Read Ruffly Speaking for Free Online Page B

Brattle is just what it sounds like, the neighborhood off Brattle Street, but it’s also a way of life and a way of language. Off Brattle, you don’t inhabit a mansion; one has a big house. You didn’t go to Harvard, either; one was an undergraduate. It must be a required course, for God’s sake. Cambridge 101, Advanced False Modesty: The Linguistic Pragmatics of Less Is More.
    So Highland Street is Brattle without the traffic: big houses painted in earth tones, soft mauve, or a warm, pale yellow like homemade mayonnaise, old brick and natural stucco, and none of the aqua vinyl siding and gray asbestos shingle that still survive in my neighborhood, Fresh
    Pond, which is only a few blocks down Appleton from Highland, but on the opposite side of Huron, where a big; house is just that and isn’t apt to be all that big, anyway. But don’t get me wrong. Despite the muted mauve voices —earth tones, old brick—and the educated hues of the paint, Off Brattle is an intense study in color, and that color is green. In early June, Highland Street is like the masterpiece of an artist who worked green to its verdant limits, Henri Rousseau without even the ladies or the lions. Vegetable opulence.
    But here and there amid the wisteria-trimmed piles of stucco, the Victorian arcs, and the vast, restrained colonials resides the evidence that sometime not all that long ago, someone ran desperately short of cash and had to sell land. Morris Lamb’s house was one of the tattletales. To judge from its architecture, the era of need must have been the mid or late nineteen fifties, when Morris’s flat-roofed cube with its heavily framed plate glass windows must have looked daringly modem. Morris or one of the previous owners had tried to force-fit this angular peg into the curves of the neighborhood by painting its harsh uprights and cross beams an ultra-toned-down pale tan with just a hint of lavender, and by planting a miniature forest of low-maintenance, fast-growing shrubs around the foundation and all over the front yard. The camouflage was about as successful as ripping the tail fins off an old Caddie, soldering an upside-down peace symbol on the hood, and expecting the result to pass unnoticed in the new car lot of a Mercedes dealer.
    Rowdy and Kimi applied their noses to the leathery leaves of a rhododendron at the edge of the sidewalk in front of Morris’s house. Pleated blinds covered the windows. The two-car parking area next to the house was vacant. The shrubs were trimmed, and fir bark the color of redwood had been spread under them so recently that the air smelled strong and woodsy. The house looked neither inhabited nor uninhabited. There was no For Sale sign in the yard. Having learned nothing, I called to the dogs and moved along.
    Just beyond Morris’s, separated from his modem misfit only by a weed-free path and a narrow shrub border, was a three-story house with peeling cream-yellow paint and stark, handsome lines. The color was softer than the bright yellow of the Longfellow House on Brattle Street, and the Longfellow House wasn’t in desperate need of a gutter and roof job, but, properly renovated, this place would have had the same festive look of a three-tiered wedding cake. And, although there were stretches of lawn, the yard was mainly devoted to border after border of perennials. I stopped. My mother grew perennials. In fact, Marissa was a terrible snob about flowers. Not about people, I should add, or dogs, either, really, but flowers. She would have loved this place. Delphiniums were everywhere, along the front of the house and in profusion in the long, wide borders, where the heavily budded spires were beginning to stretch upward, but weren’t yet in bloom. Bleeding hearts and candytuft were on their way out, and the main sources of color were the blue forget-me-nots, columbine, and alpine asters, the pink coral bells, and the spreading clumps of magenta-flowered geranium sanguineum. Delicate white azaleas