Tag: Lifestyle
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Complaints: Top 5
What do you complain about the most? Such a mysterious adventure story, this thing we call life. Plot twists around every corner. Characters waxing and waning. Textures tangling and untangling, melodies braiding and unbraiding, hues shifting and sifting so subtly we wonder if we’re imagining it,… A mesmerizing mystery so pure, so pulchritudinous as to…
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Mary Wade Rock Art
Mary Wade’s Essex renderings are legendary. Her rock painting of Rosslyn’s boathouse depicts Rosslyn’s boathouse as viewed from the Essex-Charlotte ferry dock, an enterprise originally owned by her grandfather, if memory serves. This gift from Mary immediately became a favorite in our collection of her Rosslyn inspired creations. This certainly isn’t my first Mary Wade…
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Willsboro Mills Circa 1912: Grist Mill, Saw Mill, and Paper Mill
My October 19, 2023 look at the Phoenix Mills (through the lens of “preservation by neglect“) incited some interesting feedback. I’m planning a post to pass along some interesting new tidbits including the building’s name. (Think about the concept of “phoenix from ashes“, a myth that resonates with me personally and that surfaces frequently in…
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Friend or Foe: Dandelions
It’s that remarkable season of reawakening, spring, glorious springtime! And more than all of the other blooms that announce the season of unslumbering, Dandelions remind us that nature is nourishing and vibrant and brilliantly colorful. Routinely dismissed, even abhored, as an annoying weed, dandelions are for me a welcome harbinger of warming temperatures, greening environs,…
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Column Flanked Vestibule
Tucked into the folds of the icehouse rehab scope of work some accomplishments stand out more than others. The garapa paneling in the bathroom, for example, has been a long, slooow labor of love many months in the making. Many stages and many hands have shaped this initiative, so anticipation has been building for many…
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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…
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Homestead Haikus
I often refer to Rosslyn as a homestead, but I’m aware that might mislead some of you. No livestock. That’s probably the biggest deviation from most self proclaimed homesteads. No chickens. No pigs, sheep, or goats. No milk cow. No 160 acre land grant (though we’ve slowly grown Rosslyn’s acreage to more than a third…
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Connection with Place
I was recently accused, tenderly but definitively, of being obsessed with locale, and more precisely, with my connection to place. As a lifelong wanderer, this struck me as slightly ironic. And accurate. By now my fixation on hyperlocality and placeness (aka the poetics of place) have become inextricably woven into the entirety of Rosslyn Redux, the robust and…
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Camp-of-the-Pines
I turn afield this afternoon to share with you a growing collection of vintage postcards and miscellaneous artifacts featuring Camp-of-the-Pines in Willsboro, New York. To be 100% transparent from the outset, my aspiration is twofold: I want to solicit community knowledge about this [apparently] no longer extant Lake Champlain neighbor. I want to showcase our remarkably…
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W. D. Ross Artifact Discovered by Scott Brayden
That black-and-white photograph was a personal possession of, W. D. Ross, the man who owned and built Rosslyn almost exactly two centuries ago. And it was somewhat miraculously excavated from our yard by a remarkable man who good fortune brought into our path almost a decade ago. Remember Scott Brayden? It’s no exaggeration to claim Scott…
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Morning Meander
My best days at Rosslyn start with a mellow morning meander to the waterfront to watch the sun rise up out of the Green Mountains. Or to the vegetable gardens and orchard to pick fresh fruit while sipping my tea. Or around the property inspecting flower beds and deadheading peonies or whatever else has bloomed…
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After the Rain
Just when a couple of dry, sunny days had begun to feel familiar, even normal, the rain returned. It came down in waves upon waves. Streams and rivers swelled, the driveway became two coursing torrents, and the vegetable garden turned to soupy mud. Spirits slipped. And then slid deeper. But… as cocktail hour yielded to…