Acair Fearann

Power and internet back, after seven days.  Content later 🙂

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The sun dog

At the mare’s tail

Heeled

Mirrored ice

Flashed a rainbow warning

Winter coming

And golden rain

In the woods

Hanging high above grey water

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(a not wholly unrelated topic for this house)Everyone has them, it has taken me much longer than it ought to figure out what I really like: old tools. Specifically, pre-1950 metal or wood tools. Some people collect baseball cards or shoes, others collect cars or guns (the latter are really cool but out of my budget). I get innate pleasure out of finding a pair of ‘vintage’ forged steel tin snips, or wrenches built in that elegant curve which was the answer to confined working spaces before weird ratchets came along. I can’t tell you the names and I certainly can’t, to my shame, use many of those old tools; but their relationship of form and function hit a highpoint around 1900 that we have since fallen away from, to our detriment. A carpenter’s square could just be a square edge, the level and handle doesn’t need to have an added curved fillip, it doesn’t do anything functionally, but why not make it beautiful? When a culture decrees that even the utilitarian should be elegant, there is something going right. When it decrees that the utilitarian ought to look utilitarian, and we ought to be proud of that….well….

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The equinox has passed, neglected behind the rain clouds.  The house marks the time, as if a giant sundial, for the kitchen is strangely shadowed by the maple and apple trees, whose leaves are still green and for now, for a few weeks longer, block the sun.

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One of the astonishing things with history is how easily and how quickly information can disappear.  We are accustomed to an overload of data in our modern world, but even that information can vanish.  It isn’t a matter of erasing the data, it is a matter of forgetting why the data matters.  Photographs are the classic example.  

The photograph is fine, that data set is complete.  But it carries none of the ‘obvious’ information.  The photographer and the people photographed knew who they were, so why write it on the back?  (With the computer it is even easier to seperate a photo from the context) Maybe the person is a casual friend, their name forgotten after a few years; or maybe it is a close family member, but two generations on nobody is alive to recognize the only picture of Uncle Joe, even if they have heard stories about Uncle Joe.

Every historical society probably has at least one file drawer, or more, of unfiled photos.  Hundreds of people who were important to someone, somewhere, stare out at the frustrated archivists in silent anonymity.   And I daresay that the Facebook is probably beginning to accumulate ‘who is that guy in the back?’ photos as well.   Esperanza is no different, its photo archive contains many ‘who is that guy’ photos,  some are relatives, some long time guests, some here just for the day.  Those unknown people were important, there is a whole life story there, just outside the picture frame. 

In some ways the unfiled photographs can be the most haunting ones.  The disjunct between the desire of the person photographed to be memorialized and the anonymity that happened despite their efforts is sobering.  The silent voices of the millions that have gone before who have faces but no names.

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As seen from above, main stairs.

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Or what is to love about Connecticut?  Let us be honest, loving Connecticut is hard.  At least a few people I am related to despise it.  I am more than capable of holding it up as an example of all that is wrong politically, culturally, environmentally, etc.

This bit of Connecticut earns no ‘cool’ points: it isn’t a chi-chi Berkshire town, it isn’t chic urban, it isn’t dramatic mountain/ocean/’wilderness’ vacation escapism, it isn’t romantic Southern charm, it isn’t even genuine rural or genuine ‘small-town’.  In general people look at Connecticut and say (usually the same person) it isn’t chic urban and it isn’t quality ‘wilderness’ so why care about it?  And history?  It is the center of the industrial country that won the North that dispute of the 1860s, that made the West possible, that drove America’s rise for nearly 150 years.  Webster, Whitney, Winchester, Colt, Pratt, Sikorsky, Ovation…  but industry is a dirty word…

Well, you don’t fall in love with it immediately.  It isn’t the sort of place with jaw dropping vistas.  Maybe you have to have bad, uncorrected vision, because you fall in love with it through little incremental things.  The structure of brickwork in an old mill town, the multitude of architectural and cultural types, the mist on the river, hoar frost in the winter, foggy mornings, the rain lifting off the blue hills, the hundred different greens that change through the season, you have to fall in love with trees first, Connecticut is 68% forest even though it is one of the most densely populated states.  Fall colour and spring flowers, asters to daffodils, goldenrod to trillium.  Fireflies and migrant warblers, the horned owl deep in the sharp winter night.  There is great beauty, but it is fleeting.  In Connecticut familiarity breeds love, contempt is bred by inattention.  The mist lasts for an hour, the fall colour shifts and is gone.  These are scenes that demand constant attention.  You blink driving down the road and the astonishing vista of New England is gone, a trick of light, of space and time.

It has all four seasons, but never brutal; you can’t earn macho points for living through them, but you don’t need to either.   And perhaps that is part of its attraction.   Connecticut doesn’t offer you excuses or convenient images to hide behind.  There is no romance, so you can’t pretend to be romantic.  If you plant something, and it is in the right zone, there is no excuse here for it not to grow…on the other hand, it won’t grow without some effort on your part.  No casual tropical flowers here, but also no excuses of heroism in the face of the climate when you get only a single rose. 

Connecticut is a human sized landscape with enough land that a person’s stewardship or lack of stewardship has direct results.  In an urban landscape, the land is ‘other’ elsewhere, one’s actions seem to have no visible effect; in areas of the West, the land is a constant force so great that one can feel that one’s actions will not even be noticed by that greatness, even if they are visible; in Connecticut the land is a partner for good or ill.

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Specifically, getting wet while pulling the fence that keeps the old horse off the hayfield through the summer.  He now has a thoroughly decadent 12 acre field to play in for the time, and sometimes in that great stretch of green grass he shows that he is a descendant of Kentucky royalty, even at age 26 with two bad legs.  But I timed it poorly, and got to the farthest corner as the rain came down, in buckets.  Now, I don’t run.  And getting wet, well that really isn’t worth the effort.  So I continued on and got very wet indeed.

Having decided that you are going to be wet, it ceases to be an issue.  You won’t melt, unless you’re one of Mr F.L. Baum’s unpleasant witches.  If you aren’t going to be out too long, getting cold isn’t a serious concern.  So you get wet, watching the low grey clouds come up over the hill and the mist rise from the fields, and consider time.  Because really, you are already wet, why hurry?

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Today a somewhat meditative exercise in spatial arrangement to see just how tightly a bin could be filled, while listening to the wind and the tractors in the field. Could be worse.

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