i've been trying to find the source of the "share your mug" prompt that's been going around in blog-land lately. i started over at
suki's, continuing on to
blue sky dreaming, then to
artit, and then on to
out and about in new york city, where i became too distracted by photos of new york to continue my investigation.
either way, this morning i finally remembered to hand my camera to j while i sat inches from the wood stove in my red chair listening to npr and drinking coffee as is the routine around here on weekends. the mug i'm holding has been with me for 20 years. when i bought it, i was a broke college freshman who spent every afternoon after classes driving from campus to wickenden street so i could sit in the window
at the coffee exchange. some days i skipped classes altogether to go to the café instead — to say the place was my salvation at the time is no exaggeration. with my friends from high school gone off to out-of-state colleges and my own college geared more towards commuters like myself than to kids seeking the "college life" experience, i was left to create a new community from scratch. i decided coffee exchange would be my base of operations.
the spot had everything going for it. it was situated on the sunny side of the street (like
babe's, my night-time base of operations) with two giant windows on either side of a door with tiny bells on it that tinkled hello and goodbye. their selection of fair trade coffees roasted on-site made them popular enough for some hustle and bustle but never so crowded i couldn't find a place to sit. usually i could either get my favorite table immediately or had plenty of time to wait it out. and i would wait as long as it took to sit in my spot, or else the experience wasn't quite right. it was the table to the right of the door, and from there one could sit in the corner and overlook the rest of the room, watch the action at the counter, or gaze out the window towards the port of providence, towards the sunset and the
three flashing towers of the narragansett electric company. it's where a cat would have sat had there been a cat around.
coffee was served in paper mugs similar in color and design to my ceramic mug (which was a real splurge for me when i bought it) and i loved the café so much i sometimes couldn't bring myself to throw even my cardboard cup away, and ended up with a small collection of them clumsily holding pens, pencils, and chopsticks in
my first apartment (which, not surprisingly, was between coffee exchange and babes). looking back, i guess i didn't so much move to providence when i was 18 as move to wickenden street.
i have vivid memories of sitting in the warm sunlight with my hands wrapped around a steaming cup while my hair, clothes, and belongings absorbed the acrid perfume of the coffee beans roasting in the mysterious back room. coffee exchange also had the best blueberry muffins — small but moist and full of tangy berries, served warm with a generous pat of butter. ella fitzgerald or billie holiday provided the soundtrack for wiling away city afternoons. the tables were perfectly sized for coffee and a book, or an intimate conversation between two people — your knees and feet couldn't help but touch beneath them. in my senior year of high school i'd spent many long evenings with the first love-of-my-life, savoring coffee and conversational until jittery, pushing the tiny cubes of spilled sugar around on the table while discussing the days ahead — his inevitable leaving for school 2,000 miles away, my inevitable heartbreak. afterwards i'd go home to my parent's house and, wired on coffee, write earnest, melancholy poems until dawn, carefully filling a whole notebook that i handed to him before he left.
from september on though, i sat alone, surrounded by a layered, fluttering wallpaper of multi-colored fliers: apartments for rent; roommates sought; cars for sale; bands forming; bands playing; cats lost; sidewalk and studio sales happening over the weekend. providence is a college town, with much energetic shuffling and metamorphosis going on, connections being made and broken. as i sipped, my favorite regulars came and went — frank, with dazzling winter-sky blue eyes, silver hair and fragile, pale skin who came for his coffee in the mid afternoon and read the newspaper when he wasn't talking to me about his days in the service. "the minister" from germany, a tall boisterous man with a quick, broad smile who brought me a brown rock from the fallen berlin wall which i still have in a heart-shaped box. willy would come to discuss philosophy with me after his 12-step meeting at the church next door, and martin told me that on the day of my birth he'd been on a california mountaintop, tripping on acid, finally home from service in vietnam. these were the afternoons before laptops and cell phones put a damper on spontaneous coffee-house conversations and invaluable interactions with strangers.
one night i had a vivid dream - more of a nightmare for me at the time. coffee exchange had completely changed. i stumbled in to find the regulars milling about confusedly, the ceiling hung with bright florescent lights, the small tables and sunlight gone. a year later the location at 214 wickenden street closed and the business moved directly across the street.
the new cafe was bigger, with more tables and more room for roasting coffee. it now had it's very own parking lot out back, and a
big outdoor deck. ella fitzgerald still sang. the regulars and the college students still filtered in and out. the coffee remained fair trade and delicious, and the blueberry muffins still came with a generous pat of butter. but to me of course it was never the same, especially when i sat on the deck with
a perfect view of my lost window across the street. even the ceramic mugs changed. i have one of the new ones. it's bigger.
i just dug out my old journals and poetry notebooks from that emotionally tumultuous era and found an entry dated sunday, january 12, 1991. i'd been in my first apartment for 12 days, a place i'd had my eye on for some time, hoping and praying i could figure out a job and find the strength to tell my family i was leaving home before it rented out to somebody else. i was still sorting through heartbreak that would last for a long time afterwards.
i left my (now) empty apartment flooded with sunlight and slightly out of order. clothes, towels, and dishes are heaped about in useless piles i'll sort out later. from my favorite corner table at coffee exchange i realize that for the past two years i've been sitting here gazing out the window and across wickended street at my own house. it's comforting to know that in the many lonely hours spent concentrating on the lack of someone across the table, this four story structure has was there, just waiting. someone across the table would have only blocked the view.
the woman in this photo is 71 years old. i'm serious. here's another...
she rocks!
in the grimm's brother's tale of stone soup, travelers enter a small village carrying nothing more than an empty pot. when they find the residents unwilling to share their food, the strangers fill the pot first with water then a stone and begin to cook it over a fire in the center of town.
curious, the denizens of the town begin to inquire about the mysterious contents of the pot. "it's stone soup" the travelers reply, "and it will be delicious. but it's a shame there aren't more seasonings or garnish available to help it reach it's full potential."
one by one the townspeople ask about the soup and don't mind parting with some of their food when they are told about the meal's delicious potential. little by little new ingredients are added and the pot filled.
finally, what began as nothing more than a stone in a soup pot becomes a nourishing meal for everyone in the town to share.
whose image of obama is now hanging in the national portrait gallery at the smithsonian institution.
the drone of flying engines
visiting birdstar tonight i found her blooming heart (is that related to bleeding hearts?) and an invitation to make your own flower by visiting here. i couldn't resist creating a flower in the middle of winter — and neither should you!
this old door was salvaged from a house in boston and several summers ago it became the entrance to our garage. our intention was to scrape and repaint it once it was hung, but visitors immediately began to comment on it's "great texture" and "beautifully crackled paint." i often find myself using it as a backdrop for photos. the task of painting it has been struck from the "to do" list.
underexposed — yet it caught my attention as i scrolled through old images for inspiration. it's that time of the winter when i miss growth and begin to resent how cumbersome winter feels — coat's too heavy, hat's too tight, winter gloves are too easily misplaced, winter roads too treacherous for a joy ride, floor's too cold to dance barefoot. both will pass — winter and it's inevitable emotional and creative ruts. it's still too soon in the season for winter blues week but i want to get you thinking about it — perhaps you'd like to join me this year in posting your winter blues?
i'm fairly sure i made that up.
i wear gloves when i lift, and always have. i suspect this started not for any technical reason or for fear of callouses, but simply because i thought gloves were cool, and still do.
daydream wallpaper, designed by julia rothman for hygge & west and available in several beautiful colorways here. have i mentioned that i recently had the opportunity to work with julia on an illustration for a marketing promotion? and that she is also responsible for a fabulous blog, book by it's cover? i need to photograph the marketing piece to better show how it folds — but until then you can check out the illustration and layout here.
lunch with the cedar waxwings
snowmen making themselves (with some assistance from gravity) in northampton, ma
a storefront window in northampton decked out for inauguration day. it's a work day for me, (especially after yesterday's holiday) but you can be sure i'll be keeping and eye on the celebrations online.
for your birthday i got you.......a new president! whoo-hoo!
she's both inspired and inspiring! some of you may recognize the painting above from this post.
and would you believe she doesn't really like snow?
our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
we have some guests for breakfast this morning: a group of cedar waxwings who prefer the berry covered trees and shrubs,
a territorial robin (with a particularly fuzzy looking red breast) who periodically chases the waxwings away,
and a nuthatch, who prefers the sunflower seeds in the feeder to berries
and likes to eat upside-down.
as i dig through my box of mementos i find my journals, and discover that the best writing in my 1989 poetry notebook is penned on the back of the purple title page, and it's not by me. it's by thomas wolfe. 
some scanned journal and poetry pages for a quick digital illustration relating to my last post...
this was a good day for a 3/4 down jacket, which i'm convinced is the answer to frigid new england winters. how it took me this long to discover this i don't know. tonight we're headed out for cajun food at chef wayne's big mamou, another tonic for the cold.
that's turned 50 shades of red. i don't know what this building is or if it's still in use, but it was the brightest thing i saw on my photo hunting drive last saturday. like a child's messy, crayon-scribbled valentine it's part chaos part perfection.
the lobster buoy hanging by the door reminded me of my home state, the ocean state — one just doesn't stumble across many nautical details here in the hills.
imagine my surprise when i visited magpie's beads yesterday morning to find a photo of of my zen calendar blog post displayed on her monitor with her very own zen page-a-day calendar in the foreground. continuing the cyber-fun here's my desk at work with her post up. and yes, i wish i could take my i-mac home at night and stare into it's big, glossy screen. alas, the i.t. guys would probably frown on that.
even if the messenger is only a simple teabag, this is an honorable directive — especially at the start of a brand new year.
killer icicles hang two stories above the office door all winter, periodically hurtling downward along with heavy mounds of snow from the rooftop. they drop without warning — starting as a little glassy tinkle, ending with an impressive thud on the pavement below, loud enough to shake the floor. like frozen stalactites the icicles grow ever longer, looming spear-like outside the windows, occasionally smashing through the glass and giving us all a good fright. to enter and exit the building safely we use a side door, winding our way through corridors and trying to sneak quietly past coworker's desks in our winter boots and swooshing coats. sometimes, like tonight, i try my luck at the main entrance, pausing with the door partly opened to listen before leaping out and running to the safety zone beyond the roof line. my small rebellion against winter.
today my boss decided it's time to ween ourselves off the chocolate that's filled our office candy bowl throughout the holiday season and brought in a crate of clementines to fill the sweet snack void. not quite ready to go cold-turkey, i chased mine with a cup of hot chocolate.
the appearance of the sun after a fresh snow and an unexpected visit from friends and their adorable daughter this afternoon has refreshed me. that, and putting the 50mm lens back on the camera. and wine. red wine.
yesterday's drive was destination-less — simply a return to the roads i rush over during the week. saturday afternoon brought a slower pace and occasional stop, despite the flat, gray sky of an impending snowfall and my pink-with-cold, glove-less hands.
while running errands in northampton yesterday i ducked into the haymarket, my favorite lunch spot, and realized it was still early enough in the day to order from the breakfast menu. since i could happily eat breakfast for every meal this was an added bonus.
even better, there was suddenly table service in the downstairs restaurant — no standing at the counter waiting to order, then anxiously listening for your name to be called, then having to get up for the napkin, fork, and glass of water you forgot. while i relaxed and waited for my breakfast sandwich, my mug was filled and refilled with delicious fair-trade, locally roasted coffee — a simple action that felt very luxurious.
this was yesterday's sunrise, whose pink and orange clouds i watched brighten the sky with one eye open like a periscope above the covers. i should get up and take a photo of this. noooo, i'll give myself a few more minutes — the sunrise will still be there in 5 minutes. no, i should really get up and take a photo of this to post on the blog...
though it was still a little dark for pre-coffee, hand-held shots with the wide-angle lens, i grabbed my coat and my camera and left comfort for cold. outside i found the fresh snowfall i'd wished for earlier this week, and the fleeting sunlight illuminating the woods behind the garden. in the berry-covered tree behind the kitchen i found a cluster of silent, fluffy birds i didn't recognize. minutes later they were gone. as i sat in the warm house last night i wondered if they were perched there in the darkness, waiting for the sun.
