06 December 2010
Plants
(Tropical plants serving as a green curtain. Photo Socotra.)
It snowed down south, white stuff blanketing the Carolinas. That means that the deep trough of the jet stream is way beyond us, and also that we are liable to get smacked any time from here to next March.
I was working on the plants over the weekend, in between having a serious bout of writer’s block on the issue of the Quarterly I need to get to the lay-out people this week. I had hoped to complete work yesterday, but it was not going to happen. Some of the Christmas lights from last year were burned out, and it was one of those two-trip-afternoons to the Ayers Variety and Hardware store in the Westover Neighborhood.
I actually made a pass at the mega-Target on 50, near Seven Corners, but it was so jammed in the parking lot that I realized if I actually succeeded in parking the Bluesmobile I would be quickly overwhelmed in the vast aisles of the Big Box.
I kept going up to Patrick Henry Drive and motored up to Washington Boulevard to turn left into the Westover neighborhood, which retains the old sprawling look of the garden apartments that Buckingham is losing as they knock down the blocks.
The companion building to the massive Madison at Ballston Station four-story structure that holds 235 apartments is being gouged out of the soil to provide underground parking. Along George Mason drive, luxury townhomes are going in to mirror the ones just completed on the north side of the road.
George Mason originally was a closed loop road, with purely ornamental curves to break up the sight-lines, part of a total vision for Buckingham Village that no longer works.
Now the traffic hurtles down the road, using it as a cut-through between north and south Arlington.
It literally is worth your life trying to get across, and it makes me a little nervous waking on the sidewalk only feet away from the massive SUVs careening down the narrow two-lane.
The Arlington Green Part joined local activist groups in an attempt to protect the remaining 456 affordable apartments at Buckingham Village from being replaced with expensive condos, townhouses, and high-rises. It was one of those desperate rear-guard actions that was doomed from the start. What they succeeded in doing was preserving a knot of working poverty in the midst of homes that will go at prices starting from the high-800’s.
(Corner of George Mason and Henderson, Buckingham Neighborhood, Arlington VA. Photo Socotra.)
I guess that is good. It means that the recession here in Buckingham was only a hiccough. There never was any doubt that this area was not going to be re-imagined, just as they are attempting to re-imagine our government and the way it works downtown.
There is nothing like a lame-duck session of Congress. They actually came to work on Saturday to conduct some political theater. It looks like the tax cuts of the Bush era are going to be extended for some period of time.
In order to keep going, we are apparently going to continue to dig the same hole we have been digging for the last decade, even if people seem to generally agree that what we are doing is not sustainable.
That goes for Arlington, too, I thought, all appearances to the contrary. I swung the Bluesmobile into the lot at Big Pink, one of the last places in town that has plenty of reliable surface parking. In the midst of uncertainty, I decided on optimism. I put up the new LED lights I bought at Ayers around the plants that have grown thickly across the big plate-glass window, and which filter the gray light in soft tropical green.
I was satisfied with the look, and did the weekly watering that seems to have kept them in good health. The plants have worked out better than most of the other projects of the last decade, and certainly better than the economy.
But what the hell, I thought as I poured water gently on the tropical plants. Learn from doing. Keep watering, re-pot when necessary, and maybe this will all work out.
Happy Holidays!
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