Smells like Rain

The hunter sat waiting and looking up in a beech-wood. “The leaves were whispering faintly over my head,” wrote Ivan Turgenev. “You could have told the time of year from their whisper alone.”

“Partly cloudy, wind NNW, 62F,” a weather app might have reported. But there was no weather app. Turgenev wrote those words in 1846.

Recently I noticed that I was checking the weather a dozen times a day on my smartphone, tracing the rain on radar, and completely missing the experience of the weather itself.

So for the last six weeks, I’ve turned off the app and rediscovered the smell of rain. I’ve watched the leaves on live oak trees, suffused with red violet at dawn, and tried to guess the weather from their whispering. I like this new freedom.

The other day, after I’d cut the grass and raked the paths, I sat outside sniffing the weather at sunset. The grass was soft. Clouds drifted by. Night descended.

A weather app. on someone else’s phone probably read, “Rain, 40% precip., wind SW 4 mph; 67F.”

I heard a cricket chirp.

The Laughter of Children 

“My neighborhood is so damn quiet,” a friend said. “When we moved in thirty years ago, children were everywhere. Now it’s quiet and all of a sudden we’re old.”

Just then laughter parted the air. Children were playing nearby. “It’s the Woodruff kids,” my friend said with a smile. “A new family has moved in.”

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. said that the most segregated time in America is 11 a.m. on Sunday, so the most segregated place in America may be a suburb, segregated not only by race but by income and age.

As random and incidental as it may seem, children’s laughter can be a sign of a healthy street. Outdoors, it implies that the streets are safe, that grownups are nearby, that a sufficient stock of affordable housing is available, and that there’s a mix of young and old. It suggests that people outside the family care for others.

Neighborhoods may be prized for their zip codes, oak trees, lofty mansions, distance to the airport, and elaborate holiday displays. For myself, I’ll settle for the laughter of children.

For the first time in twenty years, my friend bought some chocolates. Halloween was coming.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Most of us remember where we were on September 11, 2001, just as an earlier generation remembers where they were when John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. When I visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, I found another place that I would never forget.

I visited the memorial with two friends on a Saturday afternoon. We approached it by climbing a grassy hill that overlooks the original Capital of the Confederacy – Montgomery -- once a center of the slave trade.

We came to a memorial like no other. Suspended from a concrete roof were 805 steel monoliths the size of coffins inscribed with the names of over 4400 African Americans who were lynched in America between 1877 and 1950. All were lynched by white people.

An unknown victim was lynched because he asked a white woman for a drink of water. Parks Banks was lynched because he had a photograph of a white woman in his wallet. Mr. Al McCamy was lynched in Dalton, Georgia, for touching a ten-year-old white girl.

Volunteers have collected earth from the site where each lynching occurred. The collections are displayed in rows of clear glass jars beneath the monoliths. Some of the earth is red. When we left at dusk, many visitors were crying.

I noticed the care and tenderness of the guides at the memorial. How moving that in a place recalling terror, one can be touched by the love of others.

Tina

At dinner the other night my friend Tina was really upset. “My neighbor cut down the trees that shaded my house,” she said, “and the county tore down a perfectly good school, the school where my boys learned to read! ” Then, of course, there was climate change.

“Have a fig,” I said. “A fig from George’s tree.”

A fig tree planted in Raleigh, North Carolina, by George’s grandmother, who sailed from Sparta, Greece, in 1927, and landed at Ellis Island in New York. She packed a twig from her mother’s fig tree along with her bridal veil. Every summer its limbs are bent with figs the size of a hen’s egg.

For thousands of years, fig-trees have traveled the world as heirlooms.

Like hope.

Since the night we had dinner, Tina has started a farmers market in a parking lot not far from the torn-down school, she’s looking at trees to plant to give her shade, and seventeen-year-old Greta Thunberg sailed to New York to excoriate the do-nothing world leaders at the United Nations about climate change, sailing past Ellis Island and tracked by young people all over the world.

With hope.

And George’s fig tree looks like it may produce a bumper crop next year.

A "groundbreaking journal" with "stunning visual style" and "a record of editorial excellence." These are all comments from the 2019 ASLA jury on presenting LA+ with an ASLA award in the communications category. We're honored to be recognized by America's national society of landscape architecture, and by such an eminent jury.

We'll be bringing you more stunning visuals shortly with the release of LA+ ICONOCLAST, our 10th issue, which documents last year's international competition to redesign New York's Central Park. It's truly fascinating to see the range of incredible designs the 380+ entrants came up with and we look forward to sharing this with you in coming weeks.

Also this month, we'll be launching LA+ Journal online. We'll still be producing our beautiful print journal through ORO Editions, but we'll also be offering digital issues on Issuu.com – accessible via our website. Stay tuned for more about the LA+ digital launch soon!

Finally, all of us at LA+ give thanks to our patrons, contributors, and most importantly, to you, our audience, for helping us to reach these wonderful milestones. We look forward to bringing you more of LA+ Journal's insightful and challenging interdisciplinary content and competitions in the years to come.

Tatum L. Hands
Editor in Chief

Will we choose fresh air or air freshener?

The news is full of woe: children at the border, riots in Hong Kong, a hurricane in the Bahamas. And just today the Environmental Protection Agency (sic) announced that it will cease restricting methane, a major pollutant in the earth’s atmosphere.

What can we do?

The psychologist Erich Fromm told his depressed patients to go to the zoo. Another psychologist recommended reading the I Ching.

For me, I like going to a botanical garden.

When I’m pained by the thuggishness of others, or sick, or simply lonely, noticing the diversity of life in a greenhouse can have a wonderfully restorative effect on me. Consider these desert plants at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden: how many colors and shapes there are, how no plant is ugly.

“The sight of that association of plants,” the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx said, “gives us the impression of a covenant for living together.”

I’m not sure methane would work out so well for me, or for the animals in the zoo, let alone children at the border, but as we all know, life started in a garden.