I can’t really explain why I like this photograph except to say that there is so much going on with color and line and shape and content. There’s just a lot of information there set against a spectacular blue dusk. Taken in the rural community of Pepperell, Massachusetts, White Hen stores remind me of the city, and I was drawn to an urban image in a country setting. But horse crossing and hand-written schnauzer pup signs to tip you off that this is not Boston, after all.
More Than Freedom
As we write this, a ship carrying 2,000 U.S. Marines is on it way to Haiti to assist vicitms of the earthquake. America may be mired in conflicts that some deem questionable, but there is no mistaking that when disaster strikes, the world expects us to help, and we always do. The freedom to do the right thing is worth preserving, even if it’s not always clear how.
Photo taken at the Fort Devens, Devens, Massachusetts. Although most of the base has been converted to civilian use, it is still serves the Army and Marine Corps reserves.
Woman on the Street, Florence, 1992
Continuing in a mid-winter escapist mode, this is another photo from the 1992 trip to Italy (thanks to my beloved sister and her family). I took one roll of black and white film on that trip, and this shot uses that medium better than most – the neon elephant juxtaposed with the walking woman is what I was going for at the time but there is so much more to it now that its been digitized and the details are clearer.
Standing in a doorway, February 1992
Florence, Italy, February 1992
I went through the photos from this trip with fresh eyes this morning – the stark winter light and sharp shadows of the architecture seem both vintage and timely somehow. It was easier then to take photographs of strangers without seeming intrusive; whether it is me or the times that have changed I don’t know.
New Year’s Eve 1986
Just like today, it was snowing in Boston on New Year’s Eve in 1986. As we drove through Back Bay on our way out of the city, we recalled that not-too-long ago storm, which left the city quiet beneath several inches of snow. Newly engaged, we had just returned from Christmas in Saint Louis and had dinner with our best friends who were visiting from Washington, D.C. We’d all spent our first year out of school together, pooling our meager resources to share a plate of cheese enchiladas and a few Dos Equis from the Aculpulco on Newbury Street and watching the fourth of July Fireworks from the roof of our apartment building. Now we were all a little more settled and able go out for a proper New Year’s Eve dinner in the neighborhood. As we walked back to Beacon Street we were alone among the great trees of Commonwealth Avenue, we had an epic snowball fight in a city that belonged only to us. Then we walked down silent Marlborough Street, the golden windows making patches of light on the blue white snow. We were on our way home together, all setting out on journeys that would keep us close and push us apart at turns but still irrevocably starting from the same place.
May Your Days Be Merry and Bright
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. We are humbled to have so much and hopeful that the future will bring joy and peace to all who seek it.
Let Them Eat Red Cake
Whatever damage we sustained from overindulgence in red food coloring back in the 70s before it was yanked form the market for being carcinogenic seems to have subsided enough to allow for a resurgence in popularity of Red Velvet Cake. Red M&Ms reappeared a while back and now the cake, with recipes that call for less of the now safer red dye (but still a whole bottle nonetheless). Our mother’s birthday was on July 3, and she made red cake each year to take to the party up on the Cedar River on the 4th. Because this cake tastes especially good cold (it’s the cream cheese frosting), and the colors are right, it is really a great summer cake. And, as it turns out, nice for Christmas. I had misplaced the recipe that Mom used and recently found it in a recipe book put together by the Cook’s magazine folks. I will post the recipe itself on Parsenip later this week.
Signs of the times
This section of Ayer, Massachusetts, abuts the former Fort Devens. The area has been struggling ever since the U.S. Government closed the base in the 1990s. While the Devens Redevelopment Authority (it still has an Army Reserve Unit which houses lots of desert camo hardware – trucks and tanks and the like) has had some success in drawing businesses and a charter school to relocate or build there (with major tax incentives and subsidies from the state) the recession has nonetheless taken a continuing toll on the surrounding communities, which built their infrastructure throughout the 20th century on the population of soldiers and their families who lived near or on post.
Sometimes, Food IS Love
I don’t care what they say, it’s all about the whipped cream. One of my best early childhood memories is sitting in my highchair parked in front of a cut glass bowl of whipped cream. Total bliss.
If You Can’t Stop, Wave
There’s nothing better than when people make a little extra effort to do the right thing. This is the sign in front of the new Police HQ in Littleton, Massachusetts, and it stands on the site of a former farm stand, Stan’s Big Acres. Owned by the late John “Stan” Paskiewicz, the stand – a small red shack with a screen porch and a hand painted white sign with red writing – had a greeting painted on it “If You Can’t Stop, Wave.” Whenever we gave people directions to our house when we moved from the city, Stan’s sign was the landmark that reassured them they were not indeed lost and were, in fact, close to their destination (the other landmark was Bob’s Bait & Tackle – alas, it is gone also). Guests often arrived with cider or apples from Stan’s (no one ever arrived with bait from Bob’s – go figure) and even when I driving past alone I found myself raising a hand to Stan. When Stan’s closed the shack stood empty for a number of years, falling into disrepair, the sign still outside. We kept waving anyway. When Littleton decided to use the site for the Police station (and a beautiful one at that) some civic-minded person or group preserved Stan’s greeting on the new sign.
So, Stan’s is a Police station and Bob’s is a yarn shop. There are still signs of the agricultural life along the way home – farm stands, horse farms, fields of sheep and produce – but nothing quite like Stan’s, save for the red house directly across the street (below) that echoes his stand in it’s waning days; the future on one side the road, the past on the other. If you can’t stop, wave. Okay, then.
LettersHead 