Granted

I’d asked for snow, and my wish was granted. It snowed in Boston over the weekend, the cold drizzle J and I walked through on our way to see the Bruins on Saturday night changing into wet snow by the time the game was over. It was a magical moment when we emerged from the arena and stepped into a whitening world where snowflakes were falling like feathers.

It was a slippery, slushy snow: I wouldn’t have wanted to drive home in it. But we didn’t have to drive on Saturday night; we just had to walk to the T, and I’d worn my new winter hiking boots, which are warm, waterproof, and heavy enough to provide good traction.

By Sunday morning, we had the best of all worlds: bright sun, blue sky, and the novelty of fresh snow. Saturday night’s snow was dense and wet, so it clung to trees, creating the lovely look of a winter wonderland with every branch and twig outlined in white. Somehow, almost miraculously, this wet snow melted overnight from streets, driveways, and black-topped sidewalks, leaving the Sunday morning delight of crystal-bright whiteness with no real need for snow shovel or snow-blower: a winter wish granted.

Click here for a photo-set from Sunday’s winter wonderland. Enjoy!

 

December drab

It’s a gray day that feels like snow: a gray day that almost needs snow. We’ve fallen hard, it seems, into December drab, that season of bleary gray transition that needs the mitigation of snow to brighten it.

There’s a reason why folks long for the cheer of a white Christmas. In addition to the nostalgia and romance inspired by countless songs and greeting-card landscapes, a white Christmas brings a touch of brightness to a world largely lacking color and light. After the leaf peepers and the glowing, multicolored objects of their peeping have gone, what remains are gray days when the sun is noticeably on its way toward setting by mid-afternoon. Snow isn’t simply pretty; it’s like a reflective safety vest the earth dons on her darkest days so we can still see her–and still find light for our souls–after the sun has sunk. In a season starved for light, snow helps reflect and thus preserve every last ray, an essential kind of recycling.

Reggie is hunkered down, sleeping deeply; he knows the proper response to darkening days is hibernation, a diligent curling into oneself to rekindle every last spark of inner warmth. We humans, on the other hand, eschew hibernation, turning busy as the sun stoops in seasonal decline and rushing to buy presents and prepare for holiday celebrations as if merely moving will be enough to stave off sluggishness.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I saw a terribly ill-conceived ad that offered shoppers the promise of “Your holiday list for less”…except the design and font made it look at first glance like it said “Your holiday listless.” During a season when listlessness threatens to dominate, this ad unwittingly communicates the entirely wrong message. What we need on gray days isn’t more listlessness; what we need during the depths of December drab is the verve of holiday merriment and energizing inspiration of seasonal scents–pine sap and cinnamon, hot chocolate and nutmeg–to stir us from our stupor and drag us from the toasty cocoon of quasi-hibernation.

What we need during the depths of December drab, I hate to say, is the sight of snow to brighten our palette.

I took these photos yesterday, when it was sunny. The first photo illustrates how unseasonably mild it’s been: warm enough for houseflies to bask on fallen leaves. Today, it’s cold and rainy…with a forecast of snow.

 

Gone to seed

Wednesday is my catch-up day. I don’t teach on campus on Wednesdays, so I can sleep in and take a long, leisurely dog-walk before getting started with grading, online teaching, and other teaching tasks. Wednesday is when I run errands, do laundry, and catch up with housework. My Wednesdays always feature a full to-do list, “catching up” being a never-ending task. But because I don’t typically have to be anywhere at any particular time on Wednesdays, I can take my time chipping away at my midweek to-dos. Wednesdays are always busy, but they are busy in a relaxing way.

Now that November is over and I’m no longer committed to posting every day, I feel like my blog-mind has started to go to seed. This morning when I walked Reggie on the rail-trail where we often walk on Wednesdays, I couldn’t help taking lots of pictures of plants that have gone to seed, their tidy blooms replaced by fuzzy fluff, wizened fruit, or scraggly bracts. Last week or the week before, I would have stockpiled these Wednesday pictures to use throughout the week, but this morning I wasn’t pushing to feed the blog. Instead, I let Reggie off his leash, and we each walked at our own pace, stopping to sniff or photograph whatever caught our fancy. Instead of clinging to the blooms of seasons past, we allowed things to ripen into untidy seediness.

I think my fondness for flowers that have gone to seed is related to my fondness for weeds. Gone-to-seed flowers, like weeds, are scraggly, scrappy, and untidy. Gone-to-seed flowers, like weeds, have no place in a proper garden, as respectable gardeners diligently deadhead those blossoms that are past their prime. It should come as no surprise that for all my fondness for wildflowers and weeds, I’m no gardener, content to let my landlord keep my yard from falling into unbridled fecundity. If it were up to me, plants as well as dogs would be free to run off-leash, enjoying the leisure of commitment-free days to flower, fade, and fruit in their own time, not mine.

 

No more

I can’t promise to show you no more pictures of boring graffiti, but I can promise no more blog-posts for November, 2009.

When I announced my commitment to participate in November’s National Blog Posting Month by posting something (anything!) on each of November’s thirty days, I didn’t envision how quickly the month would fly by. But here I am on the brink of December with thirty posts under my belt: just like that, NaBloPoMo is no more.

Over the past thirty days, I learned it’s not too difficult to post something (anything!) every day if you keep a well-stocked photographic pantry to use on days when light is scarce and inspiration is scarcer. It also helps if you keep a daily journal you can plunder for posts.

More than anything, though, it helps to have an arbitrary commitment to post even when you feel you have nothing significant to say or share. There have been more than a few days this month when I’ve felt like Mother Hubbard looking at her proverbial bare cupboard, but I somehow posted anyway. In retrospect, it was good to have made the promise to post, because that promise kept me posting whether I felt like it or not. Some days you feel like you have something to say, and other days you don’t…but even on the days when you don’t feel particularly profound, you can almost always stir up something, even if it’s only a dirty, gritty version of stone soup.

Occasionally, it’s good to remind yourself that you don’t need huge, uninterrupted chunks of time to spend on your writing: just a few minutes here and a few minutes there can be “enough” if you’ve made a commitment to make good use of those minutes. A few weeks ago, at a particularly busy point in the semester, one of my teaching colleagues asked me if I’d found much time lately to write, and she seemed amazed when I replied that I’d been writing and posting every day. This particular colleague is a poet, and she says she works best when she can devote four or more hours to a work-in-progress…but I can’t remember the last time I had four straight hours that weren’t interrupted by work, chores, or social commitments. If I wrote only when I could steal four uninterrupted hours from my various demands, I’d never write at all. I’m lucky, I think, that prose is so much easier to write than poetry: a genre I can literally squeeze into the tiny gaps in otherwise busy days.

November is ending right in the nick of time, as December is the busiest, most grading-intensive time of the semester: it will be good to have one less arbitrary commitment to worry about these next few weeks, when I’ll be facing a seemingly endless series of seemingly bottomless paper piles. Whereas blogging can (and does) get squeezed into those occasional moments when I find or make time, paper-grading really does require the kind of uninterrupted concentration my aforementioned colleague devotes to poetry.

I don’t see any poem-writing in my immediate future, just a lot of paper-grading. Given the many to-do’s that stand between me and the end of my current semester, I’m happy to return to an unpredictably occasional blog-posting schedule, saying “no more, for now” to November’s NaBloPoMo commitment. It’s never too early, after all, to start stocking one’s pantry for next year.

 

Handyman’s special

They say the cobbler’s children have no shoes, and it seems the proprietors of Pill Hardware in Central Square, Cambridge are so busy helping other folks with their home improvement projects, they don’t have time to give their old sign a new coat of paint.

 

Fair and fowl

It’s become something of a holiday tradition for J and me to take a long walk on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year, we decided to leave the dogs at home and take a stroll to Newton Cemetery, where we’ve walked in the past.

J and I like to walk at Newton Cemetery for the same reason I like to walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Newton Cemetery is basically a pretty park where people happen to be buried. Because of the graves, the atmosphere at Newton Cemetery is quiet and tranquil: you can walk the roads without worrying that cars, joggers, or cyclists will run you down, and you can take your time looking at monuments without feeling like you’re hogging the view of other browsers, as I sometimes feel at museums. In a good garden cemetery, all the lanes are the slow lane, so you can enjoy a leisurely stroll admiring the landscape, remarking on the architecture, and paying your respects to strangers. Since Newton Cemetery is a gentle walk from J’s house, going for a cemetery-stroll feels like one way of meeting the neighbors, even if those “neighbors” no longer happen to be alive.

Walking in a cemetery also serves as an excellent reminder of how grateful you are simply to be alive. When J first suggested that we go to Newton Cemetery for our Thanksgiving walk, I quipped, “Ah, so we can spend Thanksgiving afternoon being thankful we’re not dead?” J immediately responded, “Yes, and that’s true everyday.” Ah, yes: a point well taken. Every time we’ve walked at Newton Cemetery, J and I have happened upon some particular marker that stops us cold, whether that’s been a tombstone with my name on it, the grave of a local victim of 9-11, or an entire field of war dead. This trip to the cemetery, we spent a lot of time looking at markers of the recently deceased, many of which had been decorated for the season by grieving family members. There’s nothing like a tombstone bearing a autumnal bouquet from a grieving widow (complete with a greeting card, “To my husband on his birthday”) or a yet-unveiled stone for a stillborn infant (freshly adorned with toys and with the carved inscription “Step softly, our dream lies buried here”) to make you realize how lucky you are.

And then there are the waterfowl. Like most garden cemeteries, Newton Cemetery has several ponds that add a quiet, contemplative tone to the landscape, and like most cemetery ponds, the ones at Newton Cemetery are popular with ducks and geese. During a cemetery stroll last spring, J and I chatted with one widow whose decision where to bury her husband was decided in part by the ducks and geese of Newton Cemetery. Over the years, whenever she’d visit her husband’s grave, she explained, she and her children would bring stale bread to feed the waterfowl, making an otherwise sad visit a bit more happy. “My children love it here,” she explained, gesturing toward her now-teenaged kids. “One of my sons said the other day that this cemetery isn’t a dead place, because there’s always something new to see here.”

Always something new to see, indeed. Just when I’d thought that the waterfowl of Newton Cemetery was limited to the usual mallards and Canada geese, on Thursday we spotted a half-dozen hooded mergansers who carefully kept an entire pond between themselves and our impertinent camera lenses. Apparently even a cemetery doesn’t always provide the privacy that wild ducks crave, at least when the local paparazzi are taking a stroll.

Click here for a photo-set of the various waterfowl we saw on our Thanksgiving Day stroll at Newton Cemetery. Enjoy!

 

Gossamer

J and I are really low-key when it comes to the holidays. Our shared attitude toward Thanksgiving is very similar to our shared attitude toward Valentine’s Day: if you’re grateful (or in love) 365 days of the year, it’s not hugely important to feel extra grateful (or extra in-love) on an officially sanctioned holiday. If you’re grateful (or in love) 365 days of the year, Thanksgiving (or Valentine’s Day) really is like every other day.

Yesterday morning, for instance, I took Reggie on our usual morning dog-walk. Along the way, I saw (and photographed) two different spider webs outlined in water-droplets: remnants from this week’s drizzly weather. Spider webs are even more difficult to photograph than raindrops are: spider-webs are often invisible, and even when you can see a spider-web, it’s often difficult to get a point-and-shoot camera to focus on something so delicate and insubstantial. Point-and-shoot cameras like to focus on things that are big and obvious, so something as gossamer-fine as a spider web is a tough capture.

It feels silly to admit it, but when Reggie and I got home from yesterday’s otherwise ordinary dog-walk, I felt absurdly grateful to have seen and photographed spider-webs: not one but two instances of serendipity in a single morning! Counting “spider webs” among one’s Thanksgiving blessings seems insanely sappy, but that’s how I felt yesterday morning. At that moment, “Thanksgiving” wasn’t a matter of counting big blessings, it was a matter of realizing the silly little things I appreciate each day: small blessings other folks might overlook.

On any given day, for example, I feel absurdly grateful to be healthy enough to walk the dog and tend to my work. When I come home from a long, tiring day teaching, I feel grateful to have a job that demands so much (every last bit sometimes) of my energy. Every time I go to the grocery store, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be able to fill my trunk with food, and I feel a similar sort of gratitude whenever I balance my checkbook or pay my bills. Beyond the basic blessings of having my health, a job, and enough money to provide food and shelter for myself, I find myself filling my journal day after day with scribbled sentences noting how satisfied I feel simply to sit at my kitchen table after another boring breakfast while Reggie lies sleeping on the floor. “I’m grateful for the sound of my dog breathing” sounds absurdly silly if you mention it as being one of this year’s blessings, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve said something similar in my journal, on plenty of days other than Thanksgiving.

I think we Americans need a holiday like Thanksgiving because most days, we live in a culture of complaint. When you turn on the TV, you’ll see talking heads shouting to see which political party can complain the loudest; when you turn on the radio, you’ll hear callers who have spent precious hours of their life waiting to voice their dissatisfaction with local sports, politics, or whatever. Around the office water cooler, workers whine about the boss, the workload, or the clients. At the local bar, you’ll hear folks complaining over cocktails about their partner, their mother-in-law, or their kids. Surfing the Internet, you’ll find a good portion of both the blog- and Twitter-sphere devoted to online rants and workday frustration. Venting is an important part of one’s emotional well-being, we tell ourselves, and complaining is one of the central ways we bond with other people. But why exactly should this be so? Why do we spend 364 days of our lives talking amongst ourselves about what’s wrong and only a single day-long holiday counting what’s right?

On this morning’s dog-walk, I noticed that both of the spider-webs I’d photographed yesterday were gone, having broken or been washed away under the weight of overnight rain. Now that those webs are no longer there, I’m even more grateful that I saw and photographed them yesterday when I had the chance. An annual Thanksgiving is like a point-and-shoot camera that focuses on blessings that are big and obvious, but most of the things we have to be grateful for are small, easy to overlook, and gossamer-thin. Today’s blessings might not be around tomorrow, so why wait another year to count those serendipities that can’t be numbered?

Click here for twelve random images from yesterday’s morning and afternoon walks around the neighborhood: a dozen ordinary blessings I’m grateful for.

 

Before they were sauce

In case you’ve ever wondered what the berries in your Thanksgiving cranberry sauce looked like before they got sauced, here’s your answer.

At last month’s final regular-season New England Revolution soccer match, the folks from Ocean Spray set up an artificial cranberry bog outside the entrance to Gillette Stadium, where soccer fans could see what a New England cranberry harvest really looks like. Cranberry vines grow in marshy areas, and the fastest way to harvest cranberries is to flood the entire area, a process called wet harvesting. Once the vines are covered with water, machines called water reels rake the berries from the vines, and the cranberries–which contain pockets of air–float to the surface of the water, where they are gathered by growers.

The artificial bog outside Gillette Stadium had all the accoutrements of an actual cranberry bog: potted cranberry vines along the border of the bog, thousands of floating cranberries, a working water reel, and three men in hip-waders who stood up to their shins in wet cranberries while answering questions and chatting with passersby. In mid-October, it seems there isn’t anything lovelier than a New England cranberry bog, even if that cranberry bog is only a reasonable facsimile of the real thing.

Although I’ve never been much of a fan of cranberry sauce, I regularly drink cranberry juice. When I was growing up, my mom raved about the health benefits of cranberries, especially noting cranberries’ legendary ability to help women avoid bladder infections. The folks from Ocean Spray weren’t handing out any free samples of cranberry sauce or cranberry juice, but they were handing out packets of dried cranberries, which are just as tasty as a tall glass of cranberry juice. I guess that’s one more thing to be thankful for.

Click here for a complete photo set from the cranberry bog at Gillette Stadium last month. Whether or not you’re eating cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving, I hope your holiday is safe, restful, and happy.

 

Undeterred

This morning, I dropped my camera…again. Today was another gray, drizzly day, so I was taking more pictures of raindrops, and while I was fumbling with one gloved hand trying to slip my camera into a rain-protected pocket in my purse, my camera slipped out of my hand and crashed onto the wet sidewalk below.

Again. My everyday-use camera already looks like it’s been through a battle, and perhaps it has: I use it, after all, nearly every day and in nearly every weather. I first dropped it last December, when I fell down some steps while taking an oddly angled shot, and ever since my everyday-use camera has had a badly dented lens housing that prevents the lens cover from opening and closing completely. Today, at least, my camera was off when I dropped it, so the telescoping lens-housing wasn’t extended and thus didn’t get banged up any more than it already was. But the impact of the drop was hard enough to jostle the memory card out of place, and now the lens cover doesn’t move at all when I turn the camera on or off. Ooops.

The camera itself continues to work, however, as these shots prove. I’ve learned over this past year that a camera doesn’t have to look good to take decent pictures as long as you remember a few simple things. If your automatic lens cover no longer works, for instance, you’ll occasionally have to open it by hand; otherwise, you’ll get shots with a dark shadow in one or more corners from where the lens cover was still partially extended. Similarly, if you’re shooting with a banged-up camera, you have to remember that a camera without a fully functional lens cover will fog up after you come inside from carrying it in your pocket on a cold day. But these limitations aren’t too troublesome if you accept them as a necessary part of using a well-used camera.

Now that I’ve taken a year’s worth of pictures with a banged-up camera, I’ve grown rather fond of the thing. We all have our battle scars, and I’d like to think that they attest to the strength of our character as well as the depth of our experience. Now that I’ve taken a year’s worth of pictures with a banged-up camera, I’ve determined to continue using it until it is truly is worn out…or until I’ve dropped it one too many times and dies completely. In the meantime, I’ll keep shooting in all weathers, undeterred.

 

’tis (already) the season

Usually, I have an attitude of “bah humbug” when stores debut their Christmas displays before Thanksgiving. In my mind, displaying too much Christmas too early simply pushes the hand of time, and that’s never a good thing. Instead of pushing consumers to think about Christmas months before the first snowflake falls, I personally believe businesses and their customers alike should follow “a predictable and leisurely seasonal succession, with September bringing fall foliage, October bringing pumpkins, November bringing turkeys, and December bringing Santa.” No need to rush into a season that will arrive on its own eventually.

All that being said, I make a blanket exception for the Christmas shop windows at Creative Encounters, an art-supply and frame shop on Main Street in downtown Keene. Over the years and in various seasons, I’ve taken lots of pictures of their window displays. The windows at Creative Encounters aren’t large, but they are always colorful, interesting, and attractive. Just as the mannequins at Miranda’s Verandah always catch my eye, I always find myself admiring whatever is on display at Creative Encounters.

The Christmas windows at Creative Encounters debuted last week, more than a week before Thanksgiving, and I for once am not complaining. On these dark and increasingly gray days, I’m grateful for the spot of color and sparkle these well-designed windows offer. This year’s display at Creative Encounters features a three-sided kiosk that rotates before a wall with several framed mirrors, an arrangement that highlights the various products on sale while also providing a moving, changing display of colors, shapes, and reflections. It might sound strange for me to admit that I stood several moments so I could see the colorful kiosk cycle through its various arrangements, but I wasn’t the only one. Before I could approach the window to snap these shots, Reggie and I held back for about five minutes while a woman and her daughter stood transfixed in front of the display, watching the artfully decorated kiosk turn around and around, offering a kaleidoscopic allure of light and color.