Halloween season brings the most New-England-y aesthetics to New England, and nowhere more than in a city park. The foliage adds a perfect contrast to blue-hour colors, and the park lights (as in the foreground) highlight the evening walkers.
Tag: New England
Vermonter Landscape
Deep in winter and summer, New England becomes monochromatic (white and green, respectively). Late fall is different; “stick season” has a broad, desaturated array of hues that stretch across the landscape.
New England Home
Homes designed to weather the fierce winters of northern New England and the North Country have a particular structure: Something vaguely Scandinavian and reminiscent of a Viking longhouse. When the sun sets and the clouds gather for our (current) proper winter, I’m glad for the equivalence.
Creek Through Stowe
This winter that won’t begin has brought strange landscapes to New England. Along Little River through Stowe, VT, the environment is in a strange flux/limbo. Add the snow with imagination?
New England Summer
The passage of time and the seasons is a common theme on Decaseconds. As the Northeast struggles out of winter and into spring, I wanted to spotlight some fundamentally “summer in New England”-ish images.
Boston in early summer hasn’t yet become miserable and sweaty yet, and is instead a sea of crisp flags and bright flowers and blue skies. At Longwood Cricket Club, the New England of the twentieth century is preserved.
Inside that club, on the porch above the immaculate grass tennis courts, is the perfect place for a frosty chocolate milkshake and a buttery roll filled with lobster meat. New England prep at its finest.
And just outside Boston is Humarock, this charming seaside community of even more flags and sea grasses and ocean-smoothed rocks. The American flag has never looked so good.
Breakfast Run
As a spectroscopist and inorganic chemist, I’m constantly encountering symmetry and its effects. From the balanced shapes of molecules to the bilateral formation of our own bodies, nature is full of symmetry that informs its function and behavior. In addition to symmetry in physical space, the kind with which we are most familiar, there is also symmetry in the dimension of time. Some examples are rather uninteresting from an “elegant universe” perspective: the cycles of alternating current exhibit high symmetry, but hide under the surface of our everyday electronics.
The cycles of seasons, on the other hand, have been on my mind lately as the North Country oscillates rapidly between spring and winter. (One day on, one day off.) In those cycles, I’ve found a strange symmetry. Though most of the year lacks reflection symmetry (autumn is obviously different from spring), there’s a point where late fall lines up perfectly with early spring—the world is cold and still and brown, and I can pretend for a moment that the winter never happened.
Vintage BMW
That perfect New England Saturday morning: crisp fall air, vintage European bikes, bright red barns, out to get waffles.
Snow on Salmon Kill
Thanksgiving is around the corner, and New England has equilibrated to early-winter leafless distributions. On a morning coffee-and-breakfast-sandwich run, snow encrusted rocks form the boundaries of a real-world Zen garden.
Snowsuit
Perhaps my last post in the cozy, wood-lined chambers of Timberline Lodge put me in mind of winter excursions. From the windy top of Lion’s Head in northwestern Connecticut, the view of three states is incredible. The snow clings to branches from a recent storm, and a few wisps of cloud mark the horizon in an otherwise azure sky. This snowsuit caught my eye, and I particularly liked the way only a single hand of human being is visible, poking out from the bundled layers.
Guest Post: Pontoosuc Launch
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Colin Hill.
Here is the boat lauch ramp on the shores of Lake Pontoosuc, just north of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Although spring has arrived and the sun takes longer to disappear behind the mountains in the distance, the water is still icy cold to the touch.
Guest Post: Uphill
Today’s post comes courtesy of Colin Hill.
The last hints of unseasonable spring snow grace the ground, and the gently curving roads of the Berkshires make an amateur racetrack for the teenagers of the town.
Winter Compound
In the hills of northwestern Connecticut, little compounds dot the landscape–the remnants of centuries-old manufacturing or artists’ collectives. The dusk-laced sky and the craggy-tree skyline combine to produce a lovely picture of New England Americana.
I Swear It Was Bigger…
My brother stands on the bridge over the creek behind our childhood home. Inside all of those prepositions is the feeling that it used to be so much larger, grander, and more exciting when we were kids. Though we used to make whole forts under the bridge, we now barely fit.
Returning Home
Out for a hike on freshly fallen snow, it was a shame to see the day coming to an end. (And the views on that hike were spectacular.) Still, there’s something very satisfying to heading back home to the comfort of a roaring fire and a glass of hot chocolate. (It’s a cliché for a reason!)
Guest Post: Stockbridge Bowl
Today’s post comes courtesy of Colin Hill.
This is a shot of Stockbridge Bowl in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was a relatively warm day, but the lake was still frozen over. I love the details in this picture: the huge cracks forming on the lake’s surface, the snow covered houses nestled into the hillside, the hills rolling off into the distance, all watched by the two tall pines in the foreground.
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