Tag: Rosslyn
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All Zipped Up: ZIP System Installation Complete
As it turns out, the snow-blizzard-cum-bomb-cyclone that hepped up meteorologists and newscasters, snarled traffic across the country, and added a decidedly wintery twist to the Christmas holiday for many across the country impacted us two totally opposite ways, one good, the other bad. Ever the optimist, I’ll launch with the glorious news: the icehouse rehabilitation…
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Winter Solstice: Longer Days Ahead
Welcome to day one of the Adirondack Coast‘s coldest season. Today is the winter solstice, the first official day of winter, and — more importantly for the likes of my mother and others who favor longer days and shorter nights — the threshold between the briefest day and the most prolonged night and imperceptibly-but-steadily lengthening…
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Architectural Salvage: Repurposed Columns
It’s time for another architectural salvage update, this time focusing on the Greek Revival columns that we salvaged from Rosslyn’s future dining room back in 2006 in the early days or our renovation project. Let’s dive right in with that photograph above, but first a quick semantic note. For the sake of this post (and others)…
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Preservation by Neglect: The Farm in Cossayuna
The Farm in Cossayuna, New York, circa 1975 (Painting: Louise Coldwell) Although long overdue, toooooo long long overdue, today I’d like to introduce The Farm in Cossayuna. Or reintroduce it, for those of you who’ve been with me for a while. I refer to it often, and yet I don’t usually contextualize my reference in…
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Is Home a Place, a Feeling, or a Relationship?
In the days since publishing “What Makes a House a Home?” I’ve been fortunate to enjoy follow up exchanges with many of you. It seems that we all have some compelling notions of homeness! Thank you for reaching out and sharing your often personal stories. I’ve mentioned to several of you that I’d like to…
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Sherwood Inn’s Boathouse Billboard
Does anybody recollect seeing the Sherwood Inn‘s boathouse billboard as photographed above. It’s well before my time, but probably not too long before my earliest Essex memories in the 1970s. I recently reached out to our friend Cheri Phillips to find it what she might know about the photograph above. She generously gifted me the…
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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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House of Dreams
Hat top to Keri Smith, one of my favorite doodlers (I’m talking about the short-short list!) for sharing this Eureka moment quotation on her blog. In honor of Gaston Bachelard, I’d like to subtly bastardize the sentiment: I should say: Rosslyn shelters day-dreaming, Rosslyn protects the dreamers, and Rosslyn allows us to dream in peace.…
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Remembering and Recounting
“Life is not what one lives, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale As I organize multiple pieces of Rosslyn’s renovation, our littoral Adirondack existence, and my still-young marriage into some sort of coherent storyline I wrestle consciously with occasional…
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Hickory Hill and Homeport
Rosslyn artifacts continue to emerge, and sometimes they’re not even even Rosslyn artifacts at all but Ross family artifacts. For example, I just discovered this antique postcard of the Ross Mansion (aka Hickory Hill) which was built in the early 1820s by the brother of W.D. Ross, the original owner of Rosslyn. Here’s the description provided…
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Totally Incompatible
My fixer-upper forays with Bruce Ware and other local realtors evolved when Susan joined the search. She shared my dream of an old farmhouse surrounded by open meadows with views and sunlight. She liked barns and was even receptive to my occasional flights of fancy about converting an old barn into a home. But our notions…