Mercurial, unsettled weather lately. Pendulum swings. Dark and light. Sunny and soggy. Unsettled hours and days. My moody meditation is inspired by this dockside monochrome.
Snapped this photo after an unsuccessful first foray into waterskiing and freshwater surfing for the 2023 season. Too rough. Susan tried. A valiant effort. Abbreviated…
Dockside Monochrome (Photo: Geo Davis)
Today’s words and thoughts are also abbreviated. An abridged initiative. Venturing out. Briefly. Then returning to safe harbor.
Dockside Monochrome
Moody mornings and monochrome afternoons re-recalibrating, observing, listening, trying to remember. Or, maybe, to forget for a little longer, for rhythm re-syncing, for watery waves, for whispering winds, for yes-yielding, for exhaling, for reboot, for today, for us, for now.
Perhaps a miniature video clip better approximates this liminal moment…
Sooo close to arriving at Rosslyn, but these peony blooms (Paeonia lactiflora) have exploded into exuberant bloom before I made it back. A false start. Preterprecocious peonies, at least from my present perspective.
Fortunately Pam documented these peony season precursors. (Thanks, Pam!) Beautiful debutants, welcoming Rosslyn arrivals. Our arrival. Shortly. But, inevitably rain will arrive, as if on cue, once the peonies bloom…
Perhaps micropoetry might capture a petal or three. And offering it up to the universe just might invite a rain free reprieve?
Preterprecocious Peonies (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Bursting with color and perfume, peonies might seem an unlikely culinary accessory. But the roots and petals are, in fact, edible. Of course anybody who’s cultivated propones (preterprecocious or otherwise) would resist disinterring peony roots for eating. But the petals?
The art of home is a tidy title with an unpretentious posture. And yet it’s idealistic and evocative, ample and ambitious. Frankly, its restrained and self contained first impression is a little misleading. Maybe even a little ambiguous. What do I even mean? I’m not offering a catchy epithet for design and decor. Nor architecture. And yet, it certainly may include some or all of these. When I describe the art of home, I’m conjuring several things at once.
In conjoining art and creativity with home-ness, I’m alluding to my own personal outlook on an intrinsic relationship between the two as well as an aspirational goal. Home isn’t science. Or, home isn’t only science (or even mostly science.) Sure, there’s science and math and all manner of practical, detail and data driven inputs in transforming a house into a home. But there’s much more. There’s a profoundly personal, subjective, intimate relationship at play in the act of homemaking. And, in the best of circumstances, essential circumstances in my opinion, home becomes a sanctuary for creating, an oasis for art.
All of this binds art-ing and homing. The art of home is a look at the homeness of art and the art of homing. It is an attempt to discern what allows one’s domestic sanctuary to transcend mere utility (a garage to cache one’s car, a grill to sear one’s supper, a nest within which to sleep, a shower with which to wash away the sleep and sweat), to transcend the housing function and become a place of growth and nurturing, an incubation space, a revitalizing space, a dreaming and dream-fulfilling space,…
In the photograph at the top of this post you can see the icehouse, mid-rehabilitation, tucked in beside the carriage barn, both frosted in snow like fairy tales illustrations or gingerbread confections. After a decade and a half my slowly percolating art of home has matured from a pipe dream into a concept into a clutch of sketches into construction plans into a creative collaborative of many. And for a few short weeks I’m privileged to participate daily, to engage in a real and hands-on way after participating from afar, participating virtually. It’s a peculiar but exciting transition. An ongoing transition.
The Art of Home: Poem Excerpt
I’ve been excavating through layers of creativity compressed into, and coexisting within, my notion of homeness. While shaping a house into a home is in and of itself a creative art — indeed a nearly universal creative art, even among those quick to volunteer that they are not artistic, not creative — I’m deeply curious about my awn associations with home as a cradle and catalyst of art. I’m trying to tease apart these different layers of art in a still embryonic poem, so I’ll include only a section about gardening, a creative pursuit that I inherited from my mother decades ago.
...composing a garden,
my own personal patch,
from selecting seeds —
corn, radishes pumpkins,
tomatoes, and sunflowers —
to turning the soil,
working compost
into last summer's
stems and stalks,
into clay clodded dirt,
into July-August hopes.
Watering and weeding,
thinning, scarecrowing,
suckering, and staking...
Composing a garden is but one of the many instances that the art of home means something to me. Cooking. Writing. Telling stories. Pruning the orchard. Entertaining guests. Landscaping. Drawing. Adapting old buildings into new lifestyle enabling and enriching spaces.
The Art of Home: Documentary
At the heart of Rosslyn Redux is a quest to discern and describe what I’m learning about the art of home. But there is still more question than answer. I’m still untangling my thoughts, still reaching for some sort of clarity that might improve my ability to communicate concisely what I have found so captivating, and why it has obsessed me for so long.
But I’m not there there. My journey is ongoing. So I will, for now, offer another perspective on the art of home, a captivating documentary that obliquely sheds light upon our Santa Fe / Essex home duality.
Two indigenous artists create new works reflecting on their tribal homelands, the Wind River Indian Reservation. Ken Williams (Arapaho) is a Santa Fe art celebrity and Sarah Ortegon (Shoshone) is an up-and-coming actress in Denver. Both artists travel to Wind River Reservation to reconnect with their ancestors and present their art work to a somewhat isolated community. (Source: The Art of Home: A Wind River Story,PBS)
Intertwined with Sarah Ortegon’s and Ken Williams’s extended meditation on the relationships between art, creative expression, identity, home, culture, family, and belonging are the perspectives of other Native Americans including George Abeyta who touches on home as a place of strength.
“Your home, it’s a place of your family. It’s a place of warmth and comfort and strength and happiness. It’s the place where were you look forward to going because that’s your stronghold. That’s your place of prayer.” — George Abeyta
In the context of beadwork Abeyta is examining it feels seamless and comfortable the way we moves from beading motifs to home as a bastion of strength, as a stronghold. Also a space where family, warmth, comfort, happiness, and even prayer coexist. Perhaps even where they are rooted, where they thrive. The subject of his reflection, a beaded ornament akin to a necktie, is an intricate work of art, and as such it functions as a vehicle or a vessel to showcase and honor these fundamental elements. This notion of home, and more specifically the art of home, as a sort of sacred space for strength and belonging, for identity and connectedness, for family and for happiness resurfaces throughout this documentary. I encourage you to make time (just under an hour) to appreciate it from beginning-to-end.
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 a while and meditate on the process of fragmenting, the potential for reimagining artifacts. I wonder about dark or damaged backstories, sharp shards, mollified by time’s persistent palliative pressure into “worry beads” carried and caressed like the glass glob I carried in my pocket for several years as a totem, a talisman, a pocket palliative for angst. Imagine delightful detritus strung into necklaces, assembled in mosaics, relics rhymed in song, or puzzle-pieced into a poem.
Relics Rhymed (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Relics Rhymed
I gather fragments wrought asunder by great gusts, gales, and tempestuous tantrums of feuding forces, jagged shards tumbled in the roiling surf, defanged, lenified, smoothed, polished, and rhymed by the tides of time, memory’s meager mitigating reach.
A runaway run-on identifying as a poem, a piece of a poem, a poetry puzzle piece,… Make of it what you wish. Those last two lines are a piece of what I’ve been wrestling with in many ways. In what ways does the past extend into the present? To and through the bits and pieces proffered by history, inherited evidence of a long before, timeless tidbits ostensibly proving our place in the river of life and death, creation and destruction? Do these artifacts salve us?
Many questions. Few answers.
Wanting wonder, I’ll simply allow that — as so often — relics rhymed.
It’s but a month and a day after Independence Day and we’re eating our first peaches of the season. Eureka!
So memorable a moment each summer when I savor the first bites of the first peaches of the season that I’ve begun to wonder if we might need to create a floating holiday. It’s hard to conceive of a better cause for celebration.
First Peaches, 2021 (Source: Geo Davis)
First Peaches Haiku
Summer’s first peaches, sunshine soaked and siren sweet, seduce all senses.
— Geo Davis
First Peach, 2021 (Source: Geo Davis)
Peach Plenitude
Growing up in the Adirondacks’ Champlain Valley, we grew fruit trees. Apples, pears, quince. But never peaches. I honestly think it was considered foolhardy in those days. Perhaps conditions pre/post climate change have shifted enough or the varietals have become hardy enough that we can account for the difference in perspective this way. Or maybe it was just unfamiliarity.
First Peaches, 2021 (Source: Geo Davis)
For this reason, I’m abundantly grateful for our stone fruit harvests in general and our peaches in particular. It’s almost as if we’re cheating nature! And my tendency to romance the first peaches of the season is rooted in this enduring awe. We actually raised peaches! Almost too good to be true. Perhaps this peach plenitude will eventually become familiar enough that we’ll take it for granted. But it’s hard to imagine. Such a delicate ambrosial fruit prospering in our northern climes. Truly a bonanza!
First Peach, 2021 (Source: Geo Davis)
If you’re new to my blathering blog, welcome. And you might be curious what sort of peaches we’re growing. Our proximity to Lake Champlain creates a microclimate that favors us when it comes to stone fruit and other marginal crops for our northern growing zone. On the other hand our soil, especially west of the carriage barn where the orchard is located, has an extremely high clay content. This is not ideal for growing peaches. They do not favor wet feet.
That said, we’ve been fortunate growing Reliance Peach (2 trees) and Contender Peach (2 trees). I’d welcome a recommendation from growers who think we’d be wise to add another winter-hardy variety that responds well to holistic orcharding.
Poppy poems! At last I’m bundling a batch of verse celebrating my favorite blooms. Poppies. Papaveraceae. Coquelicots… Most of these poppy poems started out as Instagram posts inspired, at least in part, by daily snapshots of poppies blooming in Rosslyn’s gardens. For this reason I’ll include links at the end of the poem if you’re interested in seeing the original posts. Just click the link and a new window will open with the poem as it originally appeared with accompanying image(s).
Haiku Poppy Poems
Almost ephemeral brevity, stark minimalism, and — at best — a tingly eureka moment overlap haiku’s distinctive hallmark. Delicate. Vigorous. As unlikely a juxtaposition as poppies. Exuding a fragility and sparseness, but remarkably robust and resilient, the poppy is the haiku of flowers. And so I initiate this slowly evolving post with a collection of haiku poppy poems.
·•·
Pink-Tinged Poppy (Source: @virtualdavis)
From velvety spokes a supernova outburst, ivory crushed silk. (@rosslynredux)
·•·
Unfettered, unfazed by cloudburst or thunderclap, sensuous stalwart. (@rosslynredux)
·•·
Papaver flashbacks bloom in frosted flowerbeds, daydream confections. (@rosslynredux)
·•·
Come coquelicot, come crinkly crepe paper kin, come and laugh and lift. (@rosslynredux)
·•·
Poppy blossoms pop into crepe paper fireworks and flamenco skirts. (@rosslynredux)
Longer Poppy Poems
While poppies and haikus strike me as cousins (or perhaps even as one and the same being at different stages of transmogrification), there are times when a poppy poem’s florescence exceeds the restraint of micropoetry. There are instances in which a poppy poem’s petals bloom into a lyrical sketch or rhapsody.
Amongst vegetables, fruits, herbs, and spices pop, pop, populate floral fireworks, flamenco skirts, and crepe’s crinkly kin, the coquelicots.
So sensuous, so beyond beguiling, so delicate yet robust, resilient, as exotic and mysterious as the whispering wind. (@rosslynredux)
Poppy Portraits (Visual Poetry!)
Sometimes a poem is crafted out of words, letters and spaces coalescing around a moment, an experience, a sentiment. Other times poetry is so visual that an image better conveys the poem. Please think of my “poppy portraits” as visual poems. Maybe you’ll agree that visual poems can sometimes eclipse the letter-tethered lot!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgSOV5-g-WL/
She short video in the post above essays to distill the grace of a poppy in motion, buffeted by the breeze, petals fluttering, stem swaying. I’m not 100% pleased with this series of moving images, but it’s a start. I’m still learning the nuances of video, especially phone video. I’ll get better. Hopefully soon!
I’m as smitten with the poppy pods as the blooms. Once the papery petals yield to the wind or gravity, a handsome hull plump with poppy seeds remains. Ample. Memorial. Geometric.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0GlMkNAh-1/
There’s something profoundly compelling in that image, don’t you think? A mystery unraveling. Or re-raveling. Wonder is summoned, and it answers eagerly.
Peaches This Year, August 2022 (Source: Geo Davis)
Glorious indeed it is to report that our peaches this year are the tastiest I’ve ever grown. Also the biggest, juiciest, sweetest, and IMHO the prettiest.
I’m chortling in my joy. Imagine, if you dare, the decadence of lifting a sun warmed peach, freshly plucked from the branch, up to your mouth, lips parting against the fuzzy flesh, teeth sinking effortlessly into the sweet meat, juice dribbling down your chin,…
It’s truly sensational! Peach perfection. Almost.
Sadly our perfect peaches this year belie a bittersweet backstory. But let’s micropoetry-pause a moment before sharing the slightly sadder side of this decadent moment.
Peaches This Year, August 2022 (Source: Geo Davis)
Peaches This Year: A Haiku
Few peaches this year but plump, nectar swollen with best flavor ever.
— Geo Davis
Bittersweet Backstory
That haiku actually tells the whole story, backstory and all. Our peaches this year are startlingly few after the bumper crops we’ve enjoyed over the last few years. It’s fair to say that 2020 and 2021 provided enough peaches to satisfy our most gluttonous appetites and to share with all who desired, from friends to wildlife. But 2022 has been a been a poignant recalibration.
We lost our two Reliance Peach trees this season. All of four peach trees budded on time this spring, and all four began to push out tiny little leaves. But then the two Reliance trees stalled. No apparent weather shock or fungus or predation. Just withering. And then suddenly the Reliance trees were dead. The other two trees, both Contender Peach variety, struggled as well. But they gradually overcame whatever was afflicting them (despite never really recovering 100%). Both Contender Peach trees experienced some die-back, and both set an unusually light load of fruit.
We will be replacing the dead Reliance trees and likely adding in a third new peach tree as well. Any suggestions? (Reliance vs. Contender Peach) I’m definitely open to recommendations for hardy, tasty peach tree recommendations that respond well to holistic orcharding (i.e. don’t rely on pesticide.) I’ll enjoy researching replacements, so that’s a silver lining, I suppose. But the best upside to the paucity of peaches this year has been is that the few we’ve enjoyed are quite miraculously the tastiest we’ve ever grown!
The male ruffed grouse in the photo above was documented on a Rosslyn wildlife camera about a year ago. Fancy fowl! And the two images below were recorded a few weeks ago.
Rosslyn’s backlands are fortunately flush with ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), a welcome reminder that wildlife gravitates — as if by some primal sense — to safe havens and sanctuaries. If you preserve it, they will come (or so our experience over the last 12+ years suggests.)
Ruffed Grouse (Rosslyn Wildlife Camera)
What is a Ruffed Grouse?
A brown or gray-brown, chicken-like bird with slight crest, fan-shaped, black-banded tail, barred flanks, and black ‘ruffs’ on sides of neck.
Habitat: Deciduous and mixed forests, especially those with scattered clearings and dense undergrowth; overgrown pastures.
Female gives soft hen-like clucks. In spring displaying male sits on a log and beats the air with his wings, creating a drumming sound that increases rapidly in tempo. (Source: Audubon)
Popular among hunters for their tender meat, the ruffed grouse in these images are safe in Rosslyn’s wildlife sanctuary. Although Susan is a vegetarian (a pescatarian, actually), I concede a robust appetite for wild game. That said, I’m not a hunter. And when we purchased first one, and then a second adjoining lots, our intention was to preserve and rewild, to invest in a healthy and resilient wildway buffering the already significant wildlife moving along Library Brook. With acreage expanded and John Davis’s wildlife stewardship guiding our rewilding efforts, native wildlife are returning and prospering.
If you’ve never heard a ruffed grouse drumming, you should definitely play the video below. It’s a mysterious rhythm I associate with late winter through early spring outings — cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and sometimes mindful, sometimes mindless meandering — through Rosslyn’s forests and meadows.
Carriage house horse stall door (Source: Geo Davis)
Horse Stall Haiku
Carriage house stall door, pockmarked, patinated, but hale, relates tenants past.
— Geo Davis
Wabi-sabi Horse Stall
Patina. Rust. Wear-and-tear. The horse stall door in the photograph above abounds in visible reminders of imperfection and impermanence. And yet beauty brims. The image, indeed the horse stall and the horse stall door themselves, exude warmth and comfort and reassurance. No frisky filly within. No stately stallion. Yet life has invested this space with memories and, as Donna Baribeau pointed out, “Authentic Beauty”. The bumps and bruises of horses and those who tend them are part of this carriage barn story. But for much of the last 200+ years that Rosslyn has presided over Merchant Row there were no carriages and no horses in this barn. The stables were repurposed for storing firewood, bicycles, lawn mowers, lumber, tools, children’s forts, and possibly briefly even as a bedroom (if firsthand accounts are accurate.) All of this, and more, has left marks and stories. All of this contributes to the wabi-sabi allure of this space (and this photograph of the space.)
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” in nature… Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature. (Source: Wikipedia)
Wabi-sabi is at the root of my attraction to time-worn buildings and artifacts. I consider aging utility buildings — barns, boathouses, ice houses, sugarshacks, etc. — to be at least as intriguing as old houses. More sometimes. So many relics, unselfconscious, candid. Less penchant for concealing, fewer makeovers, more concurrently present years and lives. Sometimes it’s the old, banged up subjects and objects that look the best. Thank goodness for that!
I missed my mark — Earth Day, April 22, 2023 — with this post extolling the poetry of earth. It was germinal then, and it remains germinal today (albeit marginally more mature?)
Sometimes a seed germinates with exuberance, practically exploding into existence as if overcome with the glory of imminent bloom and fruit. Other times a seed lingers dormant — cautious or reticent or simply, inexplicably vigorless — for so long that its potential is overlooked, obscured by the foliage and flowers and harvest of its neighbors.
And through it all nature’s song endures. Just when we are lulled into torpid tranquility it swells in symphonic crescendo.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Poetry of Earth, May 2, 2010 (Photo: Geo Davis)
Often a blog post is sketched out with a few simple strokes that distill the essence for what I expect to write about. A mini map yo I de ate my route. As I develop the post, filling in the voids, perhaps adding texture and color and context, I approach the anticipated narrative scope. Upon arriving at my destination I publish and share. But exploring a preliminary sketch or fleshing out a rough outline sometimes occasionally renders surprises. Wayward adventures lurk in the most unlikely places. I plan to take journey A, but I end up taking journey B.
And then there are the posts that linger dormant. A seed is planted, but it doesn’t leap to life. Perhaps the ground is still too cold, the earth isn’t sufficiently fertile, or the rain and sun remain elusive. A sketch, an outline, a map. Perhaps even a journey — or several journeys — but they are abbreviated and fruitless. False starts.
It is wise on these occasions to move on. Maybe circle back in the future. Try again. Or compost the effort that it might fertilize another seed. For this is the wisdom of nature and the gardener. This is the poetry of earth.
My mind meanders from Pollyanna printemps — nature reaching and bursting, reinvigorating all that withered and laid dormant these frosty days and nights of winter — to autumn’s harvest. Symphonic crescendo and resounding applause. Such success and such succession. Sweet reward and bitter decline. Decadence and decay.
This seasonal swan song’s poignance is the marriage of expiry and infinity, waning and immortality.
As when winter succumbs to spring’s tender caresses, thawing and refreezing, thawing and refreezing, melting into muddy mess, then gathering composure, turning etiolated tendril toward the sun begins to warm, to green, toward foliage and flower and fruit and… fall.
The poetry of earth is a consoling refrain. It is a reminder that beginnings end and endings seed new beginnings. Out of the mud, a sprout. From the sprout a life full of wonder and another generation of seeds.
“The poetry of earth is ceasing never…” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Keats’ poem delivers where I have come up short. Perhaps grasshoppers and crickets and birds lend themselves more willingly to the poetry of nature. Perhaps not. Perhaps this still muddled effort is destined for the compost where it’s decomposition will enrich a subsequent effort to compose this song of seasonality that so far eludes me. To convey the tragic beauty, and the profoundly consoling inspiration of the poetry of nature…
An endoskeleton for the soon-to-be loft shelving has begun to take shape.
Loft Shelving (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Shop-built carcasses fabricated by Bernie Liberty have been delivered and installation has begun. Lining the north and south knee walls, these reading repositories will soon be lined with bound words. One further step toward completion of my icehouse loft study.
Loft Shelving Haiku
Book bound words in a reading repository, icehouse loft shelving.
A little forward leaning, I suppose. Aspirational. Projecting, courtesy of my imagination, a few weeks forward…
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 lives on, the present riffs, repurposes, and reimagines the past. Adaptive reuse. Upcycling. Reinvention. Art.
Buckle up. Or pour yourself a cocktail…
The Past Lives On: NW Corner of Icehouse and Carriage Barn, September 21, 2021 (Photo: Geo Davis)
NW Corner of Icehouse
Before tripping too far into the wilds of my imagination, let’s root the present inquiry in something a little less abstract, a little more concrete. Like, for example, the northwest corner of the icehouse about a year and a half ago, September 21, 2021. That’s what you see in the photo above as well as those below.
I’ve titled this post, “The Past Lives On”, and if you’ve been with me for any time at all you’re well aware that Rosslyn, the property around which this multimodal inquiry circumnavigates like a drunken sailor, is rooted in the past. And the present. Starting out in the early 1800’s and spanning almost exactly two centuries.
I’ve pilfered the title from the quotation above, ostensibly the perspective of Virginia Woolf filtered through the mind of Margaret Drabble. The broader context for Drabble’s perspective is landscape. Let’s look a little further.
The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards. The landscape also changes, but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. This is one of the reasons why we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition; we lose not only a place, but ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life. — Margaret Drabble, A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature, Thames & Hudson, 1987 (Source: Ken Taylor, “Landscape: Memory and Identity”)
In the photo above I’ve recorded the exterior of the icehouse and adjoining lawn as it has looked since approximately the 1950s which is when we understand that a clay tennis court was built behind the icehouse and carriage barn for the pleasure of Sherwood Inn guests.
Actually, I’m slightly oversimplifying the contours of history. Given what I understand, the clay court was installed for Sherwood Inn patrons, but at some point in the decades since, the court was abandoned. Or at least *mostly* abandoned. The +/-10′ tall wooden posts for an enclosure along the northern end of the court remained until we removed them early in our rehabilitation. And one of the two steel tennis net posts will at long last be removed in about a week when Bob Kaleita returns to tune up the site for hardscaping and landscaping. But a long time ago the clay surface was abandoned and a perfectly flat lawn replaced it. We’ve enjoyed using it as a croquet, bocce, and volleyball court for years.
If you look at the bottom right of the photograph at the top of this post you can see that there’s a topographical bulge in the lawn, sort of a grassy hummock that is crowding the building(s). In the photo below you can again see how the ground is higher than the framing on both buildings.
The Past Lives On: NW Corner of Icehouse and Carriage Barn, September 21, 2021 (Photo: Geo Davis)
Not an ideal situation when organics (lawn, landscaping, etc.) crowd wooden buildings. Unfortunately the tennis court was built above the sills of both buildings, and inauspiciously close. Moisture, snow, and ice buid-up over the decades compromised the structures of both buildings because of this miscalculation.
Today, both buildings have had their framing rehabilitated, and their structural integrity is better than ever. In addition, significant site work last autumn (remember “The art of Dirt Work“?) and again next week is restoring the ground level adjacent to the icehouse and carriage barn to more closely resemble what it likely looked like in the 1800s when both buildings were originally sited and constructed.
A landscape altered. A landscape restored.
A memory recreated with the art of landscaping. The past made present. And yet, not. The new grade has been reimagined as an outdoor recreation and entertaining area not likely resembling the environs a couple hundred years ago. And so it is that the past “shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards”…
The Past Lives On: NW Corner of Icehouse, September 21, 2021 (Photo: Geo Davis)
Present Shadowed Past
What if innocence, in a sense, is less unbiased naïveté than wonder-wander, curiosity, and experiment? Or kneading gray clay dug behind the barn, behind the garden, before the forest (but barely before) after summer rain forty years ago. Stiff and cold at first, loosening with touch, oozing through cupped palms and playful fingers, shapes suggest themselves. Contours and textures echo yesterdays unrecorded and likely forgotten but re-emergent, confections conjured of sodded clay, and curiosity.
The Past Lives On
Indeed, something endures, but rarely should we be confident that we are knowing the past as it was. As it once was. We are informed and perhaps sometimes misinformed by our perspective sometime subsequent to the archival echo we fixate upon. And yet, perhaps allowing for reimagination, adaptive reuse, and even ahistoric reinvention, drawing upon the artifacts and memories we inherit but investing them with whimsy and wonder is one of the best ways of rehabilitating the past. Art from artifacts…
