Song Sparrow on the Rocker

Song Sparrow on the Rocker

A little striped song sparrow emerges from its protected spot under the turquoise rocker on my deck and eyes the bird feeder hanging from the eaves.

The landscape of snow itself is beautiful, even around my neighborhood. The opportunity to photograph my backyard birds against the clean white backdrop, though, is too good to pass up. Photographing birds in winter can be a challenge because most of them blend into their background of umber branches and withered leaves, but the snow is not only like a professional backdrop, it’s also like an auxiliary lighting feature as the light reflects from it from all angles, and especially underneath, enhancing details of little birds I’d never see so clearly otherwise.

Pussy Willow in the Snow

Pussy Willow in the Snow

I’ve got so many photos of the big storm and it’s hard to decide which one I’d use if I were to choose a more scenic image, but sometimes I like a detail image. This one of the pussy willow buds under the snow is interesting for the way the snow fell, leaving one side of the branch open, facing my window, and they look like an artifact, or a cutaway view. Two weeks ago during the January thaw I could have sworn they were beginning to burst open, but that must have been wishful thinking. I’m not ready for spring yet, anyway.

My Backyard on a Snowy Night

Backyard Snow at Night

The hushed energy a serious snowstorm lends to a night is magical as the very air seems to move, filled with a mist of swirling and falling snow.

My backyard is somewhat protected, surrounded by tall trees in my neighbors’ yards and situated on the lee side of a steep hill. Wind will catch the treetops and even swish across my roof, but once the snow swirls below the treetops it gently falls. Just a few hours after the snow had started every single branch and twig was covered with snow and more would be coming, even without a forecast one could tell that.

The Mysterious Paperweight

Mysterious Paperweight

I have always loved glass paperweights. Not for their use in keeping papers in order, but because I remember studying them with a child’s sensibilities in the 1960s when blown glass paperweights were in their heyday. Everybody had paperweights filled with billowing colors and millefiore patterns, bubbles and little bits of whatever could be mixed in with the glass.

This is a very special paperweight because it contains a little bit of your pet’s cremains. I spent a part of the day photographing urns and memorial items at Chartiers Custom Pet Cremation, and thought this photo was particularly beautiful. It’s a sample from the manufacturer so I’m not sure whose pet’s cremains are used. It can be customized for color. In the background is a lovely iridescent-toned metal tree sculpture on the wall, intended to add a pattern to the plain background to give the paperweight some dimension in space without being distracting.

This will appear on the website soon along with all the other new urns and memorial items.

Piano Baby

Piano Baby

The sun doesn’t often reach this corner, but in the late afternoon the clouds parted briefly and I felt someone was watching me from across the room. I guess I’ve never seen the Piano Baby illuminated in quite this way. If I had kept looking at her I would have begun formulating an arcane fictional story about how the Piano Baby came to life and probably began killing people or something, they never do nice things in these stories.

This is an artifact from my parent’s house, and it’s one of those items that was a permanent part of my visual memory of the house while we were growing up. I took it for granted, just seeing it as another one of the white or light-colored figurines my mother kept on a shadow box room divider. It always looked to me as if the baby had once been sitting in or on something, and perhaps holding something, in either case, that something was missing.

Then I discovered that it was an “item”, a “Piano Baby”. I’m not particularly attached to it, but I wouldn’t like to have seen it go into a stranger’s hands so I brought it to my house when I sold my mother’s house. I’m not a collector though I enjoy learning about things that are collected and why, so I never knew this was something other than a simple figurine until a friend who organizes estate sales and has a consignment and vintage store and has been a collector for years noticed it.

Apparently these were designed to hold the shawl on a piano in Victorian homes. I’m not so sure because these bisque figurines aren’t that big and they’re pretty lightweight, lighter than most piano shawls I’ve handled. They depict toddlers and were designed in many different styles and positions, lying down or standing, sometimes with animals or other babies. This one is fairly modest, but some seem a little suggestive with garments draped off the shoulder and somewhat provocative postures, I mean, for a toddler girl.

I’ve never seen this one in particular in any collector information and it has no maker’s mark on the bottom so it’s probably not a collector item. We did have a baby grand piano that had been my father’s growing up, but I never saw the baby on it. She’s still here, and I tried to clean the dirt from her, but in a test I also cleaned some of the paint that decorated her, so I left her as is.

Imbolc, Brigantia, Candlemas

Imbolc, Brigantia, Candlemas

Traditionally the day when the seasons turns from Winter to Spring, February 2 has been a very busy day in history. I have chosen a photo of a sun at mid-sky and the dried but still fragrant branches of wormwood, artemisia absinthum, for their significance as cleansing herbs for household and body, and their association with Artemis and by extension Brigantia…

“Brigantia”, feast of the Celtic goddess of many things in in what I’ve found of her over the years, fields and fertility, and by extension human creativity, associated with Brigid, Ceres and Artemis, celebrated on this day as she enters the cycle of power as the season turns from fallow to early fruitfulness. It is the original festival of lights, for even though the solstice is six weeks past and the days are noticeably longer, those weeks were some of the most difficult to survive for early humans; at this point spring was inexorably beginning and they could celebrate the beginning of another season of fruitfulness.

“Imbolc”, one of the eight sabats and four main festivals in Wiccan tradition, taken from the Welsh term for ewes beginning milk production, as apparently they do, as do other mammals who have gestated over the long winter months around this time. It is derived from “ewe’s-milk” in Welsh and variously from other Gaelic terms, but I haven’t ever found enough reliable information on others, such as “in the belly” from Old Irish, and it was often said that the weather for the remainder of winter until the equinox could be predicted by this day.

“Candlemas”, the day Mary is purified after the birth of Jesus, and the day Jesus is presented at the temple in Jewish tradition, and also the day that candles are blessed for the year, thus bringing together all the traditions of cleansing, reproduction and birth and the festival of lights after the most difficult part of winter.

And somehow it was adopted for the ever-popular “Groundhog Day”, perhaps we needed some comic relief! Because of regional changes in weather, the celebration may come after February 2.

Perhaps to give us some hope that the harsh Winter
really does have an end,
it signifies the true rebirth of the new season,
and by extension, of the self, since we have survived the darkest hours,
and is a time to celebrate new beginnings.

I leave my holiday lights up until this day.

Awesome Winter Sunset

Awesome Winter Sunset

This is from my archives, but it’s one I’ve wanted to share. It’ s because I missed a good one tonight—the sunset developed very nicely and I didn’t have my camera!

The one that got away is often the best photo in my imagination, but even though tonight’s sunset was lovely in its brilliant and shaded purple and red tones, it was wispy, the areas of color threaded among each other, with a fair amount of sky in between.

We haven’t had too many awesome winter sunsets this winter, and I’m not sure why. They only occur at a certain time of year because of a combination of the angle of the sun, the temperature and humidity, and they are fleeting.

This is from late December 2005, and the digital I had then couldn’t take anything approaching a panoramic shot so I had to take a series of shots and stitch them together. The image was well worth the trouble.

Aphrodite Watches

Aphrodite Watches

The carved face of Aphrodite watches over the viola da gamba player’s performance.

I only know it’s Aphrodite because I asked. I’ve never seen a face or figure on the scroll of a stringed instrument.

I enjoyed a performance of Pittsburgh’s Chatham Baroque this afternoon. I listen to classical music most days while I’m in my office, and while I love the “classics” I really enjoy chamber pieces best, small combinations of musicians wherein I can hear all the details of the music.

I love new music, too, but baroque music has been a particular love of mine since I first heard Bach, then his contemporaries, teachers and students. It’s got to do with my love of nature, I think, because the gentle acoustics of baroque compositions, played on traditional instruments, remind me of the wind moving and leaves fluttering, water gurgling in a stream.

The three members of Chatham Baroque are like one performer in each piece, each so talented I was lost in the music and watching them perform.

I Will Miss My Christmas Lights

Christmas Lights

Not the best photo, but the last day of January approaches the last day the lights will be on.

I will indeed miss marking 5:00 p.m. every day, even as the days grow longer, to see from the corner of my eye that the colored lights are “on”. I have a grapevine garland I made swagged around the outside of my porch roof right under the gutter, and the lights are draped on that garland. I used to be a white-light-only person, but one year I wanted the warmth of those little multi-colored lights and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I purchased a few strands of the new LED lights this year, and I just don’t like them, the colors aren’t right.

I’ll string other lights around the door, maybe even the pink flamingoes already, or just the string of white lights with red hearts for Valentine’s day, then I can change to green shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day.

I think I’ll string the lights around the underside of the roof so they glow and I can see them inside.

A Night at the Theater

A Night at the Theater

I went to see Cats last night in one of the grand old theaters in downtown Pittsburgh. While I photographed the marquee just to note that I was there, I really liked this photo of the view of the intersection taken from the elevator in the parking garage, eight floors up. You just never know where you’ll find an interesting photo.

I really love Andrew Lloyd Webber, T.S. Eliot has been one of my favorite poets since college, I’ve read and re-read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and I am a cat person in general, so after all these years I’ve finally come to the convergence of all these things I really like. But I was disappointed in the show; perhaps it was this production, but it neither felt like the book nor like an enjoyable regalia of a bunch of stray cats, even the costumes weren’t convincing. It’s always enjoyable to be out at the theater, though.