To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.George Santayana
Cleared for takeoff. Farewell Autumn
It seems as if all the flying things are leaving our garden, including this Cabbage White Butterfly
And the Bumblebee Moth disappeared a few weeks ago.
Over the summer we watched the Monarch Caterpillar feeding in our Butterfly Bush:
And then, after pupating, returning as a beautiful Monarch Butterfly
Not all the Monarchs survive. In the following image, a yellow garden spider, the Argiope aurantia, has captured a butterfly and wrapped it in a silk sheath.
Ten days ago, the last few Monarchs visited our garden. They had just flown south from Canada over Lake Erie and settle on our zinnia flowers to build up energy for their long flight to Mexico.
The Swallowtail butterflies have also left
The Spicebush Swallowtail
And the Yellow Swallowtail sharing a viburnum blossom with a Bumblebee.
As the butterfly bushes start going to seed, we noticed Milkweed bugs (Oncopeltus fasciatus) on the pods. They are part of the milkweed ecosystem, we left them alone.
As summer slid into autumn, we watched the goldfinch plucking petals off the zinnia flowers to access the seeds.
We had bid farewell to the Ruby-throated Hummingbird that was with us all summer, and a few weeks ago a juvenile hummingbird passing through on its migration to Southern Mexico and Central America.
We still see Dragonflies, but they too will soon be gone.
We were fortunate to be able to retire in the country and align ourselves with the changing seasons. At our advanced age we have learned to say goodbye, which we must do every autumn. But we haven’t been completely abandoned. Here are some of our friends who will remain with us over winter
Racoon
Red fox
Skunk
Eastern Grey Squirrel
Chipmunk
White-tailed deer
The Possums and Groundhogs will be nearby, but underground. We’ll see them in the Spring.
Step into the boat. No, you don’t need to bring anything with you. You can leave your things behind. Your pictures, books, clothes; Even your phone. Your shoes. The plastic glass of apple juice with a bent straw. You don’t need to bring anything with you, Not the sun warming your face, Nor the rain, softly falling on your hair, Nor dreams of the ocean, And your special places. You don’t need to bring any of that with you, Nor anyone. Not your children. Nor even your wife. Let the memories and the music Of days when you were young Disappear into the nothingness, Like the sigh and sudden emptiness In the bed where you no longer lie. Leave them weeping there. Come, hold my hand. Step into the boat.
Despite the heat and humidity of the last weeks of summer, we look out at a blaze of color in the gardens surrounding our little sunroom.
Yesterday afternoon, sitting with my camera for less than an hour and, without leaving my chair, I took the following photographs. The quality isn’t great: There were reflections in the windows and several of the pictures were taken through window screens. But I wanted to share the sensibility of being surrounded by nature’s beauty on a hot, muggy day.
There are over twenty species of this perennial. In this blurry image seen through the screen window we have a Heliopsis, Tuscan Sun.
Turning in my chair and looking behind me, I see the Honeysuckle vine against a white wall. Sometimes I may see hummingbirds feasting on the flower’s nectar, but not this afternoon.
As I look to the front again, I catch a glimpse of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird at our feeder. Even though our garden has honeysuckle, verbena and monarda, our summer visitor will often take the line of least resistance by taking nectar from our feeder. In fact, if the feeder runs low on sugar-water, the hummingbird will sometimes hover just outside the window to remind us to fill it. Like the butterflies, the hummingbirds will soon be flying south.
Speaking of butterflies, here is a Monarch settled on a Zinnia flower. Over the past few days, we have noticed lots of activity as the fourth generation of butterflies prepare for their long migration to Mexico.
We planted Zinnia seeds in the house in April, transplanting them to pots in May and taking them out to the patio when the danger of frost had passed. They are a tall-stemmed plant known for their twelve petal flowers.
Close up to one of the windows is a tall tomato vine. We planted this several months ago and its fruit is only now ripening. This is the large ‘Beefsteak” tomato, a delicious, juicy, variety that we use for salads and sandwiches.
Turning around in the chair, I look out at another tomato vine. This one produces smaller slicing varieties in abundance
This Cana plant isn’t in the flower bed but in its own pot next to a tomato vine. We planted it in spring and expect it to continue enjoying its tropical-like green foliage and brilliant flowers until the first frost of autumn. Like the tomato vine, the Cana is so close to one of the windows of the sunroom, it could almost be in the room.
There is some shade under the old oak tree behind me where Hosta plants do well. But by this time of year, the flowers begin to wilt, and the leaves are losing their vibrancy. Earlier in the summer the several varieties in our garden created a luxuriant display of different textures, sizes and shades of green.
A variety of miniature Hostas in a blue pot keeps color in the garden.
The birdfeeder to my right attracts several species: chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, bluejays, sparrows, finch, grossbeak, starlings, blackbirds, tufted titmouse, a variety of woodpeckers, doves, and goldfinch. This afternoon, only a male house finch makes an appearance.
Looking through the glass door, one is struck by the bright yellows and pinks of a Zinnia and a pot of Petunias.
This Lantana plant is a nice addition to our pollinator garden. The species proliferated in our Arizona garden when we lived there but now are confined to a pot for their summer appearance in Ohio.
A blurry image through the window-screen of the tall, slender, stems of a Verbena with its cluster of purple flowers. It is a nectar source for butterflies and hummingbirds. A late-summer bloomer, it brings some nice color to the garden as other earlier blooming flowers begin to fade.
The Mandevilla is a subtropical vine native to the Southwestern United States, Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, and South America. We buy a small potted vine each spring and plant it next to an old lattice frame that it quickly covers, producing bright pink flowers. We can see one of its flowers sharing space with a Zinnia
Beyond our own flower garden, a few sunflowers that our neighbor planted in her vegetable bed adds to the color of our surroundings.
This the chair from which all the photographs were taken during an hour on a hot, muggy end-of-summer afternoon
The danger of flying is the sense of detachment it brings from life on the ground
In 1953, I flew in a Pan American World Airways DC-6 from South Africa to Boston. It was the first of many long-distance flights that included flying on a BOAC Comet to Heathrow, and with Air China on an old Boeing 747 from Los Angeles to Shanghai. There was one memorable east-to-west around-the-world flight mainly on Quantas and north-south flights to Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Barbados and South Africa. And too many flights to Europe to count. One thing didn’t change: The view of the sky and clouds.
I liked a window seat so that I could turn away from the coach with its crush of passengers and video screens and look out at the clouds, but often with the guilt that sometimes accompanies the feeling of detachment from the real world below.
I recall flying home late one afternoon and, on the final approach, looking down at the little houses in the blue-collar neighborhood laid out on a grid of tree-lined streets squeezed in between highways and runways.
In an instant, I saw a family in each house with each member bringing home a sliver of the multiplicity and complexity of their lives outside the home: The teenager, a mother, a father. And a great compression of the larger worlds of which they are a part into the little structure that for now is home. Each house, a different family; each a little world to itself. A few hundred homes.
And from the plane, I watched cars moving on the streets, most coming home, some leaving: Each story the same, but different. Beyond the streets and trees and houses, the highways came into view with rush-hour traffic heading west and east and branching off to the south.
And, in that instant, I saw a sense of purpose in all the vehicles speeding in opposite directions, and all cars turning into the driveways of different houses in the little neighborhood.
And in the sky above, an unseen network of satellites provides location guidance to the drivers and the ability to call home to say that one will be late. And as a look down, I see a dynamic system at play, not comprised of autonomous agents, but a system of interdependent elements whose very existence is contingent on the system as a whole.
And I become conscious of the approaching runway and the other aircraft, some departing and others at the terminal, and I recognize that I’m not an observer of the scene below, but a participant in it, an element in the larger self-correcting system that shapes and is shaped by its parts.
And the words of my uncle George come to mind as he describes his experience looking down from a mountain at the village below:
And the streetlights come on, and a kettle whistles on the stove, and in a home a small child feels safe and secure. And yet … and yet.
There are philosophers who say that we only know things in their relationship to other things. It is perhaps like this in our awareness of the seasons.
It was like yesterday, looking out the bedroom window: A rock and a few bare stalks in the winter snow. Now, life has returned. The rock is barely visible in the dense overgrown garden behind a clump of day lilies. These flowering plants, native to Asia, aren’t true lilies. They are prolific perennial bulbous plants whose flowers typically last only a day only to be replaced by new ones: Something like our own short lives.
Also like yesterday, I shoveled a path through the snow from the back door. And now, the Clematis flowers have come and gone and the tomato vine I planted in May is nearly 2 meters tall.
One of spring’s seasonal joys is watching the Clematis start to bud on old vines. Here they are. But now, in mid-summer, only the leaves remain.
Each spring, a pair of Canada Geese and two Mallards arrive at the back of the house. Even though they are different species (goose and duck) they seem to get along together. The Canada Geese mate for life while the Mallards enjoy a brief liaison during mating season.
The forest behind our house is home to white-tail deer. In Spring, it’s common for deer to hide their fawns and leave them alone for long stretches of time while they gain the strength needed to run from predators. One of the instinctual gifts fawns have is the ability to stay quiet during the first three weeks of its life. After about a month, the fawn’s legs are strong enough to support running, and it is now able to keep up with the doe while foraging for food. In this image, an adult deer grazes from the low hanging branches of a maple tree. It has already eaten the flower buds of the Stella D’Oro daylilies in our garden!
In this image of a young buck, it is easy to see why the species is called ‘White-Tailed’.
Skunks and Possums are both nocturnal mammals, so we seldom see them, although the skunk can make its presence known by spraying a foul-smelling liquid as a defense mechanism. The possum, on the other hand, will ‘play dead’ when threatened. In this image, one can see that the possum is a female marsupial by the pouch under its stomach in which it is carrying its young.
We see squirrels foraging for seed below the birdfeeders in winter. Their nests are often constructed of twigs and leaves in the fork of a tree or, in the case of our squirrel, in a hole in the lower trunk of a large maple tree.
Another diptych. These are young grey squirrels venturing out of their nest as the weather warms up.
This triptych illustrates some of the aquatic life in the ponds close to our home. The European Carp in the center is one of the most common species in lakes around Ohio. The Midland Painted Turtle on the left is moving towards its primary habitat, the shallows of a quiet pond. The species hibernates in winter, tolerating freezing temperatures for prolonged periods. During hot summers, it will often be seen basking in the sun on a log or on the muddy edge of a pond. The Fowler’s Toad on the right is one of several amphibians in the pond near our house. A female can produce over 10,000 eggs that fertilize externally. The eggs hatch after about a week, giving birth to tiny tadpoles. They have a very high mortality rate with as few as 10 – 12 surviving to become frogs These young creatures go through the process of metamorphosis, changing into baby toads leaving the pond after about sixteen weeks.
As in summers before, the Monarch caterpillar feeds on the Butterfly Bush and, within a few days, it will leave and look for a place to pupate. Hanging under a leaf, it will shed its skin, appearing as a chrysalis. And ten days later, it will amaze us as it does each summer fluttering upwards in spirals and swoops then diving in a haphazard aerial display that makes photographing them almost impossible.
The Slate Colored Junco on the left is a member of the sparrow family. They are sometimes referred to as snowbirds because they appear to carry gray storm clouds on their backs and white snow on their bellies. They also often fly into many areas just in time to usher in winter snows. On the right, a male Northern Cardinal shares a branch with a female Redwing Blackbird. We marvel at the fact that so many different species of bird come together to visit our feeders.
Summer is now in its full glory, The only sadness is our loss of Lucy, in whose memory we add this post.
Without Lucy, the skunks, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, possums, geese, ducks and even wild turkeys no longer have anything to fear as they wander behind our house.
A visit to an art museum can be a contemplative experience if one has time to be still. One is less likely to have this kind of experience in busy museums like the Louvre, the Duomo, the Met and MOMA than in smaller local galleries. A camera can help one focus on the here and now as long as one doesn’t click at everything one sees. It can help one pause and look below the surface of things. Here’s an example:
Person, early 2000s. Suh Se Ok (Korean, 1929–2020). 130.5 x 139 cm (51 3/8 x 54 3/4 in. Ink on mulberry paper
I’m alone in the gallery together with Suh Se Ok’s “Person”. It is mysteriously expressive: A cry for help, perhaps. Or an invitation for unity. Back at home, I modify the image.
The image has clearly evoked something below the surface even if I’m not entirely sure what it is.
Other images are less obscure as I introduce some movement into them:
Lilian steps out of the space she occupied with seated sculpture into a new space in which she will engage with the somber abstract painting.
And again, below, the relationship between a human subject and an artistic installation stimulates an emotional response. Scale, color, and movement create a sense of foreboding.
Below is another photographic, a diptych. It tells a story combining past, present and future.
On the left, an older person sits between paintings of birth and death. The image of the crucifixion projects a narrative of suffering and redemption. It was the explanation that many of us were given as children. It speaks of suffering in the human condition and, even though we were taught about salvation, there is nothing in the image to suggest it. And so, she sits in silence at the foot of the cross. The second panel in the diptych portrays a group of school children on a trip to the museum. There is movement. They are bathed in light. They don’t sit and ponder but run and explore. Perhaps they won’t be told the same stories with which we grew up. Perhaps they will write their own stories.
Let’s visit the Altes Museum in Berlin where the Neoclassical façade consists of a portico with Ionic columns and, on the steps in front of the museum is an 1858 bronze statue, The Lion Fighter, by Albert Wolff. I have combined two photographs to integrate the two ancient perspectives.
And in the Pergamon museum, a young woman is absorbed drawing one of the Ionic columns.
She is oblivious of the crowds around her, in the moment, at one with the ancient column whose form and beauty transcend time. There is a different oblivion in the following photograph I took at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Their absorption in each other involves, perhaps, a mutual sense of transcendence that one sometimes experiences in an art gallery.
A museum experience may not always be profound, but later to dwell on the photographic image quietly for several minutes brings its own reward.
While thinking of color, I’m reminded of my aunt, Betty Woodman, a ceramicist, who nearly twenty years ago exhibited her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
On the left is part of a newspaper clipping from the time, and I created the panel on the right by superimposing two photographs, one I took at the vernissage, and the other taken in her studio.
Returning briefly to the contemplative experience in the museum, the following unedited image of a man reading the art label conveys a sense of respect for the subject.
The Lady of Carthage mosaic (4th-5th century)
Engagement is another museum experience when the viewer is drawn in by the subject.
The doppelganger effect of the reflection in the glass door creates the illusion of a detached person observing the interaction, the unity of sorts, between the sculpture and the viewer. This raises the issue, perhaps, of the tension between detachment and engagement in our own day-to-day lives.
Some experiences are difficult to express through photographic manipulation. Take, for example, the following painting:
Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed: Pierre- Nolasque Bergeret: 1806
The painting hangs in Oberlin University’s Allen Museum of Art. I was particularly struck by it, not because it is an excellent example of the late eighteenth century tradition of depicting deaths of historical figures, not because it depicts Pope Leo X and an assemblage of notable figures including Michelangelo and the writer Vasari, but because the painting’s nineteenth century owner was Joséphine de Beauharnais.
Napoleon purchased the painting for his empress Josephine at the Paris Salon in 1806, and she hung it at her Château de Malmaison. As I gazed at the painting, I became acutely aware of the fact that this same piece of canvas just three feet in front of me with all its layers of oil paint carefully applied by Begeret was admired by Joséphine more than two hundred years ago. It was as if she was standing alongside me, both of us looking at the same painting, two viewers unable to find any common ground for communication across the centuries but both silently contemplating the striking image together.
I’ll end this stream of consciousness posting with a few more photographs:
In the left panel, a ray of sunlight streams through the open door of my Montreal office many years ago. The right panel contains a corner of the waiting area.
Da Vinci’s Horse, Grand Rapids, Michigan
In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci embarked on a project to create the largest equestrian statue of his time. But the bronze earmarked for this sculpture was repurposed for warfare. Centuries later, sculptor Nina Akamu revived the project, and in 1999 two casts were poured, one finding its way to Milan, and the other making its home in the United States.
Finally, the photographer wrestles an angel in the church of Xavier del Bac, the Spanish mission founded in 1692 by Padre Eusebio Kino, an Italian Jesuit who traveled from Europe to the “new world” in the late 17th century.
She shuffled slowly up the path clinging to her walker as a winter-ravaged Alberta pine clutches a rocky outcrop by the lake. Her name was Joyce.
Only scoliosis twists a person into a gnarled old conifer bent by countless winter storms. She seemed old, silent, expressionless, as if there was nothing left to say,
Her sideways glance seemed almost sly, her head bobbing to an inner beat that only she could hear. She drooled a little, the way one might when dementia loosens self-control.
Our paths crossed that sunny day and I politely commented on the weather. Then she told me she had been a teacher, a musical composer, nurse, published poet, and a belly dancer.
I listened patiently to her delusional story, punctuated by tremors and twitches, until she apologetically told me that she couldn’t linger, or she’d be late for her Parkinson’s support group.
As she shuffled off, I listened to the swish of her skirt, noticed the tilt of her hips, and, from some distant place, heard the mesmerizing music of the danse du ventre.
Javelinas were frequent visitors to our home in Southwest Arizona. Some people think them as wild pigs, but they are actually members of the peccary family, a group of hoofed mammals originating from South America. Javelina form herds of up to 20 animals and rely on each other to defend territory. They use dry riverbeds and areas with dense vegetation as travel corridors.
This large male is agitated, perhaps by the presence of the photographer.
Javelina form herds of up to 20 animals and rely on each other to defend territory. They have a scent gland on their back, and animals from the same herd stand side-by-side and rub each other’s with their heads. Their scent identifies animals from their own and different herds
Newborns up to three months old are red-brown or tan and are called “reds”, live an average of 7.5 years. All Javelinas have very poor eyesight and may appear to be charging when actually trying to escape. They have a keen sense of smell that identifies people and pets. It’s best to keep a safe distance.
They need a water source for drinking and sometimes can be seen scratching for water in a dry river (desert wash). When available, they will roll in water and mud to cool off. During the summer months at our home, temperatures would often exceed 40 C.
Mountain Lion, Sonoran-Arizona Desert Museum
The only predator a large Javelina would fear in our neighborhood was the Mountain Lion.
This nighttime photograph shows a young mountain lion in a neighbor’s property with its prey. In this case it is a Roadrunner.
The following images may be gruesome for some. So, be forewarned!
Here is the ribcage and skull of a Javelina that a mountain lion brought onto our property one night. Knowling that the lion may return the next night and fearing for our pet dog, I threw the carcass into a ravine close to our property,
The next morning, I discovered that the remains of the Javelina had been moved from the ravine to a grassy patch near our house, suggesting that some coyotes had found and finished off the creature.
To end on a more palatable note, here is part of a multi-generational herd of Javelinas on a neighbor’s property
Here he is, in front of his 1938 creation, “Women at their toilette”, a Surrealist work using collage and gouache mediums. This month marked the end of an exhibition on “Picasso and Paper” at the Cleveland Museum of art. The exhibit was a chronological overview of Picasso’s career and experimentation with paper over about eighty years.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and Paper Exhibition
There were nearly 300 works. One could view all of them, but there were too many to examine closely. So, we chose a few to spend time with. I took photographs, not to duplicate what we saw, but to try to capture the stimulation we experienced at the exhibition. So, here is “Women at their toilette”
I created a shimmering ivory tone for the above image to convey the “electricity” of this image that is now over eighty-five years old.
The following image, “La Vie” was painted more than 120 years ago and is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art permanent collection. It is flanked by Picasso’s study drawing for this work. He considered different groups of people and different poses before paining La Vie
Here is Picasso’s “The Painter and his Model”. But again, I have modified the image, superimposing two views of the work to underscore the point that the image is anything but static.
In the following composite, I overlaid a self-portrait that Picasso sketched of himself sketching a model onto a larger drawing of “The Painter and His Model”
And, one more variation on a theme: The superimposition of nine framed drawing by Picasso onto his larger “The Painter and his Model”.
Finally, here is an image that isn’t very different from how it appeared in the exhibition. Yes, the photograph has been cropped to create a sense of standing close to the image and entering into the beauty of it.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the exhibition contained nearly 300 works. In this post, we have viewed only four of them through several different lenses.
It has been so cold over the past few weeks that the birds haven’t been coming to our feeders. Like most Februarys, I find myself staring out of the window at the cold landscape feeling mildly depressed that winter seems never ending.
At this time of year, I seem to spend too much time standing at the window and looking out at the monochromatic bleakness. And my mind goes back fifty years …
…. to our first year in Canada when I took the above photograph in the frozen Ontario countryside. But then, there’s the realization that we felt differently about winter in those days.
Ice hockey on Lake Ontario
It didn’t take long for the children to learn to skate. Here’s our son, Adrian, on the frozen lake in front of Kingston’s city hall.
We embraced winters back in the seventies, and even wrote some poetry:
But, now in one’s mid-eighties, standing by the window, looking out at the falling snow, one’s mind goes back to warmer winter’s past.
On the cloudless days of February in Southern Arizona, we hiked the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains not far from home where the shimmering golden Cottonwood trees were the only sign of winter.
And, before that, during our time in Jamaica, February was when the tourists came to escape winter.
Port Antonio, North Coast, Jamaica
And we would find a secluded place to escape the tourists and swim in the warm waters of the Caribbean.
Alligator Pond, South Coast, Jamaica
And we would talk about when we swam in the Indian ocean and of our native South Africa when February meant long summer days on the most beautiful beaches anywhere.
Robberg Peninsula, Garden Route, South Africa
And, because it was still summer in February when we returned for a vacation twenty years ago, we hiked at 3000 meters in the Drakensberg Mountains.
Sani Pass, Drakensberg, South Africa
But these are just memories that, if anything, make today’s North American winters seem even colder. And, looking out the window, the snow is still falling, and I am reminded of my Irish grandfather and of the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
And suddenly I notice a bird, a junco, perched on the feeder pole. Life goes on.
The Final Stretch 