One can of sardines, drained, placed on a small plate, topped with fresh cut onions and herbs, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprinkle of black pepper. That’s all. Okay, okay … there was some homemade mayonnaise on the side along with some toasted bread. An impromptu dinner after being too lazy to go to the store. 😉
Posted in Inspiration, Kitchen Inspirations | Tagged fish, food, food photography, Inspiration, Photography, recipes, sardines | Leave a Comment »
All three postcards depict beautiful fine art details found at historic Trinity Church in the City of Boston and are available in the church Book Shop. Peace, Be Still is also available online via this link.
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged angels, architecture, art, faith, fine art, Inspiration, Photography, Postcards, religion, stained glass windows, stationery, Trinity Church | Leave a Comment »
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes, On the Road | Tagged colors, Inspiration, landscape, light, Middlesex Fells, nature, Photography, Virginia Wood | 6 Comments »
“He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
not of woods only and the shade of trees.”
— excerpt from Robert Frost’s Mending Wall
Yesterday, I watched a former politician speaking with great authority, as his wife looked upon him adoringly, as he spouted hatred and nurtured fears in a subtle way. I had to turn off the television before I put my shoe through it. I sat for a bit trying to remember that Booker T. Washington quote, about allowing no man to belittle his soul by making him hate him.
Not long afterwards I found myself reading about current politicians and wannabe politicians, echoing the sentiments of that former politician. They spoke with great gravity about the need for bordering walls. Southern walls. Northern walls. Who knows,maybe even walls within cities. Nothing new, I suppose. Throughout human history, there have been such calls. It’s the public response to those calls that I wonder most about.
In Frost’s poem, Mending Walls, as two men rebuild the wall separating their farms, one says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The poem’s narrator replies…
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? …
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! …”
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes, On the Road | Tagged fear, fences, Mending Wall, musings, nature, Photography, poetry, politics, Robert Frost | 2 Comments »
The last of a delicious gift of homegrown tomatoes.
Posted in Inspiration, Kitchen Inspirations | Tagged colors, delicious gift, food, gardening, gifts, homegrown tomatoes, Photography, red, sunset, tomatoes | 1 Comment »
The surface of the river along the Charles River Esplanade . It was a sunny afternoon, the waters churned by gusts of wind and the wake of many canoes and kayaks.
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes, On the Road | Tagged abstract, beauty, Charles River, colors, Inspiration, nature, patterns, Photography, urban landscape, water | 1 Comment »
… and then there was a photo not taken.
I’d walked a long ways, from downtown Boston, across the Charles River and into Central Square. It had seemed a good idea in the beginning. Walk. Take pictures. But by the time I hobbled into Central Square and parked myself on a bench, I was done. I took one last look over my shoulder into the bushes behind me. A sea of pink blooms and a single stalk of white. This is it, I decided, and then tucked my camera away.
After determining that despite aches and pains I could complete my journey home by foot, I rose and began to meander down Mass Ave. Ahead of me was a man clearly seeing impaired based on the white cane he swept before him. I was planning how to slip past him at the next street light when, all of a sudden, his cane knocked over a homeless man’s Dunkin Donuts cup full of change.
Now, this homeless fellow has been a regular in Central Square, an elderly gentleman curled up in a wheelchair. As far as I knew, he’d never wheeled himself about by hand. I’d only ever seen him move himself by one foot, very, very slowly. I suspected he had a compatriot who occasionally whisked him from one side of the Square to the other, else it would take him all day to move one block.
In any case, the homeless man was twisting in his chair trying to reach for the overturned cup and speaking unintelligibly all the while. The blind man was reaching out but not having much success. I was close enough to gently take the blind man’s hand and say, “It’s okay, sir, I’ll help him.” He nodded and moved on, cane once more sweeping out. Then I knelt and scooped up the coins. As I wrapped the homeless man’s hands around the clear cup, I better understood why he did not wheel himself. His hands were gnarled, the fingers twisted. I felt like I was holding carved oak.
“Here you go,” I said.
He garbled, “Do you have any change?”
That was when I looked into his face in a way I’d not done in all the times I’d seen him before.
Like his hands, his face was like oak. Dark golden brown and deeply lined. While I thought him elderly from afar, up close I could see that most likely he was not. It was the elements, and other life events, that had chiseled his face, browned his skin and grizzled his unkempt hair and beard. His eyes were blue and shone with such intensity that if we had not been in shade I would have thought they were lit by the sun. An unforgettable sight.
That was the photo not taken.
“No, sir,” I said. “I do not have any change.”
I patted his hands and made my way home.
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged Central Square, colors, homelessness, humanity, Inspiration, nature, Photography, storytelling, urban landscape | 4 Comments »
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged colors, community garden, flowers, gold, Inspiration, nature, orange, Photography, urban landscape | 1 Comment »
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged colors, Inspiration, light, nature, orange, Photography, sky, sunsets | 5 Comments »
He kept asking for money but that I would not do. In part, because I had too little of it myself and because I could not trust him. He would most likely spend it on alcohol. If he did not spend it on alcohol, I was worried that “friends” might siphon him dry. I did want to send him something, to stay in touch, in addition to the occasional chat by phone. I wanted him to know that I cared about him as much as I knew he cared about me. I was still his baby sister and I respected that he was one of the big brothers who so carefully looked out for me as a child.
I think one day, with those thoughts in mind, I looked up into a cabinet and saw the dusty box. I took out a couple of bags, dropped them into an envelope, included a note that said something like “Drink this and not that other stuff!” When I told him what I had done, he just chuckled, as delighted as a child.
I became a connoisseur of tea design and flavor profiles. I was not especially picky. Whenever I stayed in a hotel I’d pocket the teas left in the room for guests with a goal to send them to him later. While grocery shopping, I’d occasionally splurge on an herbal tea sampler and split up the packs to send him different flavors. Later, I’d quiz him about which teas he’d liked and didn’t like. Blueberry was a favorite but all flavors were welcome, I was told.
They had to fit inside a standard envelope (which I occasionally decorated). Ideally the weight was such that I would only need at most two stamps so that I could drop my packages in a blue box on my way into work. I didn’t want to wait in line in the post office to mail a larger box. Sometimes I’d jazz up the mailings with little packages of coffee but I knew from childhood memories that he was more of a tea drinker. He and my mom would sit at the kitchen table drinking Lipton tea, her dark cup sweetened with just a bit of sugar, and his almost white with milk.
Why does this story surface? Well, it has been a long summer in some ways. Aside from a few mailings of seeds to family and friends and postcards to my kids club, I did not do much other mailing. This weekend I was on the phone with this brother. We were having a good chat and as I was about to hang up he said, “Hold it. What happened to it?”
“What happened to what?”
“My tea,” he said. “You haven’t sent me my tea. It does help, you know. When I have tea, I don’t drink.”
“Okay,” I said brightly. “I’m on it.” Both laughing, we hung up. And then I cried.
That night I pulled together a short pile of envelopes and addressed them all to him. The next day I bought a box of tea, many flavors. Yesterday, I mailed him honey vanilla. We’ll see what the next week holds. Maybe strawberry. I think a big box of blueberry will wait until Christmas.
Posted in Inspiration, Kitchen Inspirations | Tagged alcoholism, encouragement, family, Inspiration, memories, Photography, storytelling, tea | 11 Comments »
Words + Images 