Chasing sunset

Because, perhaps, my Thursday night commutes to Massachusetts happen in the dark, on Monday afternoons I’m eager to arrive back in New Hampshire while it’s still light: a chance to get settled into my workweek apartment before darkness falls.

Today, I left Massachusetts later than usual, so I had to chase the sunset all the way back to New Hampshire, the sinking sun and a single sun dog blinding me with their double-barreled glare. Sun dogs, I decided, look like a sliver of rainbow; I wish my car had its own camera so I could have photographed the low-leaning sun with its polychromatic twin. Instead, I shot these photos of twilight clouds after arriving in Keene and stopping at the store for this week’s groceries, for woman cannot live on sunsets alone.

 

Surfaces

When I saw yesterday’s Photo Friday theme, Surfaces, I immediately thought of water. On Thursday night in my “Rivers & Literary Imagination” class, we discussed the way water works metaphorically in Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers. Thoreau is fascinated with the tension between a river’s surface and its depths, and he is obsessed with the way water is both transparent and reflective. In all his works, Thoreau shows a penchant for puns, and A Week is no different: when Thoreau uses words such as “reflection” and “depth,” he implies these words’ figurative as well as literal meanings, and he repeatedly puns on the word “current,” referring both to the flow of a river and the Present Moment in the flow of time.

Time can’t be frozen, but water can, and the Current of Time can be freeze-framed through a camera’s transparent lens. I shot the photo at the top of today’s post in August of 2007, while walking (and wading with) Reggie at Goose Pond in Keene, and the rest of today’s images come from December of 2006, when my fascination with the surface tension, reflections, and textures of freezing water influenced several blog posts. I can’t fish December, 2006 or August, 2007 from the depths of time, but I can rely upon these photos and blog posts to remind me of what was Current then. The images I sketched resonate with what was going on in my life at the time, and they provide a surface through with I can see, via the eye of memory, the depths which lay beneath.

In December of 2006, I’d just stuck a tentative toe into the waters of online dating, and I was left cold by its superficiality. The image of a religious icon might serve as a window into a deeper, more spiritual realm, but when your own self is reduced to a clickable thumbnail displayed alongside other lonely-hearts, it’s hard to believe anyone will see through the skin-thin veil of appearance to perceive the depths of personality lurking below.

I first clicked on J in January, 2007, and what attracted my scanning eye wasn’t his photo but the wry humor of his profile itself: in a sea of online romantics all claiming to enjoy sunset walks along the beach, J’s profile was the only one that made me laugh by making fun of the absurdity of so many people all trying to stand out by sounding exactly the same. When I emailed J to tell him I was grateful for a spot of humor to enliven an otherwise demoralizing activity, I wasn’t intending to flirt; having already given up hope that online dating could ever work for me, all I wanted was to share a laugh with another drowning soul.

That first email was a great way, I realize now, of breaking the ice: instead of starting with the usual online pick-up lines and virtual winks, J’s and my relationship began with a shared laugh. Ultimately–countless emails and three years of laughter later–it didn’t much matter what either of us looked like in our clickable profile-pictures: what made our relationship click was a quirky sense of humor that continues to the present. J made me laugh when I first met him in January, 2007, and he still makes me laugh now. Under the surface of a frigid February, I can look through the water of time to see a pattern that is still current.

This is my contribution to yesterday’s Photo Friday theme, Surfaces. You can click here to see my photo-set of “Frozen reflections,” shot at Goose Pond in December, 2006.

 

For rent

Apparently the apartment complex across from the Waban T-station has units for rent. I can’t quite tell if this squirrel is a prospective tenant or just a nosy neighbor.

 

On the fly

On Tuesday, one of my Keene State teaching colleagues remarked with amazement that it’s already the third week of the semester: didn’t the semester just start? Perhaps we’ve both slipped into the same time-warp, or maybe the short days of winter fly faster than other, longer days.

Already this year, it’s February; already this week, we’re turning the corner toward the weekend. I shot these images last Sunday, on a frigid morning walk before giving consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center; already, Sunday morning seems a lifetime away, with so many teaching tasks, household chores, and other to-list items being checked off between Then and Now.

This semester is fuller than usual for me, as I’m teaching three classes that are new to me. My old “Expository Writing” class has been reborn as “Creative Nonfiction,” and the two Environmental Literature classes I’ve mentioned previously–the “Literature of Birds and Birding,” and “Rivers and Literary Imagination”–are keeping me on my toes as I teach a tall stack of texts I’ve read but never previously taught. When I designed my syllabi for this term, I knew I’d be scrambling throughout the term: it’s one thing to have read a book before, even several times; it’s an entirely different thing to teach that text. When you prepare to teach a text, you read it in a different, more attentive way than when you read (or re-read) for pleasure, and this kind of super-attentive re-reading is keeping me busy.

Teaching a semester on the fly is a delicate game of cat-and-mouse: you spend a good portion of your class-prep time simply trying to keep one step ahead of your students. It’s a challenging task that demands mental energy and focus…and like any sort of chase, it can be exhilarating. When planning the three new-to-me classes I’m teaching this term, I consciously chose texts I’d want to read and designed assignments I’d want to write. Preparing to teach a class you’d love to take makes a huge difference, I’m finding. When I look at my to-do list and consider the texts I need to re-visit, re-read, and review for this class, the next, and the next, I feel more excited than exhausted. When other than this semester would I be paid to discuss interesting, interdisciplinary texts such as Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biographies, and Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers?

Several semesters ago, the first time I taught a class on “The Frontier in American Literature,” I told yet another teaching colleague that I felt I was making the class up as I went along. “Maybe that’s the best way to teach about the frontier,” he noted, and I think he might be right. Once you’ve taught a class a couple times, you get settled in your ways; like Thoreau at Walden Pond, you find your feet have beaten a path from your cabin to the water’s edge. The first time you teach a class, there’s no path: you’re like an Intellectual Pioneer venturing into the Virgin Land of your own mind. What happens if we approach tonight’s class this way rather than that? And how about we try something completely different next week?

My inner Neat Freak–the part of me that makes to-do lists, color-coordinates class folders, and designs and distributes elaborately detailed syllabi every term–can’t stand the thought of teaching on the fly: spontaneity sounds too much like wild, wanton disorder. But my inner Artist–the part of me that thrills to look at Audubon prints and thinks it’s really cool to teach a class on Creative Nonfiction–loves the fact that teaching is always an experiment: what happens when you read this text alongside that one, and what happens when you ask your class genuine questions that you don’t have pre-prepared answers for?

Teaching a semester on the fly–teaching a semester when out of necessity you’re making things up as you go along–is an excellent reminder that in a good class–in the kind of class I’d want to take–the teacher often learns as much if not more than the students. Teaching a semester on the fly feels a bit like flying by the seat of your pants, but when other than this semester would I be paid to do something so exciting?

 

Feathered ephemera

You know you’ve hit the aesthetic wall that is late January when you start shooting photos in your bathroom, it being too frigid outside to allow for much interesting photography. This time last year, I was suffering from snow blindness, a term I use to describe the mid-winter photographic lull you feel when you’ve grown tired of monochromatic monotony: “I find myself growing blind to the beauties of snow, which lies strewn and heaped like last week’s laundry: what seemed so lovely and picturesque in early December has outgrown its welcome by mid-January.”

Even in late January, though, moments of beauty occasionally burn through the inertia of white and gray days, and early this morning, it was this crystal-paisley tapestry that inspired me to bring my camera into the bathroom to begin with:

That’s my bathroom window just before 8 am, before I was ready to wake up for good; by 9 am, Jack Frost’s handiwork had melted like last night’s dreams.

Frost feathers are an ephemeral phenomenon in a season that feels never-ending; that’s why we so often miss them. What normal person brings a camera into the bathroom on a frigid Saturday morning before she’s ready to wake up for good? And yet, why does Jack Frost go to the trouble of painting windowpanes with such delicate brushstrokes if nobody will notice, marvel, and find a way to remember?

Frost-feathers are always ephemeral, and feathers of any sort are more difficult to find these days than during the hot heyday of summer. I cherish the down in the long, quilted coat I wear when walking the dog on cold and windy winter days, and I’m cheered to see juncos, sparrows, and an occasional robin flush at our approach, each of them warmed by a natural down coat.

When you’ve seeded your dreams with visions of frost-feathers, you’re more likely to find this same plumy shape elsewhere. And sure enough, on this morning’s cold and windy dog-walk, there were sparrows chirping and a robin clucking as I shot this image of ornamental grass frizzled into feathers.

 

Distant

In late January, memories of carefree summer days seem impossibly distant. Was there ever a time when it was warm enough to play soccer in shorts at the local playground, and will frigid temperatures ever again allow a friendly game of touch-football, shirts vs. skins?

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Distant. It was 10 degrees outside when I walked Reggie this morning; as I write this, the wind is howling with wind-chills in the negative digits. Spring (much less summer) seems very distant, indeed.

 

Crystalline

On Monday we had unseasonably mild temperatures and torrential rains which melted much of the remaining snow cover, leaving puddles of snow-melt that froze overnight into intricate crystalline shapes: the sparkle of geometric shards underfoot.

 

Hawk-eyed

Today was overcast: not a good day for pictures. But today was the day that one of Waban’s resident red-tailed hawks decided to perch low in a bare tree outside the neighborhood Starbucks–right in the middle of Waban Square, in other words, with its constant stream of cars and people on their way to enjoy Sunday brunch or lattes with their human compatriots. Apparently any day is a good day to perch wherever you want if you’re an impressive-looking red-tail. Who, after all, is going to tell you to move?

Had I seen this red-tailed hawk yesterday, when the skies were blue and I was carrying my larger camera, who knows what sort of image I might have shot. Instead, the only sort of raptor I took pictures of yesterday stayed very, very still while starlings made themselves at home on his outstretched wings.

Click here for several more images of today’s Waban red-tail. Enjoy!

 

Damaged

Stockpiling photographs is like owning a time machine that can zip you back in an instant from the monochrome monotony of a freezing winter’s day to a now-distant summer when the landscape was green with leaves freshly damaged by insects now dead, dormant, or flown.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Damaged.

 

Busy as a…

Throughout this week’s meteorological mood swings–thaw then snow then sleet then thaw–I’ve been scrambling to keep ahead of my schedule, with my online classes settling into their third week while my face-to-face semester started yesterday. At Keene State this term, I’m teaching two interdisciplinary “Literature and the Environment” courses: one on the “Literature of Birds and Birding,” and the other on “Rivers and Literary Imagination.” This morning I used these classes as an excuse to go dog-walking along the Ashuelot River, figuring any birds or riparian creatures I saw would serve as grist for the pedagogical mill.

I didn’t get any photos of the muskrat I saw grooming himself on the icy flank of the river, nor did I capture any images of the chickadees I saw foraging in the pines or the downy woodpecker I repeatedly heard calling from nearby trees. I did, though, record this sign of activity from a creature who apparently has been busier than even I’ve been these days.

Click here for a photo-set from today’s dog-walk along the Ashuelot River. Enjoy!