May

Things were in full swing in May. But I still took time to photograph - and more importantly, smell - the snowbells (Styrax japonica) that bloom outside of the guest apartment window. This tree also happens to be between the door of the house and the door of my studio (which is in the garden), strategically planted in that location so that when I walk by, the wafting fragrance forces me to stop, bury my nose in the blossoms (watching out for bumble bees) and get a little tipsy from the sweet scent. Delight.

April: Serviceberries in Bloom

One of my favorite things about our garden is our five serviceberries that we planted in our rain garden. A rain garden is a small detention pond that catches runoff, in this case from our roof, and holds it there while the water slowly seeps into the ground rather than flooding our neighbors:

I have written several posts on the Therapeutic Landscapes Network Blog about these trees, including one called "Serviceberries Make Me Happy." And they do. They flower early, with delicate white blossoms that only last for about a week or so. The leaves emerge soft and downy, like little pale green rabbit's ears.

Faulty camera

My camera started misbehaving in April. Early on, if it was acting up I could just shake it or wait a couple of minutes and it would calm down and take normal pictures again. This is our front yard, with the coral maple all bright spring green and the white redbud (yes, I know, funny name) blooming in the background. The sculpture is by our friend Eric Tillingast.

After awhile the shaking and waiting didn't work and I thought my camera was dead. Luckily (sort of), Canon was very nice and they fixed it, cleaned it, and sent it back to me. So much for my excuse to buy a new camera...

Hudson Valley Light

People are always going on about the Hudson Valley light. Having moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, another place known for its enchanting light, this one aspect of the area doesn't usually strike me. But on this day in February, close to sunset, the light really was pink. This is not my faulty camera (I know you won't believe me when you see the next post, but it's really true!); the light was pink and made everything else pink as well. It's a terrible picture, but at least you see the light, and our witch hazel in bloom.

Big Bambu and (what used to be and what we Beaconites still refer to as) Tallix

In early spring, before the Starn brothers re-opened Big Bambu to the public, our friend George (who is now running for City Council at Large and for whom everyone should vote) let us wander around the giant (former) Tallix space. I told him I wouldn't publish any of my pictures of the sculpture, and I hope the Starns don't mind my posting a couple snapshots from their studio. Above is a detail of this notepad:

And here's a detail of the ropes that the climbers use for climbing and to tie the sculpture together. You can see a little of the actual Big Bambu in the background:

Outside the Tallix building is pretty great, too. Here's a pallet on top of a marble base on top of a piece of plywood. So Beacon.

I think this lady got left behind:

One of the things we loved and still love about Beacon is its industrial past, and its grittiness. Especially on a cold, blue-light February day, this blue building and other structures looked very, well, blue:

And another thing we love about Beacon is the fact that our friend George can take us for a quick peek at a sculpture in progress by world-famous artists who just happen to be using Beacon for their project...pretty cool.

Catching Up

This is one of my latest pictures, taken in August. August marked our four-year anniversary of living in this fair city. Today is September first. The dill is from Common Ground Farm, our CSA. The tomatoes are from our garden. But we need to back up a little bit...

This always happens. I get all excited about a project in January, in my slow time of year, and then April hits and work stomps out all of the extra non-paying creative stuff I do. Luckily, I get to be creative in work, but still. I've been missing this blog. Today I got a nice note from someone who found A Year (or two, or three...) in Beacon whilst looking for information on Dia:Beacon. I have no idea how she found me; I just tried googling Dia:Beacon for websites, blogs, and images and this blog was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless. I'm going to play hooky for an hour or so and catch up a bit. A fellow Beaconite, Gary, has a lovely blog that's mostly images (actually, it's only images), and he has inspired me to say less and show more.

So, working backwards from early spring, here are a few posts:

Speaking of Gary, his wife Virginia makes beautiful pottery. These pears happily occupy the bowl that she gave me and J. as our wedding present.

Spring in (the West Garden at Dia) Beacon

Spring is great just about everywhere, but there's something about spring in Beacon that is particularly magical. The less positive part of me would say that it's because Beacon, being a former industrial city that has fallen on hard times more than once in its life, has its fair share of nondescript buildings and houses with vinyl siding and chain link and vinyl fences, and in the winter - especially after the Christmas decorations have come down (giant blow-up santas notwithstanding) and the snow has melted - it can get to looking pretty grim. J. and I, like many other urban transplants, were drawn to the fact that Beacon still has a "gritty" side, that it hasn't been completely gentrified and cleaned up. But I admit that sometimes we get a little wistful as we drive through our boring, gentrified, cleaned-up neighbor, Cold Spring (no blow-up decorations allowed, and certainly no rusting cars on blocks in the back yard). Snobby, yes, but I'm not going to try to pretend in my own blog that Beacon's all rosy all the time. Still, "it's home," and for most of the year Beacon is beautiful and even when it's not, it's got enough other great things to make us want to stay. 

But back to spring. A friend said she thinks of this as the "bridal season," not because it's when lots of women get married but because so many trees and shrubs look like they are wearing gowns - all chiffon and tulle and lace in varying shades of pink and white, completely fluffy and froufy and over-the-top. 

At Dia:Beacon this weekend, the cherry trees in Robert Irwin's West Garden were in full knock-your-socks off blooming splendor. I entered the garden on Friday just as a gust of wind blew through, whipping pink blossoms off the trees which then fluttered down like parade confetti. People seemed truly happy as they walked around, sat on the benches, smiled, took pictures, and listened to the Louise Lawler sound piece. And walking around inside the museum, you could spot who'd been in the garden by the tell-tale pink petals in their hair. We're not allowed to take pictures inside the museum, but outside is fair game, so here are a few shots from my visit this weekend. 

I wish I had time to just wander around the city taking pictures, but as a landscape designer, this is also my busiest time of year (in fact, I shouldn't even be writing this post!) and so for the time being, these images will have to suffice.

Ten things I'll miss when winter's gone

Winter is not my favorite month. In fact, it's my least favorite month. Still, in sticky, sweaty, sweltering August, I'll be pining for snow and ice. So here are some things that I love about winter, and that I'll miss when it's gone:

1. Seeing Orion 

2. Reading or working on a puzzle with J in front of the pellet stove

3. The absence of mosquitoes, ticks, and fruit flies

4. Having a tiny bit more time than in summer when everything is in full swing and the garden and clients clamor for attention

5. The quality of the light - long, blue shadows on vivid white snow - and the soft, muted tones of dormant nature

6. Hot cooking in the kitchen: Baking desserts, roasting vegetables, making soup (and then eating it all)

8. Dinner and bed early, then getting up early the next day - never seems quite as easy when it gets dark so late

9. The way the landscape opens up here in the Hudson Valley

10. Seeing my witch hazel (above) begin to bloom, and feeling hopeful for spring's arrival

Winter Time

The Hudson in winter/my soul on ice

Can you tell that I write this blog in my spare time? Not much of it these days. 

We spend most of it walking the dogs, which is wonderful, especially in the winter when there's enough snow to cover all the nasty Lyme-disease bearing ticks that are a year-round threat. Little Stony Point, where this picture was taken, is our favorite spot these days because we can let the dogs off-leash to run. They love it, we love it, everyone loves it. Oh happy joy! 

But today J and I spent our spare time going to the mall, something we assiduously avoid for as long as possible. Nevertheless, we needed socks and underwear and a flash drive and a new battery for my old calculator and a new screw for J's sunglasses; we try to "keep it local" as much as possible, but sometimes we do have to brave the ravages of Route 9 for those quotidian needs. 

The mall. I feel like my soul has been held up to a fluorescent lightbulb until it shriveled up and died. Retail therapy around here is hard to find, even in the best of economic times, which this certainly ain't. 

At least it's book club night, which means getting together with 9 very smart, funny, talented Beaconite women and talking about a good book that Oprah probably hasn't even heard of and eating good food and drinking wine. The best antidote to the mall, if there is one.

Images of Beacon from March, 2005

Since that last post was so long, I figure I'll keep this one short and sweet, with just three pictures of Beacon in the winter as I saw it on that first trip in March of '05.

These are a series of structures on Tioranda Avenue, just west of the train tracks which are just west of Fishkill Creek. The industrial silos right alongside this gorgeous sycamore tree...

...and all that right alongside this sweet little house. That's Beacon for you. That house, incidentally, used to be a cutesy antique shop that we never went in but is now one of our favorite places in Beacon, The Hermitage, an amazing book store and art space. If you visit Beacon (and if you live here), you must visit the Hermitage and buy lots of books and art! 

The Why of It

What we left: Our garden in Santa Fe

What we gained: Our garden in Beacon

It's been a busy few weeks. Not that people are waiting with bated breath for my next posting, but still. I will today, finally, try to answer the "Why did you move from Santa Fe to Beacon?" question. 

About six months before we decided to leave Santa Fe, another friend of ours moved to North Carolina, quite suddenly. He got a lot of "why?'s" and, being a well-prepared, organized type, had his response at the ready for when he announced his planned departure: "Because it's wet, it's green, and it's where I grew up." Huh. Yeah, can't really argue with that. He said it with such conviction and finality that there wasn't much room for discussion or dissuasion. We all just nodded, bemusedly agreeing. 

So when we decided to move, remembering this clever ploy, I suggested that we, too, should have a sound-bite response that summed it all up. We never did. The nearest we've come is "to be close to NYC but not in NYC," and "to be closer to family," both of which are certainly true, but there's much more to it than that. But to put it into some neat, tidy explanation? Nope. Maybe that's just the way we both are. 

So here are some more of the reasons, as I see it:

1. Adventure: I think that J and I are both adventure-seekers. We like a challenge, or at least the idea of a challenge. This house turned out to be far more of a challenge than we intended, but that's what happens sometimes. That's another chapter. 

2. Career: J, as an artist, felt he had reached a sort of "glass ceiling" in Santa Fe, which has a great art community but can get to feeling pretty limited, career-wise. It's hard - not impossible, but hard - to be taken seriously as a contemporary artist if you're based in Santa Fe. Sure, SF and surrounds has some very famous artists (Bruce Nauman, Susan Rotherberg, Richard Tuttle, Fred Hammersly, Agnes Martin before she died) but they didn't make a name for themselves from NM, they moved there after they were famous, when they could live wherever and still carry on being famous. So there was that feeling for J of wanting to be closer to, or even in, a real art center. And for most artists, that's New York. Even with all the talk of L.A. being the next art center, NY not being "where it's at" anymore, blah blah blah, ask almost any artist where s/he would go to really take their career to the next level if money/family/etc. were no object, and most will say "New York City." That's just the way it is, or at least was back in 2005, or at least that's how we saw it.

And for me, too, though I was doing okay as a self-employed landscape designer and had a good thing going as a part-time lecturer at the University of New Mexico that might have blossomed into something else had I stuck it out (in which case we would have had to move to Albuquerque because driving 120 miles a day five days a week was not how I wanted to live my life), I felt like in another three years or so, if not before, I would be "done" with New Mexico. That was a long sentence. I was channeling Thomas Mann. My epiphany came one day when I was looking at ASLA's online job postings, something I did now and then, and there was a listing for a well-known firm in NYC whose work I really respected. All of the sudden, I thought, "Wow, I could work there." And if not there, then somewhere else in New York. Why not? I'd done a brief stint at the City of Berkeley and knew I didn't want a government job; I'd worked for two landscape architecture firms in Santa Fe as the sole employee, which was good but not altogether satisfying; I was doing the self-employed landscape designer thing (still working towards being a registered landscape architect), and that was o.k. but kind of lonely and limited; I was doing the UNM thing and was pretty sure I didn't want to be a full-time academic; I had even tried some freelance writing and knew that wasn't for me, either; the last unexplored territory, it seemed, was to work in a big landscape architecture firm. Not much opportunity for that in or near Santa Fe. In New York I could work for a diversified firm that did public projects and private commercial and residential projects (rooftop gardens! cool!) in a stimulating, challenging environment where I would really be forced to earn my chops, etc. It could be really great to have that experience. If I hated it, I hated it, but at least I would have tried it and learned a lot in the process, gained great experience, and have something impressive on my resume. That day, I said to J, who had been suggesting off and on moving to NYC ever since we met in 2001 and who had always been met with my resistance, "maybe we should move to New York city." I'd like to say he fell off his chair or spat out his soup or something dramatic, but I think his response was more subued than that, a kind of quietly incredulous "really?"

3. Family: My parents live in CT, and almost all of my extended family is also on the east coast. J's parents both lived in England. Getting to both places, but especially to England, from Santa Fe was a major ordeal. Perhaps it would be better to be closer to both of our families. 

4. To live somewhere more sustainable: Santa Fe seemed, in many ways, unsustainable from an environmental perspective. You're in a city in the desert, where not that many people should be but where too many people are, using up precious water, spending a lot of fuel getting goods to and from port cities...I could go on but I'm even boring myself at this point. But suffice it to say, we were tired of constantly thinking about and feeling guilty for how much water we were using (which wasn't much, relatively, but still); showering with buckets that we then emptied out onto the perennials; spending hours each week draining the rain barrels and dealing with the water-wise but antiquated irrigation system...and so on. Plus, Santa Fe is 7,500 feet above sea level, and we convinced ourselves that living at a lower elevation was better for our health as well.

There are other reasons, too, but like I said, I'm bored and so probably boring, too. Now I know why I've been putting this post off!  Maybe I'll write sometime about why Beacon instead of Brooklyn or NYC, which were in the running when we made that trip in March of '05. And maybe not. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm writing this blog for me, not for some audience who will be upset if I don't fill in all the details. So from now on I'm just going to talk about what I want to talk about, post the pictures I want to post, and enjoy telling the story the way I want to tell it, holes and all.

Why later. Miscellaneous March '05 pictures now.

I will, eventually, address the why question, but as I'm a bit pressed for time tonight, here are some random images from J's and my first trip to NY in March of 2005.

J, Jack, Agnes, and Boo in the hotel room in Fishkill, NY. Back when we were looking at Beacon, there wasn't a single hotel or B & B (no hotels, still, but a couple B & B's now). We were grateful to find one in nearby Fishkill that allowed pets. By the way, Fishkill doesn't mean that they kill all the fish - "kill" is Dutch for creek, so it translates as fish creek. 

Beautiful installation in the hallway at P.S. 1. Wish I knew the artist's name.

The cellphone "tree" - we didn't have these in NM because they would look even more ridiculous than they do here. Not too many tall trees in the southwest unless you're right by the river. And even then...

Is anyone actually fooled by these? I guess they at least provide some comic relief on dull highway drives.

I Love Beacon

After the last posting, J was concerned that I painted Beacon in a bad light compared to Santa Fe. I suppose I did, but only to illustrate the point of view of those incredulous ones who so bluntly asked "why?" when we moved here (see previous posting). So to set the record straight, I love Beacon, and I'm glad it's my home. 

In fact, I feel a song coming on!* I love Beacon in the springtime:

I love Beacon in the fall:

I love Beacon in the summer, when it sizzles:

And in the winter...well, not so much. But I've never been a huge fan of that season, anywhere. Still, plenty to enjoy, including the three red foxes and two deer we saw on our walk along the Hudson this afternoon. Our friend Jennifer, who spent 13 years in Nevada before moving here, and who still gets claustrophobic from the unrelenting green foliage of summer, says she likes the winter because everything opens up a bit more. You can see the sky, and even catch glimpses of the horizon sometimes.  

And the dogs love the snow, and it's the one time of year when we don't have to worry about ticks. So you see, I really do love Beacon, every season, every year.

Next up: My answer to the "why" question.

*Please don't sue me, estate of Les Baxter.

Why?

What we left.

After we moved to Beacon, people we met were often surprised that we hadn't moved from Brooklyn (where the vast majority of newcomers to this fair city are from - more on that in a minute). When we told them we had moved here from Santa Fe, New Mexico, the response was almost invariably a blank, uncomprehending stare, followed by the question: "Why?" (As in, why would anyone in their right mind move from somewhere so beautiful to, well, Beacon?)

Most folks who move up here from the city (as in New York city) are moving from Brooklyn, and most of those emigrated from Williamsburg before it became nauseatingly full of hipsters. We were already pretty sure we didn't want to live in Williamsburg because it was already full of said hipsters in 2005. As one of our friends from Santa Fe said about her visit there, "It was chilling: I got off the train and everyone looked just like me. " That and high real estate prices were enough of a deterrent for us. But for many newly transplanted Beaconites, most of them artists or other designer-y types, this little city was attractive because it wasn't near Ground Zero; real estate prices were much more affordable; it seemed like a good place to raise kids (you could have an actual yard, for starters); there was a burgeoning art community (some even call it a renaissance); and all still close enough to NYC (about an hour and 20 minutes on the Metro North line, a beautiful ride along the Hudson) to not feel totally out of touch with what you left. Many of our friends still commute to the city for work at least part-time.

So, then, why Beacon for us? More on this soon. Stay tuned.

What we gained.

Background? The characters, anyway.

I'm not really sure who I'm writing this blog for. Mostly for myself, I suppose, though if it's just for me, then why not make it totally private? Perhaps I harbor many bloggers' fantasy that someone will see my meanderings, think they're the most brilliant thing ever, and want to publish them. More likely it's so that I can share my memories and pictures with J, my best friend of seven years and husband of three months, and other family members and friends who might want to see/read my rendition of how it all went down. Like I said in the last posting, I don't keep a scrapbook anymore, so this is, in a sense, my scrapbook of those three plus years since we left Santa Fe on our Beacon adventure.

But for the random person who googles Beacon and stumbles upon this blog and hasn't given up reading yet, perhaps they want a wee bit of background. I did kind of jump into the plot at the deep end. 

So here are the characters:

Naomi. Your narrator and photographer. Landscape designer who will be a landscape architect as soon as she passes the fifth and final section of the Landscape Architecture Registration Examination. Moved to Santa Fe, NM straight after getting her Master of Landscape Architecture from Berkeley. Met J in summer of 2001, because he lived in the live/work lofts where she worked (and because of destiny, of course). 

J. Artist, designer, and lots of other things here and there to pay the rent/mortgage in between art sales. Born in Brazil, grew up in Suffolk, UK, moved to L.A. in the 1980s, moved to Santa Fe in the early 1990s. Initially attracted to Naomi for her two vehicles: A 1972 Chevy El Camino and a beat-up Toyota pickup truck (slightly more reliable than the Elky and perfect for trolling the back roads of New Mexico). First gift to Naomi was a rusty shovel. That's why she loves him.

Jack. Sweetest dog on earth. German Shepherd/Collie mix, born on Christmas Day, 1990, adopted by J and his then-partner at the perfect age to be adopted, 8 weeks. Died on a warm spring day in 2007. We still miss him.

King Jack

Agnes and Boo. German Shepherd/?/? mixes, sisters and littermates, born 6/29/04 at Bridging the Worlds Animal Sanctuary after their mother was rescued from a hoarder. Spent the first 13 weeks of their lives (note that the socialization period for dogs is 12 weeks) there, on a mesa in between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, with two wonderful people and about 60 dogs. Adopted by Naomi and J in September. As they drove home together, it started raining - in New Mexico, a good omen. Very, very shy around people, even today, but much better than they were at the beginning which was almost impossible. Most people continue to think that they are either coyotes, wolves, or a mix of the two. To us they're just our wonderful, cuddly, charismatic wildlings.  Still, it makes for funny anecdotes: On a walk recently, a girl saw Agnes and Boo and asked her mother "Mommy, are those foxes?" And her mother replied matter-of-factly, "No, dear, they're wolves." 

Boo

Agnes