Tag: Reawakening
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Rosslyn & Reinvention
Reinvention is woven intricately, inextricably into Rosslyn’s DNA. This home, this property, this history endure some two hundred years (and more) after W.D. Ross first built his home on the Champlain Valley’s fertile shore in no small part because of this legacy of renewal. It’s as if Rosslyn, in addition to historic buildings and generous…
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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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Easter Color
Happy Easter to you from the Adirondack Coast where our seasonal reawakening is picking up pace with each passing day. And since spring is synonymous with the reemergence of vibrant lizard-like amphibians — most notably the red eft and the yellow-spotted salamander — it feels appropriate to substitute creatively died Easter eggs for a watercolor…
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Vernal Equinox: Barred Owl Sighting
Welcome to spring! It’s currently 43° at Rosslyn, on target to hit 46° shortly. Sun is out. Snow is melting. Bulbs are bursting. So many remarkable signs and suggestions that the vernal equinox may indeed have marked the transition from winter to spring (daffodils and daylilies perking up, an auspicious sunset cloud formation, a handsome…
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Meditative March
Mornings offer me moments of introspection, mostly optimistic meditations catalyzed by the dawning of a new day. A fresh start. So much pent up potential swelling. And like morning, springtime fills me with enthusiasm for what is possible. A seasonal morning. And so I’m finding myself lately absorbed in this liminal zone of daily and…
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Frosty Ferrying into Rosslyn
Heck of a homecoming my frosty ferry ride into Essex two weeks ago on January 25. Damp-cold. Socked in. Snowing. I was dropping in for team time, scope shuffle, timeline tuneup, perspective pivot, and a revitalizing dose of laughter with friends. Team Time As I’ve often touted, teamwork is the first, second, and third priority…
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Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil Foresees More Winter
Did Punxsutawney Phil see his shadow? Is spring around the corner? Are we headed into six more weeks of winter? In this high tech era of satellites forecasting weather from beyond the beyond, intricate algorithms gobbling gargantuan data sets, and media channels dedicated to analyzing and communicating meteorological mysteries in real time, we still get…
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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…
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Historic Rehabilitation
Once upon a time—starting in about 2005 or 2006 and concluding about a dozen years ago, if memory serves—I was on the board on Historic Essex (formerly Essex Community Heritage Organization, ECHO). Todd Goff, a fellow director, Essex neighbor, and friend, took it upon himself to correct me, differentiating for me “historic preservation” from ”…
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Are Icehouse Rehab Updates Achieving Objectives?
On October 18 I laid out some goals for my series of icehouse rehab updates. I’d already been posting for about two and a half months at that point, looking in depth at the summer’s deck rebuild. I intended to continue posting for the duration of our adaptive reuse project, transforming a late 19th century icehouse…
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This is Not a Metaphor
In the vintage postcard above — faded, blurred, and stained with touch and time — the historic lighthouse located at Split Rock in Essex, NY reigns over a promontory bearing a curious resemblance to an arboretum, more landscaped and less wild than today. A copse of diverse specimen trees here, a granite outcrop there, a…