Our friends SN and LL, and their dog Dusty Moe, lived here for a couple of years, long ago. They were remarkable hosts, magnanimous and funny, and probably could have made a million dollars running a bed and breakfast in another life. The place itself was small and rustic, with all the basic necessities, and a soul soothing, four season river out in the back yard. We’d pitch our tent on the riverbank, and be carried off to sleep in its lullabies. And sometimes, at 4 AM, waking and walking under the stars, it was easy to look up, and reach out – across the continents, and the centuries – to anyone who ever gazed into a night sky, or listened to the sound of flowing water.
11/28 update: SN tells me that “.. thanks to last summer’s hurricane the love shack is now laying in two pieces upside down on a big pile of rocks…” Well, I guess mostly it was a “soul soothing river”, although come to think of it … one early spring day, I looked up the river to see two kayakers working their way down – the winter runoff was at its peak, the volume of water huge – they were proceeding 20-30 feet at a time before taking shelter in eddies to figure out their next move. My first impression was “pretty crazy”, given the strength of the current and the huge rocks in the riverbed, but when I saw their discipline, I could only watch in admiration, and wave as they passed by.
Tagged as:
animals,
autumn,
film,
VT,
yankee structures
The Essex Garden Club hosts an annual “May Market”, and a few years ago, I went looking for perennials that might be especially interesting to photograph. One of the club members steered me to some anemone roots, and they definitely fit the bill. That first year, they bloomed through the autumn into November. This year, however, rabbits cleaned them out, and rightfully so, given my procrastination with laying in the protective netting.
Tagged as:
autumn,
book,
CT,
current favorites,
flowers,
our back yard
Come the fall, as surely as the geese fly south, I go north. Vermont beckons, and I’m off: with my camera, with or without family/friends in tow, for a day, or a week. It’s an inchoate longing – some unconscious desire – that brings me to those back roads, and at some point I find what I’m looking for, and I’m ready to head back home. This year, “enough” came on the second morning of a planned three day trip, in the middle of shooting this scene.
Tagged as:
autumn,
book,
current favorites,
farms and fields,
trees,
VT
Many a visual artist will rave about the quality of early morning light. The surest way to become a believer? Go out and work in it yourself! The added reward (if out in the country) is the stillness of that time of day, occasionally broken by a dog barking across the valley, or geese in flight, or the low of a barnyard animal. The singular beauty of this light lasted about 10 minutes, before it shifted away to neutral tones.
Tagged as:
autumn,
current favorites,
farms and fields,
vehicles,
VT
