building since last August; the moreso since November when the United Nations set a January 15th deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Or else. Now the world was...

UNITED STATES—Vegetables are annuals too, just like the flowering bedding plants that get replaced seasonally. Some are technically biennials, and a few might even have the potential to be short term perennials if they ever got the chance. Yet, for the purposes of home vegetable gardens, the warm season vegetables that produced through summer should now get replaced with...

UNITED STATES—Bunches of blackened leaves hanging from blackened stems in otherwise healthy pear trees really are as serious as they look. They probably appeared as new growth was developing in spring, and are still as dead now as they were then. As surrounding foliage colors and falls, the blackened foliage will remain until it gets knocked out by rain...

UNITED STATES—Crazy thing. One of the residents of Manhattan Place recognized a woman who’d left a deposit on a room I had shown. The woman had been a mental patient four years earlier. Now this great tenant, Dee, who recognized she didn’t want to live in our house any more. Go ahead, tear me apart: gain one loony and...