Cape May Diaries
40- The icons of Washington Street.
This year we couldn’t find the place we called “The house of junk.”
This definition is deceiving because the house was as much in keeping with the grand parade of houses through that neighborhood as any along its block.
The yard, however, had become a repository of glorious junk, crafted into what we considered works of art – a style of which we had only previously seen in Woodstock, New York and in East Village neighborhood gardens.
Finding it as some point in the early 1990s, we had made it a regular stop in our personal walking tour of the historic district.
As with most things such as The Trade Winds store and the Christian Admiral Hotel, we mistakenly assumed the house and its yard of art would still be there each time we returned and its sudden vanishing – if it has indeed vanished – left us a little saddened with the loss of yet a little more of the original texture that had made Cape May so attractive to us, as the second most popular tourist attraction in the state polished itself into a more acceptable gleam that didn’t include such novelties.
Although, lawn ornaments serve as a secret attraction for us each year as we tour the neighborhoods to see what new items are on display. In fact, Cape May has several places where people can purchase some rather original lawn items, and one place on along Sunset Boulevard caters to this particular hobby, and we routinely stop there to see the selections of odd items offered each year. But you can find such items in many of the large antique stores particularly near the harbor.
Yet nothing gives us quite as much pleasure as finding them in a more natural setting either proudly posted in the middle of some property’s magnificent lawn or half smothered in a bed of flowers or leaves.
One trend over the last few years as been glass-like globes that might have evolved out of a science fiction film by Steven Spielberg, glistening with odd colors when fully exposed or like something alien peeping out from plants along a porch side.
Washington Street – going north from the historic fire house – is a particularly fruitful area for such discoveries. Many of the lawn ornaments we discover along these blocks have a Greek or mythological air, mostly white statures of various woodland nymphs framed by greenery that makes each seem magical.
A times, we catch only glimpses of some which some property owners have located in the rear of large yards, giving them that hazy almost twilight impression of shy deer grazing in a meadow. Many post their lawn ornaments up close to the sidewalk where we frequently pause to admire them. While still others position theirs in clusters giving us the feeling that we have stumbled into some magical meeting out of films such as The Lord of the Rings and that we can soon expect to be whisked off on some madcap adventure.
Over the years, Sharon and I have developed favorites to which we revisit as if checking upon their progress. I am partial to a winged nymph – which is clearly not an angel (although someone might mistake it for one) – that sits in the middle of an amazing property full of bushes and paths. This nymph blows on a silent flute.
Sharon tends to like those statues that depict more natural creatures such as rabbits and deer, though she is always quick to point out some new object I had missed. She also greatly admires lawn statues that roughly resemble the kind of creatures typical to adventures such as Alice in Wonderland or the original (as opposed to the Disney version) of Winnie the Pooh.
Yet more popular in our minds than even the most graphic of those we normally find were the treasures we encountered on the front yard of “the house of junk.”
Part of the attraction is the fact none of the stores in town offered any of these for sale – although I suspected the home owner/artist must have been offering to sell the object we saw explaining why they littered the lawn as they did.
Each item was utterly original; a one of a kind piece that once purchased you could be assured would not find a duplicate gracing the lawn of any neighbor. Each object seemed to have come out of the imagination of the artist, using items that had previously served in a more practical capacity.
My favorite was a dragon fly that was as large as a red-tailed hawk with four wings fashioned out of the blades of a ceiling fan. Sharon liked a dog whose face was made from the blade of a shovel. One tree-like ornament had multi-colored bottles protruding from the end of each branch. Bottles, tiles, old machine parts, and a variety of other objects created a regular menagerie for us to gawk at each time we came – although I can’t recall any changes except the wearing of weather from year to year.
The small house – by Cape May standards – did not offer a large side yard the way many of the other properties did, so that nearly all of the objects stood in the small space between the front porch and the fence, giving off the strange impression of alien zoo, overcrowded, and delightfully bizarre as compared with the sparsely populated lawns to either side.
Because we assured it would always be there when we got back, we took no note of the address or even the cross street, thinking we could never middle such an odd display.
Perhaps this year we blinked at the wrong time or turned our heads to some other attraction as we passed that property. Perhaps, sadly, like many good things the place has faded back into the magical world that inspired it, kept alive now only by our memory of having seen it as often as we had.
Ironically enough, after this was published, we discovered the house was not on Washington Street at all, but on a nearby street, and it still existed