Figure 1 – Physical therapist’s table, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2017

Yesterday I had an appointment with my physical therapist. It was the quintessential November day in New England – cold, cloudy, and damp. Still it was not so cold as to rush me inside, and I paused to take in the Assabet River meandering lazily in the bleakness. A few duck persisted defiantly against the weather and floated or paddled along. November is like a month between seasons. It is as if the weather cannot yet make up its mind, although we know the inevitable choice that it will make. The paradoxical fact is that rather than dismaying, we actually rejoice in the gloom and melancholia.

My physical therapist’s offices are within an old, restored, and repurposed Massachusetts textile mill. You see these in particular as you ride up I 495 particularly in Lawrence and Lowell – absolutely huge structures and you imagine them filled with cloth looms. No problem you think, but then you realize that this is 1853 and there was no electricity. It was all done with water power, canals, flues, giant wooden turbines, belts and gears transmitting mechanical energy throughout the plants – a triumph to there age. The archeological remains of all of this are channels diverting the river into and out of buildings, and lots, really lots, of handmade stonework. The Massachusetts economy did not die with the American textile industry. Rather it was resurrected first with the high tech boom and then with the biotech boom. Many of these wonderful “old mills” have been restored and re-functioned including the offices of my physical therapist.

So I found myself that dull November morning in the scene captured by Figure 1. Gloomy skies outside, blobs of condensation on the window panes, and this therapist’s table with its complex yet simple wooden mechanism. I shifted it to black and white, adding a deep creamy sepia tone to it. The image was taken with my Iphone and to my mind’s eye perfectly captured the mood.