Kinsler: A long summer romance continues
Thoughts after a hot day:
On this early August evening in a season that one science writer called “the grand, corrupt time of high summer,” we sit on the front porch watching the Firefly Singles Connection hold its nightly mixer over the lawns of East Mulberry Street.
The male firefly slicks back his antennae and flashes, “A sweet little bug like you shouldn’t be roaming around like this.”
“I’m just waiting for my boyfriend Mothra to fly me home,” replies the female firefly, crisply.
That’s the sort of luck I always had in singles bars. I believe that Natalie did better, but even after 29 years, she has revealed few details.
My beloved had spent the day in the garden, braving the heat to remove bales of blight-infected tomato-plant branches, these to be carefully quarantined in a brown paper garden-waste bag lest they infect future gardens.
She learned how from her mother, who grew up on a subsistence farm in southern Italy and showed her middle daughter how to prune tomato plants for maximum yield. I still don’t know the procedure, but we haven’t had a bad season yet.
Meanwhile, I made sick calls upon the grandfather clocks of Fairfield County. Each has a story attached: father built its case, brother sent it from Europe, mother treasured it. Deep inside each one lurks its movement, an elaborate brass structure made by Urgos, or Jauch, or Keininger, all of them subjects of long discussions in the clock collectors’ Web forum.
It takes perhaps 45 minutes of excavation to remove a movement, stow it in a cardboard cat litter box, slip the polished brass weights into their protective socks, remember the pendulum, and depart for the clock hospital.
It was good to come back to our shady home. Our oak tree was already 6 years old in 2012 when our friend Mike began laying out our porch. “We’ll cut that tree down,” he said, stretching his tape measure over our neglected vegetation.
“No, we won’t,” I protested. “I planted it, and for some reason it grew, and thus we treasure it.”
“OK,” sighed Mike, a carpenter and architect whose appreciation of trees extends mainly to the lumber they supply.
Somewhat trimmed, the tree prospered and gave us a tree-shaded porch upon which Natalie can sit and peer out at the street unobserved by passers-by. She takes a particular delight in this, as did I in 1954 while wearing my “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” helmet: “You can see out,” said the ad on our RCA black-and-white TV, “but they can’t see in!”
This evening, Natalie deployed the citronella candle that our neighbor Shawnee gave us. It flickered in its little bucket on the railing as we sat on our Giant Eagle outdoor settee, Natalie’s face illuminated by the Kindle book she was reading. Then we silently looked out into the dark, reclining together in our deck chairs on our cruise into the unknown.
Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives in an old house with the five cats and Natalie, who did not know who Mothra is. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com. (“But I never went to movies like that,” she protests.)