Scene & Story: October 2017

Oh, October, you most brilliant and colorful of months! I hate to see you go.

October has always been a favorite month, no matter where I lived. Where I grew up, in southern Nevada, there wasn’t much color to speak of, but by October the weather was always pleasant — not too warm nor too cool — and life would be well-settled into the fall routine of school or work or whatever.

October is usually quiet month, before the excitement and anticipation of the winter holidays set in. It brings with it a touch of nostalgia, as my father’s birthday is (was) in mid-October. He died in 1994, but would have been 99 this year. I still miss him.

The year after Dad’s death, I moved eastward, first to Ohio and later to Maine, and experienced the “real” autumn that I’d previously only read about. It’s been over 20 years and I still haven’t gotten over the wonder of it. So, even though it’s a total cliché, my October scene is all about the leaves.

High winds and heavy rain last weekend brought an end to the peak color, but I have memories and I have photographs to remind me of its glory until October comes around again.

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Click here for the Scene & Story link-up at Paisley Rain Boots.

Scene & Story is a monthly collaborative creation that Sarah Huizenga of Paisley Rain Boots and I dreamt up to encourage one another in our photography and writing. We’d love to have you join us! Share a favorite photo from the previous month along with a short story or description and link up your blog or Flickr photo. 

Autumn Musings and Summer Reflections

October Marsh

Well, I can no longer kid myself that there’s anything of summer left. October is definitely autumn, though it feels like fall has been slow to really take over. For the most part the weather has been quite warm and mostly clear. The leaves are slow to change color this year, and many trees seem to be letting go of their leaves without the usual spectacular display first.

Autumn Solitude

Today really does feel like fall, though. The morning was overcast and there’s been some rain, and I can see a few colorful branches among the green ones outside my window. A light wind is fluttering the leaves in the trees and scattering them like confetti on the ground.

Dawn Beach Patrol

With the new season I’m thinking about my blog again. It’s been a year since Sarah and I started our monthly Scene & Story posts, and since May that has been the only post I’ve published each month. Last year in September, I took Susannah Conway’s Blogging From the Heart course, thinking it would revitalize my blog. That didn’t exactly happen, but I still have hope — and tomorrow’s another day!

Noontime “Crowds” and Clouds

Today I looked through WordPress’s blog templates, thinking perhaps I’d select a new one to change things up a bit. While there, I learned that mine has been “retired.” I also learned that there’s none I like better, so I’ll be keeping it as long as they will let me! It’s clean and simple and it suits me. I can always change my header photo for a new look now and then (and in fact I just did).

Evening Falls

I have ideas for posts and a mass of photos to sort through! Though I haven’t been blogging much, I have been taking photographs nearly every day, mostly with my phone. I love my iPhone for its convenience, spontaneity, and ease of sharing. Lately I’m feeling drawn back to my Nikon for its creative control and photo quality, but now I almost have to learn how to use it all over again. I think that “A Year With My Camera” may be 2018’s project.

Lone Leaf

The photos in this post are a random sampling from summer and early fall. I am so glad to be able live in this amazing place.

Wishing you all a wonderful week!

Scene & Story: May 2017

This was my May:

May has been such a grey, wet month this year that a Bangor Daily News blogger wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about it. The headline read:

‘Great Fiery Orb’ seen over Maine on Tuesday identified.

April showers bring May flowers, as the old saying goes, but when May just brings more rain day after day, it can be a little hard to remain bright and cheerful.

But . . . this was also my May:

In between the rains, there have been days of warm sunshine, soft breezes, and bird song. Spring bulbs, trees, and shrubs have exploded into bloom, their sweet fragrance filling the air and fallen petals carpeting the ground with bright color. And everywhere the new green leaves are growing, screening views and hiding nesting birds from prying eyes.

This May, I have thought to myself that perhaps spring has become my favorite season now. As long as I can remember, I have loved fall best. But this year the renewal of life after the cold, dark winter seems especially meaningful and precious to me in ways I can’t put into words.

So I can’t choose just one photograph for Scene & Story this month, because I need to tell both sides of the story. The dark, gloomy, wet days and the bright, sweet, flowering days are both essential to paint the scene. Each makes me grateful for the other, and I love them both in their turn.

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Click here to join our Scene & Story link-up at Paisley Rain Boots.

**Scene & Story is a collaborative creation that Sarah Huizenga of Paisley Rain Boots and I dreamt up to encourage one another in our photography and writing. I hope you’ll join us! Just share a favorite photo from the previous month along with a short story or description and link up your blog or Flickr photo. Please remember to visit the other story sharers and leave a little love everywhere you visit. It’s a wonderful way to find and build a community of kindred spirits.

Scene & Story: April 2017

Robin Redbreast

April in Maine is known as mud season for good reason. We had snow. We had snowmelt. We had rain, lots of it, and more fog than I remember from previous springs. The water in the river rose a couple of feet. The photo above was taken on a day that was very typical of this year’s April.

Many years ago, I read in a newspaper advice column that you can tell if a rainstorm will be short or long by watching the birds in your yard. If all the birds disappear when the rain starts, it will only be a brief shower. If they ignore the rain and go about their usual business, you’ll know the rain is going to continue for some time. Birds need to eat often and can’t afford to take a day off from hunting and gathering food just to avoid getting wet.

I’ve found this bit of folklore to be pretty accurate. After all, our ancestors needed to use their experience and observations of nature to forecast the weather for themselves in the days before satellites and radar and 6:00 news broadcasts. On the day I took this photo, it had been raining for hours and the trees and brush at the river’s edge were busy with hopping and fluttering winged creatures.

Several robins left the trees for the grass below my window, exploring the newly thawed earth for tasty treats. This one perched on the picnic table for a good look around before strutting across it and joining his fellows on the ground. I could almost imagine him sighing and asking, “How much longer is this going to go on?”

Well, Mr. Robin, you tell me.

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Click here to join our Scene & Story link-up at Paisley Rain Boots.

**Scene & Story is a collaborative creation that Sarah Huizenga of Paisley Rain Boots and I dreamt up to encourage one another in our photography and writing. I hope you’ll join us! Just share a favorite photo from the previous month along with a short story or description and link up your blog or Flickr photo. Please remember to visit the other story sharers and leave a little love everywhere you visit. It’s a wonderful way to find and build a community of kindred spirits.

Monday, Monday

What a week! It rained all day Tuesday and all day Thursday. Wednesday and Friday were solidly gray, overcast and damp. But Monday, oh lovely Monday, looked like this:

I’m participating in Susannah Conway’s April Love 2017 (there’s a photo prompt for each day during the month of April), and the prompt for Monday was “Noon.” How lucky was I that this one glorious day fell on Monday? I was tired and not feeling well as I headed out, but an hour of walking on the beach at midday, breathing in the salt air, feeling the sun on my face and the wind in my hair, renewed my body and spirit.

This is the collage I made and posted in the April Love group on Facebook. But after all my moaning about snow and winter lingering on forever, I thought you all might like to see it, too.

This . . . THIS is what I’ve been waiting for!

Adventures in…Intuition

I went out this afternoon to try to complete this week’s challenge from Kim Manley Ort’s Adventures in Seeing book. To be honest, I’m not sure if I “got it” or not. The purpose was to exercise our intuition, and Kim suggested listening to our body’s leading rather than consciously deciding where to walk or what to photograph. The idea was to allow ourselves to feel something physical, a vibration or resonance, that would give us direction.

I think of most of my photography as “intuitive.” I seldom go somewhere specific with preconceived ideas about what I want to photograph. I go someplace, I see something that catches my eye and causes a quick intake of breath, I “work” the subject and make photos of it. But I can’t say I’ve ever felt the sort of physical sensation that I understood Kim to be talking about. Maybe I was trying too hard to make rational sense of something that’s not based on logic.

Anyway, I bundled up and went outside and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for “something” to suggest a direction. All I heard my body saying to me was, “Are you crazy? It’s cold out here! Let’s go back inside.” I ignored that and arbitrarily turned right and headed for the Riverwalk, mostly because I hadn’t been that way in a while.

Past Main Street and the railroad overpass, I veered off the sidewalk to check out this little “park” area. There was no one else there — I wouldn’t have gone in if there had been, because the place kind of gives me the creeps. There used to be some rather artistic graffiti on that wall, but someone (probably the city) painted over it, and now it’s just a lot of (to my eyes) ugly scribbling. This is certainly not the kind of image that makes me feel good. I don’t think this is where my intuition was leading me.

I saw leaves, an unexpected sight this deep into winter. A tall oak tree still held nearly all its leaves, though they were quite dead. I suppose the new growth in the spring will push the old leaves off.

These are oak leaves, too. The sun was playing peekaboo with the clouds, making the leaves flash like a neon sign as shadows came and went.

One had broken away from the crowd to lie in yesterday’s inch of new snow.

There was much evidence of other, smaller creatures out following their bodies’ instincts. I’ll bet they don’t question where they are going and what they are doing.

Okay, that’s a pretty nice view. Let’s keep going just a little farther.

I never notice this sign except in winter, when it always makes me laugh and say out loud, No kidding! But I suppose it serves a useful purpose in the summertime, when there’s a boat ramp there.

“Fine. Can we go home now?” my body wants to know. “The wind is picking up and I’m cold.”

No, not just yet. I want to walk up to the birches, then we’ll go home.

So delicate, the tracery against the sky. Who would have expected this? When I left my apartment it was mostly overcast with dark grey clouds piling up on the western horizon.

Oh yes, this is what I wanted. Maybe I could go just a little bit farther up the trail…. Okay, wait, my body is definitely talking to me now.

“You said, to the birches. These are the birches. You can’t even feel your fingers anymore. Go. Home. Now.”

And so I turned back, still not knowing if I did it “right,” but happy with my outing anyway. One look back:

It is enough.

A Winter Album

Last Tuesday evening, the weather forecaster told us we could expect perhaps an inch of snow overnight. It only took a quick peek out the window Wednesday morning to see he’d been a bit off the mark. The world had been rendered in black and white.

Six inches of lovely, wet snow fell during the night and continued softly all the next day, settling delicately on every branch and twig. I kept going out to see what new delights I could discover.

No Picnic Today

Arcs

Bittersweet

Twigs

Tree at the River’s Edge

Weighted

Secret

Everyone photographs this covered footbridge from the other side — the street side. But this is my favorite view, hidden away behind my building and challenging to reach.

Sentinel Fir

The little island, Jubilee Park, is locked up and inaccessible during the winter, but I still enjoy looking into it from the sidewalk and taking photographs of the trees, water, and changing weather conditions.

Winter Reflection

Resident Mallards

Apparently they missed the memo about flying south for the winter.

Lamp Post

Upriver

Island’s End

The Street Side

Contrast

Bowing Low

Hiding Place

Framed

Zigzag

Home Again

Time to thaw out my fingers with a cup of tea, snuggle under a warm throw, and spend some time with a favorite book. Thanks for coming along to play in the snow with me!

 

Nor’easter 2016

I think we’ve just had our final big storm for 2016, and it was a wild and crazy one. You may have heard rumors of it. Even my sister and brother-in-law in California were worried about the “monster storm” they heard was headed for New England.

All Decked Out

We haven’t had too much snow this winter — up to now. Yesterday morning about 7:15, as I walked to meet a friend for breakfast, I stopped to take a photo of the lighthouse gazebo on Main Street. There was still a trace of snow from last week. While we were at breakfast, it began to snow a bit, but that wasn’t the storm. No, that was only a little warm-up, if you can call snow a warm-up. By the time I got home, we had maybe an inch of “pre-storm” on the ground. It soon stopped and moved on to make way for the real deal.

All was calm for a couple of hours, and then it began to snow in earnest. Perhaps four inches fell over the next few hours, before switching over to rain that poured down in the evening, washing away most of the snow. But we weren’t done yet! It got colder again and switched back to snow, which was falling steadily when I went to bed around 10:30. I’d guess we got another six inches or so overnight.

By this morning the world was transformed. The first order of business was to dig out both of our cars and remove them from the parking lot by 8:00 so it could be plowed. But first I had to take a picture of the soft pink sunrise clouds.

Cotton Candy

Let’s just skip over the actual hard labor part. I got enough exercise to feel justified in skipping my fitness class this morning! I was tired and cold, but my reward to myself was to go walking and try to get a few photos with my iPhone. Here’s a bit of what I saw.

The Bluest Sky!

Old Faithful
Behind the building: I’m so grateful for the faithful boiler that produces that
picturesque steam — and the heat that warms my apartment.

These black twigs make beautiful patterns against the snow.

Remnants of the rain.

I love this tree in every season.

Evidence of the wind: snow plastered against the side of the tree trunks.

A spark of red in a blue and white world.

In front of the building, rhododendrons conserve energy by letting their leaves “wilt.”

So nice to see the sun!

The gate is locked and the park closed until spring. So sad!

This is ice and snow on the water downstream from the bridge.
Does anyone else see a message?

More ice/snow on the river. I’ve never seen it like this before.

A glimpse of the Amtrak train station across the river.

The Sunny Side
Heading home to have my coffee and get warm!

May this New Year’s weekend find you happy, healthy, safe and warm. I wish you all a wonderful 2017!

Soul Food

Like everyone else I know, I’ve been grieving the results of Tuesday’s election. This post will have nothing to say about that, because I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been expressed by others…many others. This post is about what I did yesterday afternoon to distract and soothe myself.

I picked up my camera and I went for a walk.

Fallen Leaf

I followed the Saco Riverwalk, which begins just a few blocks from my apartment. To get there, I had to pass the covered bridge to the little park next door, where I paused to take the photo above.

Next I found this delicate fern growing out of a crack in the wall of a railroad overpass.

When I got to the river walk, the path was so leaf-strewn that it was barely visible. It’s narrow and slopes steeply down to the river’s edge, so I kept my eyes on where I was placing my feet.

I came across a few wildflowers still blooming. This large, round boulder is a puzzle — it looks completely out of place atop the angular granite riverbank. I wondered how it got here.

Rosa Multiflora is a terribly invasive plant, and there’s a lot of it in this area. But it is beautiful! It’s covered in tiny white flowers in the summer and masses of small red hips in the fall and winter. I’ve read that they are edible, but I’ve never tried it.

Many trees have already shed their leaves. You’d think those ones at the very tips of the branches would have been the first to go, but they are hanging on tenaciously.

A favorite resting place. I love this view to the neighboring town across the river.

This clump of birches is one of my favorite places to take selfies. Yes, I did get my phone out of my pocket and snapped a few. Not very successfully, though – it’s a windy spot, and I couldn’t keep my hair out of my face!

And here are the tops of those birches. This makes me think of spatter painting.

There’s not much red left, so I was especially pleased to spot these oak leaves.

The river widens into a little bay here and the path curves left to follow it around.

With apologies to my friends who have to pay florists exorbitant prices for a bit of bittersweet — this stuff is everywhere.

And here the trail swings back to the right…

…to follow this power line easement.

I don’t know what those tall, auburn-colored plants alongside the trail are, but they were filled with the rustling and twittering of small birds. I saw many chickadees, busy doing whatever chickadees do in the fall, calling out their cheery little “chickadee-dee-dee.” (This image is greatly cropped, since I didn’t have my tele lens with me.)

At the top of the hill, more trees and so many leaves! I sat down in the middle of these for a while, just inhaling their delicious spicy scent. The river walk has turned away from the river now, and is circling back toward town.

From here, there’s just a glimpse of the water. The tide was out so the water level was very low. (The Saco River rises and falls with the ocean tides all the way to the center of town.)

One more surprise: a single scarlet leaf on a bright golden maple tree.

And that brings us to the trail’s end. Those steps on the left lead up to a small parking area, where I begin my zigzag path along the neighborhood streets and sidewalks toward home.

On the way home, I looked up and saw this:

Crisscross Clouds

And an hour or so later, the day’s final gift:

From My Window

I needed that, so very much. I hope it has lifted you up a little bit, too.

Scene & Story, Chapter 2: October 2016

If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you may have already seen the image I chose for this month.

Signal Flare

I took this photo on the same day as my hike on the Saco Heath. I was driving home and was only two blocks from my door when I saw this flaming red vine out of the corner of my eye. I drove on home and parked the car, then ran back to frame and shoot the photo. I called it “Signal Flare” for its brilliant color, a sure sign that autumn was truly under way.

Okay, New England fall, colored leaves, pretty picture, and all that. But there’s a reason this photo is meaningful to me.

It was only early October. Virginia Creeper is one of the first plants to show its fall color and I knew there would be so much more to come. I’d already been out with my camera for a good three hours, since around sunrise, and hadn’t had breakfast or even coffee. I was tired and hungry. Surely this could wait? At least until after breakfast…and that coffee!

Better yet, how about tomorrow? (I am an excellent procrastinator.)

But somehow this felt urgent. I needed this photograph, and it couldn’t wait. I didn’t even go in the house first; I just hurried back and got my shot. And guess what? Overnight the rain came, the wind blew, and by the next morning, that vine was stripped bare. I’m so thankful that I captured it when I had the chance.

The older I get, the more conscious I become that tomorrow is a hope, not a promise. This photo is my own personal Signal Flare, a prompt not just to “seize the day” — I’d already done that — but to seize the moment when it presents itself. It may not be there later.

I know myself well enough to know that I won’t always succeed at this. I’m grateful for this image that reminds me to be present, to listen to the quiet voice of my own intuition, and to recognize and receive such fleeting gifts before they slip away.

Be sure to visit Paisley Rain Boots for Sarah’s October Scene & Story.

If you’d like to post your own “Scene & Story,” you’re more than welcome, and we’d love to know about it. We hadn’t planned on a formal linkup, but if you feel like joining in, you could leave a link to your post in the comments.