Sixty Summers

A year has passed since I even opened my blog, let alone considered writing and posting any words, but I have been spending most of the last five weeks alone, blessed to be at my family’s summer home and leaving real life behind.

Today, however, is the last day of this interlude, this interruption from the worries and concerns of daily life. Tomorrow, I go home to New Jersey and leave New Hampshire behind, perhaps for another year.

I realize today, however, that this is my sixtieth summer on Lake Winnipesaukee - more or less. As I am a summer baby, I was probably not here that first summer. Still, there was always the chance that I might have been. And, to be fair, there were summers when we did not come - the year my youngest brother was born and perhaps a couple of years after college and grad school when the house stood empty as I do not believe my parents made the trek here during those years either.

However, since 1987 or so, I have been coming here each summer. With family. With friends. Alone. With a gang. I think the trips would have died quietly and the property sold had I not started coming again, first in law school for a weekend and then for a week with my husband.  We came both quietly and loudly and calmly and crazily. It has all been good. I tell myself every single day that I am truly the luckiest person in the world and I never fail to express gratitude for whatever fate brought me to this life.



But I digress. Words are easier to find when you are on a porch with waves quietly lapping at the shore, with boats humming by, with ducks announcing their presence and with children laughing in a neighbor’s yard. For sixty summers, more or less, I have watched as this spot changes and, truth be told, stays exactly the same.

Of course, more and more grandiose houses have inundated the shoreline and, therefore, more and louder boats cross my view. There are fewer cottages and more mansions, none of which fit in with historic norms. Restaurants have come and gone. Mini golf, once a staple, is harder to find and harder to afford.  The few water parks have disappeared. Parking has become troublesome. There are supermarkets, thank goodness, when once there were none.

But some things have not changed and I hope they never do. The sheer volume of sky takes my breath away no matter how long I am sitting, staring at it. Clouds here seem larger and whiter and cleaner than they do at home where trees, ironically, obscure the view. The temperature is rarely high although there were a couple of wicked days this summer which made be wish, briefly, for air conditioning. The mornings are truly golden with a clear, sharp breeze crossing my bed as the sun comes up - usually around 5am, but getting later as the summer draws to a close.

It is that moment that I will miss the most, the first awareness of another day at the lake, the first light, the first breathe of a new day. It is then that my heart fills with gratitude that another day has dawned, that there is the possibility of a 61st summer at the lake. After all, anything can happen to derail a dream.

As I sit on this porch, I mourn the passing of these five weeks, of this summer, gone in the blink of an eye - again. But I refuse to think about that, not on this crisp, clear lake morning in my paradise, my happy place, my heaven on earth.

Sunset on the Broads of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire

Stories from Behind the Camera: The Lady of the Lake

The M/V Mount Washington on Lake Winnipesaukee

Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire is known for many things. Water sports, amazing sunsets, cool breezes, great boating, a couple hundred islands, an ice airport and charming resort communities. Its most popular and enduring attraction, however, has to be the M/V Mount Washington, a unique ship that cruises the lake from late spring until the leaves have left the trees in the fall.

Seeing this unusual ship cruising past our summer home is the most enduring memory of my many trips to this lovely lake.

But first, some history. The first Mount Washington, a wooden ship, launched in 1872 to transport travelers and cargo across the lake as part of the Boston and Maine Railroad Company. As the fastest of many such ships on the lake, she came to dominate the transportation business. By the end of the century, she transported more than 60,000 passengers each year.

Eventually, automobiles eroded the railroad business so the "Mount" was sold and converted to a tourist attraction, carrying passengers to many ports around the lake. In December, 1939, a fire broke out at the railroad station in the Weirs, the Mount's home port and spread to the ship, completely destroying it. The owner, determined to replace it, found a ship in New York, built in 1888, cut it into pieces, transported it to New Hampshire, reassembled it and launched the second Mount Washington just eight months later. In 1982, she was again sliced down the middle and 25 feet were added, making her sufficiently large to be reclassified as an an official maritime ship. She became the M/S Mount Washington.

[Historic information from https://cruisenh.com/pages/history]

The Mount in Alton Bay

When I was a kid, the Mount cruised daily from its home port in the Weirs to Meredith, Wolfeboro and Alton Bay, the four corners, more or less, of Winnipesaukee. Because our summer camp is on a bay, we got to see her four times each day, once each way in the morning as she picked up her passengers and once each way in the afternoon as she returned them home.

Even before you could see her come into view, you could hear her engines giving advance warning of her arrival. When I was small and heard those engines, we would all yell, "The Mount! The Mount is coming." My brothers and I would run down to dock and wave, four times a day, every day, even though the ship was too far away for us to see if anyone waved back.

Sometime during my middle school years, my parents sent my brother and I off on our first solo cruise from the neighboring town of Wolfeboro to our home port in Alton. I was probably fourteen and my brother would have been ten. My parents then drove, with my infant brother in tow, from one port to the other. The whole ride probably took no more than half an hour, but it was thrilling to be let loose on the great ship without a parent dictating our every move. I distinctly remember recording our departure from Wolfeboro from the back of ship on my Kodak Instamatic camera. I can picture that photograph in my mind, but cannot, unfortunately, determine its whereabouts.

The Mount in Wolfeboro

By the time I was an adult, the powers that be had changed everything. Instead of daily trips to all four ports, she started coming down past our place only four days a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. A Saturday evening dinner/dance was added. Now, sadly, she comes to our neck of the woods only on Sundays. She still cruises every day but staggers the ports depending on the day of the week. Keeping track of where she is going to be and when has become something to look up online instead of something we can easily conjure up at a moment's notice.

The Mount is the "premiere" ship in New Hampshire

Now, each night, there is a dinner cruise. For many years, the captain would bring her within fifty yards of our house on Saturday nights. Everyone along the shore here would flash spotlights, put in for this express purpose. The Mount would flash back at us. We could hear the music and sometimes, if the air was just right, smell whatever delicacy had been served for dinner. But now the ship has a new captain and her trips down the bay on summer evenings have ended.

The Mount, heading towards Little Mark Island at the mouth of Alton Bay. She would come close to shore on Saturday nights during the dinner cruise until a new captain took over the evening sail.

Worst of all, we have to remember to watch for her now on Sunday mornings and afternoons as we no longer have the advance notice of her engines. She was given a new, silent engine a few years ago, thus eliminating the hum and whirr of her engines, a sound as familiar to me as breathing.

I miss the great churning engines of the Mount. I miss the advance notice. I miss the daily trips.

Times change. Technology advances. And not always for the better.

The Mount in the Broads of Lake Winnipesaukee

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Thanks for reading!!!!

For print information, please message me at vmlincolnphotography@gmail.com.

Follow me on Instagram @vmlincoln.photography and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/vmlincolnphotography for more photographs from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Alaska, Canada, France, Italy, Norway, England, Iceland and the Faroe and Orkney Islands. Next stop - Hawaii!

Stories From Behind the Camera: It's All About the Light

I have been blessed by the gift of magical places, the charming streets of Paris, the fjords of Norway, the food of Italy, and the glaciers of Alaska. I have seen the treeless landscape of the Faroe and Orkney Islands, a waterfall in Quebec, the lava of Iceland and the history of London. I have gotten lost on the Autobahn and sung along on a Sound of Music tour on a rainy day in Salzburg.

But of all the places I have been, none compares to the one I have visited every summer - and the occasional winter - of my life, Lake Winnipesaukee in NH. I used to think that this grand lake was all about air and water and sky because that is what you see and feel in abundance, but I have now realized that it is all about the light.

Each morning, the sun awakens me around 5am, early by any account. I could pull closed the shades, but somewhere along the way, someone decided that vertical blinds for casement windows was a good idea. They flap and click annoyingly with the slightest breeze. So, I leave them open, day and night. Eventually, the light becomes too much and the day begins. Even walking the dog, a test of one's patience, brings it own delights, the scent of pine, the leaves shivering on the trees, the shadows on the road.

As the hands on the clock progress, the light, of course, changes. No hour matches the one that came before.

To just sit and watch the sky and the breeze on the water is enough to make you forget home and work and chores and responsibilities. The effect is almost immediate. You take a deep breath and you relax. You are here again.

And then comes the moment, fleeting, but long awaited each day, when the sunset is either bonanza or bust. I can see no sunsets from my home in NJ (too many trees, surprisingly), but open water provides the perfect canvas for the light show each night, if we are lucky enough to get one.

The light is usually lovely, but it is, wonderfully, sometimes magical. These gifts here are not few and far between, but often daily. This view is a blessing I appreciate each and every day even at home in suburbia for once in a while there is a smell to the air or a feel to the breeze or just the right kind of brightness that brings the great expanse of air, water, sky and light of New Hampshire home to New Jersey. It may last only a moment, but a moment is all that I need.

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Thanks for reading!!!!

For print information, please message me at vmlincolnphotography@gmail.com

Follow me on Instagram @vmlincoln.photography and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/vmlincolnphotography/

Back to the Blog - Again.

Many months have passed since I put pen to paper, so to speak. No matter, really, since no one reads my blog posts anyway. Truly, I write them for myself as I enjoy the process of creating, whether sentences or photographs or art journals and scrapbook pages (hey, those photos have to go somewhere, after all). Maybe a day will come when I will share this with my children. They tell me my stories are boring and that they have heard them all. They may be boring, but they most definitely have not heard them all.

This blog has had many incarnations, first as a scrapbooking blog and then a blog of random stories and then a photography blog. Clearly, I have no idea what this is supposed to be. However, telling the tales with photos to go along with them seems to be where this particular passion lies and where it tends to end up. So, this blog is evolving once again back to stories with photo illustrations. And, once again, I changed the name and the email address and the photo banner at the top of the page.

I am nothing if not flexible although I believe my children would probably disagree. We'll see how long this one lasts or if, once again, months will pass and the tales will remain unwritten.

Stories from Behind the Camera: Turning Glass into Art

Float Boat by Dale Chihuly

Okay. I am just going to admit it. Until a couple of years ago, I had never heard of Dale Chihuly. If I had heard his name, I might have responded by saying, "Gesundheit." 

If you have never heard of him, first, let me thank you because it means I am not the only one who had no idea what a Chihuly was. Secondly, it also supports my theory that I do not indeed live under a rock. For the uninitiated, here is a brief primer in Chihuly:

Beluga by Chihuly

Five Orange Baskets in Glass (Chihuly)

Red Reeds on Logs (Chihuly)

Seaforms (Chihuly). There are several pieces in this study.

Scarlet and Yellow (Chihuly)

Dale Chihuly is a sculptor. His medium is glass. His creations can be mammoth or small. All are intricate. Some are colorful. Others are not. Some are plain. Others have impossibly tiny details. Whether you love him or you hate him, it is hard to deny that his work is amazing. It is certainly unique. 

Chihuly came to my attention when the college I attended installed one on his pieces in the multi-story entryway of the library. The school sent out emails and publicity, printed photos in the alumnae magazine, and generally promoted this as the greatest thing since sliced bread. 

Second confession. My response to all this was, well, "meh."

And then I saw it live and in person on a visit to my alma mater in 2015.

Clear and Gold Tower (Chihuly) at the Williston Memorial Library at Mount Holyoke College.

The piece was so enormous that I could not get it all in one photograph. It filled the foyer. It was, to use a word I hate to use, awesome. Tall, white, swirly, and pretty darned spectacular.

But I returned home and forgot about Chihuly, utterly and completely, or so I thought. Oh, sure, I read an article about him in a newspaper, something about his employees suing him, but that was more my professional interest as an attorney than any real interest in the artist. The occasional photo showed up in my Instagram feed. A classmate may have mentioned the piece from college. Overall, though, I lost interest.

And then articles started appearing in the New York papers and online. The New York Botanical Gardens was having a showing of his work in various locations in the park. Hmmm. I was mildly interested. When I started seeing photographs of the pieces lit up at night, I became somewhat more interested. When there was less than a week left for the exhibition, I bought tickets and my husband and two friends decided to make the trek from Joisey to da Bronx. 

[It was not a trip for the feint of heart or for people in a hurry as there was a football game about to begin across the street at Fordham University, but that is a story for another day - or not.]

And, in addition to the photos above, this is what we found. . . .

Beluga (Chihuly)

Glasshouse Fiori (Chuhuly). There was an entire wing of the main building lined with fingers of glass,
perfectly placed to blend in with the flora.

Persian Pond and Fiori (Chihuly)

Seaform (Chihuly ) - another piece in the series.

Sol del Citrón (Chihuly)

  

Sapphire Star (Chihuly)

Blue Polyvitro Crystals (Chihuly) - made from a resin rather than glass

My husband and I, along with our friends, wandered the Botanical Gardens on that beautiful Saturday in October, the last good day of the exhibit. We scoured the map provided by the NYBG to make sure we found every single piece of glass. We followed the app on our phones to make sure we missed nothing, not even the ones quietly hanging high up on the ceiling near the restaurant, pieces that could easily have been missed, pieces I failed to photograph.

Most everyone must have checked the forecast and decided to descent upon the exhibit that day as the gardens were packed. The rains came the next morning. That would not have been a good day to spend with Dale Chihuly.

We may not have seen the exhibit at night, but, I suspect, seeing all that glass on a gorgeous fall day may have been just as good. 

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These photos can also be viewed on the Echo Glen Photoarts website at www.echoglenphotoarts,photoshelter.com or on Instagram @echoglenphotoarts. Because Mr. Chihuly's work is copyrighted, of course, the photos are not for sale.

Stories From Behind the Camera: A Childhood Dream

When I was in middle school, we were offered two options for studying a foreign language, French and Spanish. As my father spoke French, it, too, became my language of choice at the tender age of eleven.  Although I have forgotten the names of virtually all my middle school teachers, the name of my french teacher stuck with me, Monsieur Dupuis.

I remember thinking it was the quintessential name for a french teacher.  

Monsieur Dupuis was known far and wide in the halls of our school for his rakish mustache and his popsicle stick constructions. He would collect the sticks from students who purchased popsicles and other such treats from the "canteen," the snack store that the eighth graders ran during afternoon recess to raise money for something I no longer remember. As the weeks and months passed, the secret project would grow. Sometimes students recognized it immediately as was the case when I was in the sixth grade and he constructed the Eiffel Tower. 

The following year presented more of a mystery. It was not until the school-year neared its end that we discovered he was building a guillotine. He even added a blade made of copper sheeting. Monsieur Dupuis was gone the next year and we, his students, always wondered whether his threat to cut off the tongues of those whose pronunciation was lacking could have been the reason for his departure.

Monsieur Dupuis was succeeded by Miss Fitzgerald whose name did not conjure up images of the Eiffel Tower or Versailles. However, Miss Fitzgerald had something that Monsieur Dupuis did not - the desire to take her students to France. By this time, I was in the eighth grade and she planned on taking eighth and ninth grade students to Europe during spring break.

How I wanted to go. Although I was not one to beg my parents for anything (we will not mention the clock radio I desperately had to have when I was 12 which followed me all the way to law school), I made a case for being allowed to go on the trip. There was one small, itsy bitsy problem: My confirmation fell smack in the middle of the trip. This did not deter me from my mission to get on that plane. Eventually, my parents relented and I was confirmed weeks later in another church.

That trip began my love affair with travel. We flew into Paris and made our way around the city before venturing further afield, to the chateaux of the Loire Valley, to the beaches of Normandy and, finally, to what became my favorite place on earth, Mont St. Michel, the iconic fortress off the coast of Normandy.

I had only my Kodak Instamatic back then in 1974 and the years have dulled the colors of those 3x3 inch photos. Now, all these years later, I think my thirteen-year-old self did not do a bad job in taking photos of this amazing fortress. For some reason, however, this odd little picture was always my favorite. I always wondered who, if anyone, got to live in that little house outside the walls.

Years, of course, passed. I was blessed to be able to return to France several times - as a recent college grad and then, much later, as a wife with my husband. 

But I never returned to Mont St. Michel.

And then children arrived and European travel became a pleasant memory with a hope for the future.

During all those years, though, I sang with a chorus in northern New Jersey. In 1989, the chorus went on a concert tour of Italy. Later, there were trips to Prague, China, Vienna, and Australia, but I had small children and sadly remained behind.

By 2014, however, my children were grown and I was ready to hit the road. In 2014, my chorus went to France. The plans included the beaches of Normandy, but not Mont St. Michel. My appeal to the trip planners was successful and thus came the day, exactly forty years after that first visit, when I returned to Mont St. Michel. A dream fulfilled at long last.

Of course, the Kodak Instamatic had been replaced many times over and, therefore, the photographs of that remarkable, unique island improved accordingly.

During our tour, I began looking out the windows. I wanted to find that little structure on the beach, the one that seemed to be outside the walls of the fortress. Having no luck, I was about to give up when it accidentally came into view.

Almost completely obscured by trees now, I could only make out the edge of the roof and the chimney as well as the small round tower at the corner of the walls. Nonetheless, there it was. 

When people ask me where it is I would go on vacation, the answer, no matter where I had just been, is always France. 

And I would give anything to climb the hundreds of stairs of Mont St. Michel yet again. By now, I bet that little building and the guard tower are completely hidden by nature. 

No matter. I know they are there.

Prints of the 2014 photographs from Mont St Michel as well as other photos of France are available from echopointphotoarts.photoshelter.com.

Stories from Behind the Camera: Home to Italia

Well, okay. The title of this post is not exactly accurate. I do not nor have I ever lived in Italy. I have been blessed, however, to visit this gorgeous country on three occasions, twice with my beloved New Jersey Choral Society

In 1987, I joined a small and fledgling organization that existed from concert to concert on donations and ticket sales. We were a tight family and, thankfully, we still are after 30 years. Back in 1989, our music director brought us a proposition, a concert tour of Italy. Another organization had put the trip together and then, it seems, abandoned it, but everything had been arranged and the tour company was searching for another group. We accepted the challenge.

Arragonia Castle, Ischia - 1989 (scanned film photo)

This trip took us to Sorrento and Pompeii, to Ischia and Orvieto and Orte, to Perugia, Assisi and, finally, too briefly, to Rome. It was a whirlwind trip over 14 days with six concerts. The tour arrangements were terrible - nasty hotels, tiny rooms and, of all things, terrible food. Our group of intrepid singers and a few spouses, though, had the best time ever. Even all these years later, we still talk about it. In fact, there are six of us from that trip who still sing with the same chorus.

But no other concert tours followed those amazing two weeks in Italy.

Until now.

Since 2006, the chorus has travelled to many other places - China, Australia, Austria, England, and France. Now it was time to return to Italy. Two of us who went on that first trip were, in a sense, coming full circle, coming home.

Our trip took us to very different places - Como, Milan, Venice, Verona and the amazing Sirmione. The participants were very different. In fact, many had not even been born yet when we went on that first trip. Others were just children in elementary school. The performance was also very different - just one, in an ancient theater in Como. Singing Verdi's Requiem in that place with a professional orchestra was thrilling despite the incredible heat. Europe was in the throes of a heat wave and it was very nearly unbearable.

And yet despite the differences, the feeling of camaraderie and affection and fun was exactly the same. The players may have changed, but the song was just the same.

Back in 1989, digital cameras were not even yet on the horizon. Home computers had yet to hit the stores. Photoshopping was not yet something anyone would have even dreamed of. By 2017, of course, everything had changed. Taking, editing and sharing photos is commonplace.

So, here goes. . . .

Venice

Verona

Piazza San Marco, Venice

View of Venice from the island of Giudecca

Venona

Verona

Prints available at echoglenphotoarts.photoshelter.com