Journal of a Sabbatical

May 13, 2000

the coveted columella

Today's Reading: Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges, On Agriculture by Columella, On Trees by Columella

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Jeff Fassero

For some reason it felt like a huge effort to get myself to Priscilla's house to meet the walking buddies, let alone actually walk for 45 minutes with them. My legs feel like lead. My head feels heavy.

Joan-east has one of her notions to check out the million dollar houses under construction nearby. There are always million dollar houses under construction on the Andover/Lawrence line near the country club and the Greek Orthodox church. I don't think either the country club or the Greek Orthodox church is the attraction. It's just where there was some unbuilt land left. No matter that the land is wet, or hilly, or inaccessible. If you build it, they will come.

So we walk over to the latest development. The houses are ugly. Huge and featureless except for one that has an oversized front porch. Nobody sits on front porches anymore, but this house has the biggest one I've ever seen on a new house. Actually a book I read recently, Geography of Home by Akiko Busch, explains why people still want formal front doors, old-fashioned porches, and formal dining rooms for emotional reasons even though the way we live in houses nowadays makes them useless. So the buyer for that house must've longed for a front porch reminiscent of the ones from his/her childhood or more likely his/her grandparents' childhood.

I chicken out on going into one of the half finished houses even though we can get in through the garage. So we skip the house tour and proceed along the muddy track where trees have been cut down to connect the place where the ritzy houses are being built to a former cul de sac where the half-million dollar houses got built a couple of years ago. I bet they're pissed at losing their cul de sac lifestyle for the perils of a through street.

I hand over Pawing Through the Past, the latest Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown mystery to Joan-east, who had just finished the next-to-latest one, which she hands over to Priscilla. So I guess I'm back in their good graces again.

With legs still feeling like lead and a heavy head, I change clothes and pick Nancy up at the bus station. Both of us are starving, so the first stop is House of Tibet Kitchen for veggie momos, spicy spinach with potatoes, sweet tea, and the like. Nancy even orders dessert: dreysil, which is normally only served on H.H. D.L.'s birthday. I guess if you're running a Tibetan restaurant in Somerville, every day is H.H.D.L.'s birthday.

I want to go home right away, but inexplicably the car turns the wrong way and heads toward Harvard Square instead of toward home. I manage a bit of a second wind and escort Nancy to the jazz department at HMV. Then, instead of my usual thing of waiting interminably for her to browse every bin, I take off for the Harvard Coop promising to return in 35 minutes. See, I have this notion that since I'm in Harvard Square I might be able to get a copy of the Loeb Classics edition of that Columella thing on agriculture that Thoreau mentioned in his journal. There it is on the shelf. Three volumes. Which to buy? The third volume has books XX-XXII and the separate manual on trees. Book XX is the hexameters on gardening. So it's convenient that what I most want to read is all in the same volume. I sit down and start reading, liking it better and better as I get into it. Man, if they had taught this in Latin class instead of Caesar's conquest of Gaul I would have paid a lot more attention. Fecundity can be fascinating. And come to find out, The Coop is having a sale so not only did I get the coveted Columella, but also a cheap paperback edition of selections from Pliny the Elder's Natural History (another thing they should've taught in high school Latin class).

Back in the friendly confines of my bedroom we listen to Nancy's newly acquired CD's and I read aloud from the gardening poem and the manual on trees. Nancy likes it is a much as I do. Who knew ancient Roman treatises on agriculture were this sexy?