Dans Papers - May 11, 2007

I've spent the last part of this week fitting out my house for the summer. Finally, the long, brutal winter, with its storms and cold snaps, harbor seals and high tides, is over and I can get things underway here.

I opened the pool, putting the tarp in the garage and the old chemicals in the trash.

I set up the hot tub on the front deck with water at 104 degrees and added chlorine, ph+ and anti-foam chemicals.

I took the old, battered American flag down from atop the flagpole, put up a new one and made a phone call to somebody who will come to fix the cleats and put new lines on the yardarm pulleys for the signal flags.

I started the hose irrigation system to bring water to the lawn and shrubbery. I wrestled the outboard into the back of the car and drove it to Sag Harbor where a guy will fix the starting rope we pulled out of its socket.

I talked to David about getting the sailboat in the water at our slip in Three Mile Harbor right across from the house. It's currently at Vanderveer's Boat Yard, where it's been all winter.

We put out the barbecue, the deck chairs and the umbrellas.

I rolled out the 48-year-old antique convertible sports car I own from the garage and opened the hood to check the oil, water, brake fluid and gasoline. Then I sat in it and turned the key. And nothing happened. We got the jumper cables out of the Tahoe, set the two vehicles side by side and jumped the little old TR-3 convertible. We'll let it run a while to charge the battery.

I oiled the salute cannon, put the dogs in the library, put the earplugs in and fired a ten gauge blank in a great puff of smoke toward the buoy just off Gardiner's Marina. Just a test. Usually, we fire it at sunsets.

And then I turned on the waterfall. Years ago, I set up a rig on the second story trellis overlooking the pool, where a hose attached to the pool circulator climbs up the side of the house two stories and fires a great display of water high into the air and down into the center of our swimming pool.

And so, this morning, the morning after we did all this, we sat out on the deck and listened to the waterfall splash into the pool while we ate our breakfast. The flag snapped in the wind. The dogs sniffed the salute cannon, the hot tub rumbled and we began to consider how nice it is to live in New York and have the changing seasons, rather than, say, in LA, where it's all just boring all the time.

And we began to consider that the long brutal winter, with its cold snaps, nor'easters, harbor seals and high tides is now just a memory, and in a couple more weeks, we will begin enjoying the upcoming heat waves, hurricanes, high tides and mosquitoes of summer.

First, of course, we're going to have to deal with the Carpenter bees, who have hatched up in the crawl space in the attic and are, like great black marbles, big as your thumb, buzzing curiously around, discovering their own springtime for the first time yet again.

Then, of course, we have to do the whole thing backwards in October.