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Day 49 – Halloween Parade

Halloween

Theme in Yellow

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o’-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
-Carl Sandberg
Well, I had something else planned for today but a friend asked me to go to the Halloween Parade and I could tell she really wanted to go but didn’t want to go alone so I agreed. And it was fun, and colorful. There were all kinds of costumes and all ages of participants. I especially liked the dogs in costume but didn’t get any good pictures. It was also hard to get good pictures of the parade as it was going by so fast and people were crowding in front. But I like this image for the spirit of fun and color and paradeness. And I like Sandbergs poem for my tribute to Halloween which is a part of autumn, just not my favorite part.

Day 27 – Still Life with Pumpkins

Still_Life_wpumkins2w

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-Robert Frost

Well, I sat down this morning to pick out some poems for my poetry group. When I went upstairs put them into the computer for printing I realized I had lost power. I wasn’t too worried about it until two hours later when I still had no power and it was about time to go and I realized that if I wanted to go anywhere I was going to have to override the garage door opener and wrestle with the garage door. That’s when I gave up and decided to go play in the tiny studio instead, it being too windy to photograph outside. Of course, the power came on 15 minutes after I should have left. Grrr. But anyway, here is one of the poems I had picked out for the theme of Letting Go.

Day 25 – Pink Striped Umbrella

Pink Umbrellaw

Wind

Not a remarkable wind. 
So when the bistro’s patio umbrella 
blew suddenly free and pitched 
into the middle of the road, 
it put a stop to the afternoon. 

Something white and amazing 
was blocking the way. 

A waiter in a clean apron 
appeared, not quite 
certain, shielding his eyes, wary 
of our rumbling engines. 

He knelt in the hot road, 
making two figures in white, one 
leaning over the sprawled, 
broken shape of the other, 
creaturely, great-winged, 
and now so carefully gathered in.

– Mike Whte

I took a walk over to the Talent Harvest Festival but didn’t find anything too earth shaking. On the way home I encountered this sidewalk umbrella dancing in the wind with the trees. Not white, not yet in the road but still in harmony with the poem. I am now 1/4 of the way into the 100 days project and starting to wonder what I have done to myself. I felt a little silly going out to photograph when I still have hundreds of images to sift through from New England. But then, if I hadn’t gone out, I would not have encountered the pink striped umbrella.

Day 23 Stone Wall

StoneWall

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

-Robert Frost

It is another travel day today so I decided to grab an image from yesterday mainly because I wanted to use this poem. We learned all about making stone walls at the Stone Trust yesterday so it seemed fitting. This image was taken in the beautiful village of Grafton where we have been staying.

Day 14 – Paul Revere

PaulRevere

from The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

On my last day in Boston you can see that the leaves are only just starting to turn behind this statue of Paul Revere on his midnight ride. We visited the old North Church and really the take home message for the day was that it didn’t happen quite like that. I hate it when it turns out everything I learned in grade school was wrong. But Paul Revere did ride out to warn the patriots that the British were coming and they did (briefly) hang two lanterns in the old North Church when the Brits took off over the Charles River. What else really matters, I ask you? All these subtle nuances are… well, just subtle nuances. What’s sad is that Henry seems to have been actually writing propaganda to get men to enlist to fight in the Civil War.  “Don’t you want to be a hero like Paul Revere?” was apparently the point of the poem. Who learned that in grade school? The older I get the more I miss math where the answers were just right or wrong.

 

Supercharged

Super_charged

 

Orange

Sour.
Bitter.
Bright. 
The sky before the night.
The leaves in the fall.
The rhythmically bouncing basketball
The poet’s nightmare.
The fire’s glare
The bottle of prescription pills
The pumpkins on our porch, still.

– Anshika

According to Fitbit I walked over six miles today. The only spot of orange in my travels was this supercharged classic car which I stumbled across at a high end car show on Boston Common. I was disappointed to find only green leaves on the trees. It didn’t even feel like autumn today. In fact I was wishing I had brought some shorts. Truth be told this was far and away my favorite photograph from the days wandering. I’m sure things will be more autumnal once we get out of the city.

Day 7 – Apples

Apples

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree 
Toward heaven still, 
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill 
Beside it, and there may be two or three 
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. 
But I am done with apple-picking now. 
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight 
I got from looking through a pane of glass 
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 
And held against the world of hoary grass. 
It melted, and I let it fall and break. 
But I was well 
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 
And I could tell 
What form my dreaming was about to take. 
Magnified apples appear and disappear, 
Stem end and blossom end, 
And every fleck of russet showing clear. 
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 
The rumbling sound 
Of load on load of apples coming in. 
For I have had too much 
Of apple-picking: I am overtired 
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 
For all 
That struck the earth, 
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 
Went surely to the cider-apple heap 
As of no worth. 
One can see what will trouble 
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 
Were he not gone, 
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his 
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 
Or just some human sleep.
                     – Robert Frost 

 

Today’s destination was the grower’s market which, as always, offered up a colorful array of compelling subjects. But the box of apples spoke to me most of fall so they got the nod for picture of the day.  And Robert Frost’s poem was a perfect fit. You can almost see him nodding off as he is writing. And feel the ladder’s rungs on your feet. And I was reminded of when I worked at the library when I was in college and we had a period when we would recall all the books checked out by faculty… and I would dream of books, carts and carts of books. Just as Frost would dream of apples after a day of picking.

Day 2 – September 14 – Wine Grapes

Grapes2_Sim

On the Subject of Grapes

Not even field mice can hide 
from the smell of autumn grapes
that bind with air molecules
for the sweetest fragrance 
that could never be replicated
by the best candle.

It’s no wonder that trout
throw themselves above the stream
that runs through the vineyard
to get a taste of the concord
September aroma.

That’s why the windows stay open
until the first frost bites the fields
and takes with it the purple air.

– Don Brenner

Well, the vision I had for today’s image was about like this but without the netting. Maybe I will find a vineyard without netting before the grapes are all harvested. Maybe not.  I ran it through a simplify program to modify it a little. And I still like it. It’s just not quite as organic as I would have liked.

I also tried working with another image that ended up turning into a full blown digital art piece so here is a bonus for you to look at today.

Grapes

Blue Wall Santiago Cuba

Blue_wall

I was actually just trying to photograph this grungy wall when the guy walked into my shot. That happened a lot in Cuba. I did some cropping, brightening, saturation and vibrance. I also took out a drain and water stain that was causing too much division in the composition. I also bumped up the yellows to play off his pants and the large spot in the upper right. And I did some sharpening.Finally, I went in and cleaned up some of the white spots around the guy to put more emphasis on him.

Iris Garden

Iris_GardenIt has been a week of playing catch up with household and yard chores and starting new OLLI classes as both student and teacher. So, not much photography got done. In fact I was surprised that I hadn’t even imported my Texas images into Lightroom. But that has now been corrected and I am ready to go full bore on post processing.

Due to flat lighting my flower pictures turned out a lot better than my travel pictures. This Iris garden was found in the King William district in San Antonio. I added a lot of detail and some saturation to get the vivid colors. I think this one would look good printed on canvas.