Tag: Artifacts
-
Relics Rhymed
I’m verily inspired by potsherds and beach glass, coal fragments, and other detritus churned up on Rosslyn’s waterfront. Or disinterred from the yard while planting a garden or building a stone wall. I stall awhile and meditate on the process of fragmenting and the potential for reimagining artifacts. I wonder about dark or damaged backstories,…
-
The Art of Thresholds
I’m slightly obsessed with transitions and betweenness. Liminality and interstices. Metamorphosis, reawakening, and transformation inevitably weave themselves into my words about gardening and historic rehabilitation. In fact, in a not altogether exaggerated sense, Rosslyn Redux is a kind of carefree contemplation of thresholds, the art of thresholds, and the artifacts of crossing thresholds… Transitions. Flux.…
-
The Past Lives On
The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards. — Margaret Drabble I return today to a recurring theme, a preoccupation perhaps, that wends its way through my Rosslyn ruminations and my collections of photographs and artifacts. While the past…
-
Artifacts & Ephemera: Regattas & Ferries
At a time when we’re inundated 24×7 with digital marketing and messaging, it’s fun to flip the calendar back 60+ years to some equivalent pre-digital promotions for regattas at the Sherwood Inn and Lake Champlain ferries (including the Essex-Charlotte ferry.) Today’s post highlights a few quotidian artifacts that offer a bridge into an earlier time.…
-
66% Done, 33% To Go
This is my 243rd Rosslyn update in daily succession. It completes an 8-month streak of daily old house journaling, the 2/3 mark in my quest to post every day for one year. I marked an earlier milestone — six months in and six months to go — with a summary of the aspirations guiding these…
-
Harvesting Ice
Today the sun came out, the temperature rose, and the snow began to melt. With work progressing in the icehouse my mind drifted to the days when this building would have been bustling with activity, teams of horses hauling loads of ice from the lake for storage. I imagined the bittersweet emotions that must have…
-
Broken & Unbroken
I’ve been reflecting a lot on vessels. Crockery, boats, homes, books, relationships, memories. And conditions. Conditions of vessels, the contents they’re asked to contain, and those of us who rely upon them, who contemplate them. The vessel above, a burly bowl, reminds me of another, gifted to us by Pam, crafted from a burl collected…
-
Genre Resistance
After a lengthy pause — a series of pauses, really, punctuated with intermittent updates — August 2022 marked my return to the challenge of *redacting Rosslyn* out of sprawling scrapbooks, flaneurial field notes, poetry and storytelling, lyric essays, monologues, and an avalanche of artifacts. One of the persistent questions that I’ve been exploring is whether…
-
Midpoint Milestone: 6 Months Down, 6 Months to Go
Yesterday was a meaningful midpoint milestone in my quest to post a Rosslyn update every day without fail for an entire year. Six months, 26+ weeks, 184 days. One new installment every 24-hours without fail. Rhapsodizing Rosslyn, celebrating our team’s accomplishments, soapboxing historic rehab and adaptive reuse, showcasing seasonality snapshots and historic Essex memorabilia, weaving in some hyperlocal haiku and…
-
Bowtie & Broken Memento
Bowtie & Broken Memento: Poem Amidst broken memento and fragmented hope, fractured sculpture and ruptured carpentry, a bowtie binds bitter ends. A patchwork harvest of homegrown cherry, felled and milled, cured and crafted, offcuts conjoined, scrappy remnants sewn in singalong, cradling conversation, cutlery, crockery, and nourishment. Sun soaked, finger tipped tenderly, inadvertently in thought, in…
-
Rosslyn Rapture: A Bronze Sculpture by George McNulty
After purchasing Rosslyn, George McNulty, presented us with a bronze sculpture born of his own hands and imagination. Standing with arms outstretched, extended skyward, the figure’s celebratory posture exudes joy and pride. In my view, McNulty’s miniature man appears to be celebrating or perhaps praising, arms reaching upward toward the heavens. Rosslyn Rapture, I’ve titled…
-
Camp Cherokee for Boys in Willsboro, New York
Have you ever heard of Camp Cherokee for Boys in Willsboro? If so, I’d love to learn more. So far the details are pretty thin… As we roll into the final days of 2022, I’ve been attempting to streamline my end-of-year projects. And while the prospect of simply deleting lingering items on the perennial punch list…