Tag: Summer

  • Essex Regatta 1960

    Essex Regatta 1960

    An archival flashback to the 11th Essex Regatta (and 34th Westport Regatta) as featured in August and September 1960 Valley News articles. Ready for summer?!

  • Memorial Day

    Memorial Day

    Memorial Day reflection (complete with summery blooms and a bike ride!)

  • Hummingbird Haiku

    Hummingbird Haiku

    Perhaps hummingbirds offer us a fleeting reminder to welcome the wisdom of wonder? To wander wider? To pursue a nonlinear path, to be unimpeded by obstacles, to bound between ambrosial blossoms?

  • Spring Grilling

    Spring Grilling

    An informal ode to the grill’s seasonal migration from carriage barn hibernation to deck celebration. Let’s eat!

  • Play Daily

    Play Daily

    From our first fanciful forays — pipe dreaming and what-iffing — Rosslyn represented for Susan and for me an opportunity to play more. Or so we imagined back in 2005 and 2006 as we slowly talked each other into a monumental life change. Although fantasy and reality haven’t overlapped exactly the way we conceived, most…

  • Gray Day

    Gray Day

    What a persistent stretch of rainy gray days. It seems to me that February or March of this year marked a transition from *typical* North Country winter to rain-dominant weather. Then a rainy spring followed by a rainy summer. When autumn arrived, everyone was in agreement that the rain was behind us. Certainly September and…

  • Teak Table Renewal

    Teak Table Renewal

    As a teenager, I spent my summers working at the Westport Marina, first as a dock boy, and later, managing a fleet of rental boats. My coming of age memories are intricately interwoven with my boating and boatyard memories. They overlap. They converge. A recurring narrative during the boating preseason was cleaning, brightening, and oiling…

  • Tom Duca’s Sunburst Gates

    Tom Duca’s Sunburst Gates

    If Robert Frost was correct that “Good fences make good neighbors”, then experience has taught us that sunburst gates make neighbors into friends. And so today I doff my proverbial hat to neighbor, friend, and carpenter, Tom Duca. Tom was one of the first people we met when we moved to Essex in 2005, and…

  • Before Undocking

    Before Undocking

    Last day of summer. Yesterday. First day of autumn. Today. Liminal moments. Time to remove the boats and docks. But, just before, Susan snapped these potent images. Before undocking… Before undocking, putting summer 2023 behind us, there was calm. Placid waters. Almost mirror flat. And a sunrise as sensuous as it was poignant. Rosslyn’s waterfront.…

  • Misty Sundown

    Misty Sundown

    So many variations of a perfect sunrise, a breathtaking sunset, and yet — like spoiled children — we yearn for more. More colorful. More dramatic. More lingering. But, this misty sundown redefined the limits. Moody dome. Warm light, gently filtered. Colors few, but saturation intense. And mist. Ground-clinging, gossamer haze blurring the ground-to-trees transition. Mysterious.…

  • Intermingling

    Intermingling

    Recently we’ve been approaching that liminal space where Essex and Santa Fe obliquely overlap and intermingle. So many subtle signs. Lingering at the limits of liminality, savoring the flickering figments, and occasionally discovering that the mirages are not illusions. They are real. Like portals between the Adirondack Coast and the Southwest. An aperture between lake…

  • Persimmons Maturing

    Persimmons Maturing

    In good news, the 2023 persimmons maturing — albeit a decidedly smaller subset of the overall fruit that adorned our three persimmon trees at the beginning of the season — are just possibly going to reach the finish line. For the last several summers… [I’ve gotten] high on the hope that our three persimmon trees…