Tracey in Maine

One day, I will move from this house in Somerville with its many windows.  I will no longer be able to climb its spiral staircase to the top floor and from there to peer out the old window at the towering oak.  I will no longer be able to train my camera up through that tree’s branches into the sky.  But that day has not yet come. So on this bright September morn, I am grateful for this window, this oak and the blue of the sky beyond.  Have a good day, folks.

… while walking along the Charles River Esplanade in Boston.

… when the squirrel stepped out.

just sparkling water in a clear glass

sitting a bit in the shadows

I passed by a pond of what I thought were all orange koi fish.  Then, out of the blue, I spied a white fish with gold accents.  A ghostly figure that I really wanted to capture amidst the reflections in the water.  Mostly unsuccessful … he kept dipping deeper into the water.  But what I caught, and what I remember, are magical to me.

We spoke by phone.  I sat in my kitchen in Somerville, MA while my younger brother sat outside his home in Lynchburg, VA.  After I had described my latest walk by the water and what I might write about, he said, “Mmmhmm.  I think you should write some more about porches.”

“Porches?”

“Yes.  About what it’s like to sit on the porch steps at night, in the quiet and in the cool, with fireflies in the distance.  They look like stars.”

I imagined him sitting on his little back porch.  I thought about the seeds I had sent him and his family.  “Next year, I am sending you night blooming flowers.”

“That’s fine,” he said, and then he added, “And you should write about wearing glasses, how we wear them to see clearly, these wire frames that are not heavy but somehow you feel their weight all the time, and…

In The Art and Thought of John La Farge, author Katie Kresser writes that John La Farge (1835-1910) completed his first sketch of Nicodemus and Christ in 1874.  That biblical encounter is a subject that La Farge would depict in several different forms over time.  Here is a sketch dated 1877 in the Yale University Art Gallery, and here is an oil painting completed in 1880, now housed at the Smithsonian.  He would also create a stained glass window for the Church of the Ascension in New York.  The following image, The Visit of Nicodemus to Christ, is a photograph of the mural La Farge painted on the walls of Trinity Church in Boston.

The Visit of Nicodemus to Christ, mural by John La Farge, 1878

It is one of several murals that La Farge painted inside the building with the aid of assistants like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Francis…