I went for a walk this morning to capture some beautiful windows I have been noticing lately and also caught this fractured image of myself in the antique panes of the local Legion Hall.
Category Archives: windows
And I Woke Up Happy
Last night I dreamt that my husband and I lived in a white clapboard house on an urban industrial street. Its pale painted interior held many of our current belongings but we had no children and had spent much of the summer away from it. We returned home one dusk to find a circular hole in the glass of a the outer metal door, and then the wooden inner door’s top window had a similar hole in its glass. There had been a break in and I mused that we should have used light timers while we were away. We found the place cleaned out of all electronics and art and clothes and books and stuff. I was annoyed but mostly dispassionate, while my beloved set about the task of getting our stuff back. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. We drove a truck down the street to a gray corrugated tin warehouse. I don’t know how we got in but when we did there was everything that was missing, piled along the warehouse walls. We began to load everything in the truck, and as we did I noticed a small cherry wood jewelry box shaped like a tiny chest of drawers. It was just like one I had given him for our fifth anniversary many years ago, and I became convinced that, though empty, it was the same box. The box was stolen from our real house during a break-in in 1997, and here it was now, among the things taken in the dream. We hurried to finish loading before the thieves came back, and I climbed into the passenger seat with the box in my lap, so relieved to have it back and wondering if we would return to the white clapboard house or move on to another place.
A Love of Bricks and Ivy
The stucco house I grew up in had ivy all around one side and I admit to being less charmed by it then because pigeons were always flying in and out of the ivy and dancing on the air conditioner in my window. But once I moved south to St. Louis and then out east I fell in love with the red right angles and the fluttering greens vying for attention, and there is nothing like the solid, cool interiors and dappled light of a brick house on a sunny day.
I drive by this house situated behind a wall on what was once a vast estate (now merely a large one) all the time but there is no safe place to stop and take the photo, so on this stunning May morning I parked the car in town and walked a mile to get this and many shots I have been meaning to take. More to come.
Spring Thaw, with a Vengeance
Last week the roiling Nashua River escaped its banks and pummeled the abandoned mill buildings it once powered. Ten inches of rain fell over two days during the second powerful storm to hit New England in a month, taking all of the season’s snow and the contents of many cellars with it. This mill wall, with it’s bricked up window and stars whose purpose elude me, says so much about how much we struggle to manage nature. Harnessing and fighting its power at the same time; eventually giving up and letting it loosen and take the bricks with it downstream, one at a time.
Winter Window, Ipswich
This is the cottage at the entrance to The Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The colors in the roof tiles, the curve of the wrought iron entwined with the ivy and the gnarled trees in the winter sky all remind me of a faded photograph from another time, even though I took this today.
Early American window and door, just because
This window is at the top corner of the Haines House in Concord, Massachusetts. Built in 1813, it has shutters are made to work and most likely has layers of paint thicker than the walls of most modern houses. Below is the front door to the same house (currently an academic administration building at Concord Academy), where the wiring for the light had to be routed on the outside. The way all the exterior lines and shapes in these old structures can fit together into a coherent whole fascinates me – in modern times that approach doesn’t seem to work nearly as well, and yet here, it does. Are we more forgiving of older architecture just because it’s old or did they get something right that we don’t? I admit that I am more enamored of such places from the outside looking in – once inside, they tend to be dark and cramped and have a kind of slanted fun house quality because everything has settled unevenly over the centuries (and that funky wiring goes from quaint to dangerous).
More Windows
No story here. Just colors and shapes and light that make me unreasonably happy.
Opening Windows
Over the years I’ve taken hundreds – thousands, probably – of photographs of windows. I used to take days off from work in Boston and photograph all of the windows of the older buildings in Back Bay, the Financial District and at MIT. They give me a sense of place, I think, because once I have them I never know what to do with them, but they each have a story, real or imagined, and I suppose my intention was that sooner or later I would get around to writing it.
This window is in downtown Ayer, Massachusetts, and each morning as I drive through town, there are flocks of birds, barn swallows, I think, that swoop over Main Street again and again. Ayer is a town stuggling to reinvent itself after the nearby military base was closed, and sometimes I imagine that the birds are trying to breath new life into these too quiet streets. It looks a little like a Western town, with false facades on some of the buildings squaring them off at the top, and wide covered porches over the walkways. Fort Devens is where the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 broke out, and I have read Groton’s Town Diaries about the World War I soldiers who brought the virus and carried it far and wide, the deaths and quarantines and the great infirmary on the hill where the local folks went to recover. But that’s another photograph.
