We decided to have a stoop sale this weekend because we heard it was going to be eighty degrees out and we had a closet filled to the door. The closet had gotten to the point that we couldn’t even remove anything without causing an avalanche.

On day like we had, Americans in other parts of the country will have a garage sale or a yard sale. Well, here in Brooklyn, we don’t always have garages and yards; but we have stoops. And therefore: stoop sales.

This was the second stoop sale we’ve had. Early on Saturday morning, I emptied the front closet and Caitlin rounded up other things from around the house until we had a tower of old and unused things to sell. We didn’t bother to tag anything and freestyled the whole time. From the moment we got out of bed to the point we had our first sale wasn’t an hour and a half.

Then we started advertising. It didn’t hurt that I put up signs on light posts and in the local laundromat but, when I needed something really effective, I grabbed a piece of chalk. I went up to the nearest corner of the busiest street and scribbled on the sidewalk on all four corners. Chalking a giant arrow on a high-traffic corner is the preferred style of stoop sale advertising and Brooklyn’s weekend strollers look for it.

Card tables would have been better but the ground sufficed since we had an old blanket. Caitlin hung all the clothes on the fence, the prettiest things face forward.

Don’t sweat it if your neighbors are having stoop sales too. Stoop sales are stronger numbers. Think about it: aren’t you more inclined to veer off down a side street that has multiple stoop sales instead of one? On Saturday, we were the only stoop sale on our block and it was a decent day. But on Sunday, when we were one of three, we were really busy.

We eventually sold I’d say 75% of what we put out. We hung out with friends, met our neighbors and pet lots and lots of dogs. I also learned a few valuable lessons; for example, trying to sell your Swifter cheapens the entire mood of your stoop sale. At the end of the night, we left stuff out for free until eleven then bagged up what was left for garbage.

We made money and had fun doing it. We can now walk into the front closet.

To you loyal modern anachronists, did you notice what I’m selling in the foreground?

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Not a month since we learned that reforestation efforts are part of Detroit’s revitalization, we have this from the New York Times regarding efforts to rethink Michael Moore’s beloved Flint, Michigan and what should be done with what’s left of it:

Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.” [...]

On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year — one of many savings that shrinkage could bring.

Mr. Kildee was born in Flint in 1958. The house he lived in as a child has just been foreclosed on by the county, so he stopped to look. It is a little blue house with white trim, sad and derelict. So are two houses across the street.

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

This is bold stuff but I expect we’re going to see more of it. This combined with the Detroit story some weeks back recalls the Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers” for me. At the very least, these regions are doing the right thing for their cities, their people and their environment.

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I had heard about the Artists’ Cemetery in Woodstock last July while I was up as an artist-in-residence at “Byrdcliffe,” a turn-of-the-century artist community that offers studio and living space to artists (and writers) on a monthly basis. Many of the legendary artists who had worked and lived up in Woodstock were buried there at the Cemetery, including Philip Guston, Milton Avery, the founders of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony: Ralph and Jane Byrd Whitehead, and many other poets, musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, and dancers.

Finding myself back in Woodstock last week on a sunny brisk day, I ventured down Rock City Road and walked left, across the street from the town cemetery, down a dirt path and along a small grassy hill. I saw a girl, maybe 25, wearing long black braids and hippy dress sitting next to her parked car making a painted sign on poster board. She asked me for the time, I asked her the way to the Artists’ Cemetery. We both grinned and she directed me through the tree line behind her.

Coming through the trees I came upon a long sloping grass-covered hill peppered with flat-lying stone rectangles: the Artists’ Cemetery. Artist names were carved into the faces of the slabs, some crudely scratched, some decorated in Art Nouveau period type with organic designs, and some had reproduced the artists’ signatures like an autograph. Some stones were placed and clustered among the roots and low sweeping branches of a bordering tree, while some were in the bright sun, marching up the hill like an angled chess board. A tall stone monument, backed with dark bushes, crowned the top of the hill.

At the very bottom of the slope I saw something glittering gold, and discovered the autograph of “Philip Guston” on a rectangular slab placed next to the identically sized stone for his wife Musa. Up the hill and slightly to the right I found plainer, squarer stones for Milton and Sally Avery…”signed” as well but forgoing the gold for a plain engraving. 

Soon it began to feel like a type of Easter egg hunt, trying to find names I recognized, wondering about those I didn’t, admiring the more decorative designs. Not a human sound intruded; I heard a bird song, a soft rush of wind through a branch, otherwise silence. 

The history of Woodstock’s rival artist communities was reflected in the somewhat cliquey placement of artists’ stones with like-groups, notably recalling the feud between the Whiteheads and Hervey White, who broke from Byrdcliffe to begin “The Maverick” arts colony in 1905, and later The Maverick Festival in 1915. The festival raised money yearly to fund the colony and invited costumed revelers to come and cook over fire pits, play music and revel in bohemian extravagances…often times clothing optional…foreshadowing a better known festival to come in 1969.

A man with white hair sat reading on a stone bench at the far side of the hill. He commented on the special silence of the place and mentioned that in his travels elsewhere nothing could match it. An artist and teacher, he told me that sometimes stones were found missing and would turn up in so-and-so’s local back garden. A shame, because I feared old Hervey’s had met the same fate, as he was nowhere to be found.

Call me a romantic, but I couldn’t help but feel that the peace perhaps came from the resting souls beneath, satisfied they had given their lives to their heart’s work, and left behind an immortal gift to the world.

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In an effort to bring in more modern anachronists, this page has been finding ways to stay linked through Facebook and Twitter.

As you may have seen in recent months, each story on this page ends with a ‘Share on Facebook’ link. This allows you to post your favorite Modern Anachronist stories as links through your Facebook profile.

In addition, what with all the excitement about Twitter, I have been providing links to the Modern Anachronist through a Twitter feed. (I’m probably not using the right terminology here.) You can stay up to date with the Modern Anachronist here though it’s probably easier just to directly visit this page.

For the Modern Anachronist’s Twitter icon, I chose a Peake portrait of Henry Knox, my favorite hero of the American Revolutionary War. A Boston bookseller, Knox’s earliest accomplishment was hauling tons upon tons of heavy cannons from Fort Ticonderoga north of Lake George through the winter forests to Boston; this was the key to Washington’s first victory over the British (and his last for many months). Knox thus became Washington’s artillery man and closest confidantes in the Continental Army. Knox later became the first Secretary of War and is the Knox in Fort Knox.

There’s much more on Henry Knox to come on this page but, in the meantime, you can keep your other favorite Modern Anachronist stories linked through Facebook and Twitter. I prefer to keep up on my favorite sites by bookmarking them with CTRL + D.

REFERENCES

Henry Knox (Wikipedia)

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I often get the pleasure of visiting the Connecticut woods of Eric Sloane lore as it is close to my family’s home. It’s one of my favorite places to walk and, just two weeks into Spring, Caitlin and I went hunting for signs of Spring.

Looking up into the trees, it is still winter. It is hard to imagine that, in just a month, this forest will be glowing green with Spring.

I grabbed a low branch and examined more closely. A green little bulb that will soon be a fan of leaves. I kept looking; the tip of every twig of every tree revealed that Spring is here.

We walked farther down the road to find more signs of Spring. Aside from the occasional briar bush or a row of tulips planted on someone’s property, the forest still bore all the signs of a barren winter.

Until we came upon the place where Spring begins in every forest: by the water. In this case, a crick running down the side of Sleeping Giant and coming out to the road. Notice how much greener it gets closer to the crick at our left.

We followed the crick up the rocks where the water was moving more slowly. There, thick lines of moss blossomed back to life along the edge of the crick. A curious plant that looked like lettuce had sprouted up intermittently but more frequently by the water. (I need to find what this plant is called. It’s sturdy and has deep roots; I couldn’t pull one up. It also has an open leathery pouch with its seed lying loose inside.)

This crick runs through a chestnut conservation effort managed by the state of Connecticut. We went farther in kicking the big spiky shells of the chestnut seeds. (I dared not pick one up. Caitlin did and regretted it.) Far away from the crick now, we had returned to the brown, crunchy forest where Spring has yet to arrive.

We were not alone. I spotted a wild turkey. Caitlin and I chased after it but it hid somewhere over the hill and we didn’t get a picture.

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For centuries, men have gone to their public house to reflect upon the day. Before bars became singles joints or girls gone wild, they were a place for thought or conversation.

In writing that “work is the curse of the drinking class”, Oscar Wilde was making a joke of a time-honored tradition. Men (and women) have retreated to where there is drink and companionship when times are tough: the bar. The bar was not always a place of rowdiness and sloppiness.

So after a long hard day at the office, I reflect in the warm sight of a cool beer by candlelight.

If the Era of Responsibility were to extend to bar life (which it will not), the public house would again be a place to “take a load off”, not a place to get loaded.

(And maybe all our beer would be made of barley and hops, not rice and corn.)

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