Pale

On nights when nothing is stirring, when the trees hang heavy with humidity, I seek solace in ice-cold watermelon.For some reason, when watermelon juices are running down my chin I forget about the sweat trickling down my back. The riper and colder the melon, the more pleasure it offers.The other night, a steamer, I found myself slicing a chunk of reasonably cold, relatively ripe melon for my 12-year-old son and telling him watermelon stories. Both he and his younger brother are fond of the fruit, and watching either of them eat it is always a welcome sight.

News item: Kathie Lee Gifford's last appearance on "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" will be on Friday. Dear Diary: Well, this is it! My final few days on the show! Then it's on to a new career: singing and acting! Hope there's nothing wrong with Reege, though. Today I said to him: "Well, I suppose I could stay. I mean, if you really want me to stay, I'll stay." He got so pale! Then the poor thing had to lie down. Gelman reacted the same way. Hope they're both OK. They'll always mean the world to me. Dear Diary: You know what makes me so sad?

Had enough?Had enough silk velvet, mahogany, chintzes, tassels, swags, fringes, gilt, leopard prints, overstuffed cushions, period reproductions, black lacquer, elaborate window treatments, collections of collections, glossy finishes, mother-of-pearl, ostentatious opulence, frills, trills and decoration for the sake of decoration?Had enough of the '80s look?Then welcome to the beautifully simple '90s interior.It hasn't happened all at once, but there is a new American style: more serene, more sophisticated, less cluttered, lighter and looser.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Oliver North seems to view politics as a holy war. His opponents are not just people who disagree with him but people beyond the pale -- the "Washington insiders" and "the professional politicians" and "the Washington crowd."His message, he says, is the essence of simplicity: "This is our government, they stole it, and we're coming to take it back."He is all defiance. "I've got news for them," he says of his enemies, real or imagined. "They will never see Ollie North crawling up the steps of Capitol Hill to kiss their big fat -- rings."

Gardeners are forever looking for something to wrap a flower bed around. There has to be a bed along the front of the porch, and others might be carved out around a garden shed, a birdbath or the trunks of shade trees. For many people, there's another opportunity right out by the curb: the mailbox. A garden bed around a mailbox gives gardeners a chance to put their horticultural stamp where it's sure to show. In the midst of handsome shrubs, interesting ornamental grasses or hard-working annual and perennial flowers, a standard-issue mailbox on a post becomes a piece of functional art. When there's a flower bed to visit, the trip out to the mailbox is much more interesting, even if the postman brings nothing but bills.

For weeks, my inbox, Twitter timeline and ears have burned. Readers and colleagues can't stop talking about WC Harlan, a new bar in Remington. The praise has been gushing and unanimous. To them, WC Harlan is a wonder. But there was something else: The bar's owners - Matt Pierce of the local band Big in Japan and writer Lane Harlan - are not interested in publicity and would prefer we not list its address. During a time when bars hire public relations teams to generate buzz via social media and other outlets, WC Harlan would rather find success through solid execution and word-of-mouth marketing.

Fragrance is so fundamental to our experience of flowers and gardens that most people react instinctively when they see beautiful blooms: They put their noses in them. The delicate fragrance of a rose, the sweetness of jasmine and the heady perfume of lilacs have a magical way of making the hectic world outside the garden disappear, while the gardener breathes in a moment of peace. "It's imbibing a memory," Atlanta garden designer Ryan Gainey says. "I carry scents in my mind, and they are a possession that can carry me back to any time, any place."

WashingtonIn another life, an adopted child named Cathy Deupree fantasized that her parents had been killed in a car crash or a plane disaster, or even that she was somehow the offspring of aliens.After all, she reasoned, Superman -- her favorite comic book hero -- had come to Earth from the planet Krypton. And anything would be better than facing the possibility of having been willingly abandoned at birth.The girl grew up to be a woman who now calls herself Jett Williams. As she reached adulthood, she searched for her birth parents and found that her mother was a Nashville secretary named Bobbie Jett.

I've been advised to use diaper-rash ointment containing zinc oxide to keep my horse's muzzle from getting sunburned while he's grazing. I've been wondering if this would also work to keep me from developing a "horsewoman's tan." All of the sunscreens I have tried help me avoid sunburn, but I have brown arms from the edge of my gloves to the edge of the short-sleeved shirts. For decades, lifeguards have used white zinc oxide to keep their noses from burning. It blocks both UVA and UVB rays and provides excellent protection.

GREENWICH, Conn. -- No one was home when firefighters got to the tree-shrouded mansion on the evening of May 5. Inside, mounds of documents were burning in two fireplaces and in a metal filing cabinet, scorching nearby furniture.The firefighters doused the flames and called police, who found strange notations on some of the charred documents. The top line on a handwritten "to-do" list pulled from the fire read, "Launder money." The next line: "Get $ to Israel get it back in."Greenwich detectives and federal agents have been looking ever since for the owner of the $3.1 million house, Martin R. Frankel, 44. They also can't seem to find between $200 million and $3 billion in other people's money that Frankel, under several aliases, had been managing.