Figure 1 – House at Heard Farm, Wayland, MA, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Pastels are usually made by diluting vivid colors with creamy white. Yesterday as we were emerging from the trail at Heard Farm in Wayland, Massachusetts, i was struck at the contrast between the tans f the dried grasses and the delicate magenta pink pastel of a house. The result is Figure 1. Notice also the pastel blue of the sky reflected in the window. But note most particularly the old wooden gate. This path through the brambles is clearly not well traveled. As such, it has a charm of mystery about it. Is this the way to some secret garden.

This is what I love about the character of the New England landscape, and I will take pastels over deep vivid hues any day.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 73 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/400 th sec at f/13.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Grace, Crumpet, and Keith at Heard’s Farm, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

It was a most unwinterly 60 deg. F (15 deg C) in Sudbury this morning and my canine neighbor, Crumpet, was kind enough to invite me on an adventure at the Heard’s Farm Conservation land in Wayland, MA. If you are to understand her sacrifice, you must recognize that I was forever talking to her father (Keith), when he should have been throwing sticks for her, and also we were not quite keeping up the pace. Still my poking around with my camera in the scrub gave her plenty of opportunity to try for an un-noticed swim in the Sudbury River. But her mom (Grace) always managed to thwart her efforts. In the end the three paused long enough for a group picture (Figure 1), and Crumpet obliged me by climbing up on a log in a most undoglike manner. Still she was happy to be with people as she always is. In fact, my sense with dogs has always been the more the merrier!

Heard’s Farm is on Pelham Island and historically was owned by the Nipmucks of the Algonquin tribe. As I have indicated in a previous blog, Sudbury and Wayland featured prominently in King Phillip’s War. Pelham Island was, in fact, part of a separate land grant from the original Sudbury land grant that founded the two towns and was given to Herbert Pelham, who was the first treasurer of Harvard College. Herbert willed the Island to his son Edward in 1672. Today Heard’s Farm is part of gorgeous conservation land in the Sudbury watershed that also includes the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge that abuts it.

It is late fall and this is defined by stark leafless landscapes and reddish orange decaying leaves. We were circumnavigating the field, when I noticed the wispy cirrus clouds of Figure 2 crowning the naked trees along the horizon.  The whole sense of the  pictured: the colors, the textures, and silhouettes define the New England season to me. And the whole point is that whatever season you are in, in Massachusetts, there is always life in the landscape: life in the tree buds, life in the decaying leaves, and life in the wild birds. The phrase “a lifeless landscape” is indeed an oxymoron here.

Thank you, Crumpet, for taking me along!

Figure 2 – Heard’s Farm, Wayland, Massachusetts, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf2015.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/200 th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

The darkest evening of the year. IPhone selfie. (c) DE Wolf 2015

I would like to express my contempt for those that each November plunge us into unwanted darkness. In their “infinite wisdom” (NOT) “they” end daylight savings time and we get to drive home in the dark. What a pain. Well this is it, Tonight in Boston December 8th along with tomorrow night, we have our earliest sunset. After that and until the solstice the duration of daylight continues to become shorter, but comes off at the other end with progressively later and later sunrises.

There I am in Figure 1 driving home (not driving at the instant of the selfie) with a displeased look of contempt on my face. My contempt is for “them.” And who are “they?” “They” are the members of the United States Congress and Senate. That should explain my contempt. This is not a very reliable or thoughtful group.

I must content myself with the fact that we will soon be on the ascendance. And, of course, there is a certain poetry to New England winters – to the sense they are to be conquered. I am reminded of the words of Robert Frost, the poem that I first read in elementary school “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening:”