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:”

Figure 1 – Sentinel along the Concord River just below the Old North Bridge. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

It is a very strange year. Thanksgiving has come and past, and it is now December. But Boston has been warm and snowless, leaving us all with the sense that it was summer only yesterday. Still the beautiful bleakness and the darkness of a world nearing the winter solstice has set in. I took the photograph of Figure 1 about ten days ago. That little tree stands guard in all seasons just where the Concord River turns to go under the Old North Bridge. If water only had eyes and remembrance, but it has neither. Rather the river and, indeed, this little tree in majestic silhouette are merely metaphors. I so much love this quintessential American place.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USMlens at 70 mm. ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/1000th sec at f/9.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – American robin’s nest in winter, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

The other morning I went up to the Minuteman National Historic Site by the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA – one of my favorite spots.  They’ve got it buttoned up for winter, despite the hoards of post-Thanksgiving visitor. I explored my usual haunts and there are a couple of places that I like to break away from the trail and risk the mud and ticks in order to get down to the river. There I like to project back and imagine a time when this was a picnicking or swimming location – maybe I am romanticizing.

In any event I pushed my way past a low lying bush and was delighted to find the “perfect” bird’s nest of Figure 1 – no longer well hidden at all. I am pretty sure that it is the artful handiwork of a pair of American robins (Turdus migratorius). What is so wonder is the perfection of the shape created by this avian basket weaver and how well it fits in with the surrounding scrub. There is a marvelous sense of three-dimensionality. And I think, that such a perfect birds nest – now empty – is not without deeper meaning. New England winters are cold and harsh but in the spring the Robins will return. Both the circle and the nest itself convey that kind of meaning.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/160th sec at f/9.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Landham Brook behind Old Mill Village, Sudbury, MA, the day after Thanksgiving 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

After I posted my black and white image of Landham Brook in Sudbury, Massachusetts yesterday, I worked up the image of Figure 1. This testifies to the conflict between color and black and white. Sometimes, maybe even more often than not, a little color however muted adds to the quality of an image. In this case the question for me was which medium best captured the mood of the day. I think in the end that I will settle on this one.

New England weather is defined by a multiplicity of seasons, which is why those who live here love it so much. We have the glorious color of early fall and that gives way to a desolate and moody late November that anticipates the first snow. There is a special bleakness to a leafless world accentuated by the muted orange browns of fallen leaves. I think that this image speaks to the temperament of the day after Thanksgiving 2015 and I believe that it captures the brook in a light which could easily have been taken on any late November day over the course of a hundred years or more. The name of the brook is barely remebered today. But its face is almost timeless. In a number of places, if you hold your head or camera just right, you can still feel the wilderness of the centuries ago. I spoke yesterday about the history of the place. In New England, old only by New World standards, history is everywhere.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 94 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/125th sec at f/9.0 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Landham Brook, Sudbury, MA, the day after Thanksgiving 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

The day after Thanksgiving this year was unseasonably warm in Massachusetts. There were cloudy skies, but not without blue patches, and temperature were in the low to mid sixties Fahrenheit (~ 21 deg C). I took advantage of the warmth to explore some of the local waterways and took the photograph of Figure 1 along Landham Brook behind Old Mill Village. I have been intrigued by the spot since a few years back when I saw a pair of river otters playing in the snow and ice, just like young school children. There was no snow nor ice today, only water rushing and light dancing in the current.

A short way downstream Landham Brook joins up with the Sudbury River in the Town of Wayland. This region of the state is scrubby wetland, at least today, and strangely the nature of the land has a raw and wild appeal. This is where the local native Americans (the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Podunk, Narragansett, and Nashaway) staged their first major battle, known as King Phillip’s War, to stop the invasion of their lands. From 1675-1678 Metacomet, who had adopted the English name “King Philip” in honor of the previously-friendly relations between his father and Plymouth pilgrims, waged war against the colonists. On April 21, 1676 ironically 99 years almost to the day before the Battles of Lexington and Concord and a century before the Declaration of American Independence the Battle of Sudbury took place.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 87 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/50th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Family memories for Thanksgiving. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of the readers of Hati and Skoll!

Thanksgiving is a great family holiday in the United States; egalitarian in that it is non-sectarian. Thanksgiving brings to mind people lost yet remembered. So I wanted to share a photograph that I took with my IPhone this past Monday afternoon. It was late Monday afternoon, in fact, and the light was streaming in almost horizontal and illuminating a nearly ninety year old photograph of my mother-in-law, Ginny, as a young girl. She hated when I called her Virginia and would say that “only my mother calls me Virginia.”

She was a very sweet and wonderful woman, and it has been many Thanksgivings, since she was with us. But in the warm glow of late autumn light streaming in through a little blue window an old colorized black and white portrait is brought back to life. The reflection of the little window is an enigma. The plane is not quite certain. The features are not quite sharp. It is kind of a fuzzy memory and the reflection of the window in the glass serves to remind us that the eyes are the windows to our souls.

Figure 1 – Bubble in my coffee cup, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

There is a long standing tradition among physicists to search for the cosmos in a coffee cup.  I don’t know if this tradition arises from the quiet contemplation that coffee produces or from generations of boring physics seminars where you have nothing else to do but look for galaxies in a swirl of cream. I had a colleague years ago, who would finish his coffee and then slowly knead the cup inside out until it looked like a sombrero. But even that speaks to the mathematics of topology that so dominate the theory of General Relativity, and it is that which ultimately governs the universe. And, of course, there is the appealing science fiction possibility that our universe is merely a vortex in the coffee cup of some titan race.

Anyway, this past Sunday I departed from my usual espresso and chose instead a more standard cafe’ Americano and as a result I spotted this little bubble on the surface of my brew and marveled at the reflections that it created. These include two images of the IPhone that I used to capture it. The double image almost certainly results from reflections off two surfaces – the convex top and concave bottom of the bubble.