SUMMER SLOWLY SLIPS AWAY

Labor day’s over …. Hermine pulled out … the end-of-season Commodore’s Ball is over … the weekly rentals are gone home … the Purple Martins left town a few weeks ago … there’s no weekday morning headboat, in fact, only an occasional boat at all … there are ginger snaps, mums and candy corn for sale … the cicadas frantically buzzed their way back to Middle Earth, replaced by the crickets, embarrassed to be noisy in the post-Labor Day quiet … school buses are on the streets … and the Canada Geese are honking.

Yep, summer’s slippin’ away.  It always makes me think of this quotation which I’ve used before:

“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon.  The two most beautiful words  in the English language”

                                                                           Henry James

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Well, I’ve got a few pixels left from summer to help me remember what it was like.  Here are some.

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I love this piece and the image.  Besides Royal Blue being a favorite color I’m hooked on the many-lenses effect giving me lots of views of a favorite place.  Even the puff of cloud overhead was captured in the stem.  My daughter, Sigrid, bought some of these including tumblers this summer so that they could always identify their glasses at the BYO parties.  We’ve seen this kind of glassware, typically thought of as Bohemian, where a color flashing is artfully cut away to create the lenses.  This one, however, is plastic and a beautiful job.

Way back in August I mentioned that I had gone to the beach to photograph a rainbow but I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it.  However, I keep tripping over it and it’s grown on me.

I like the warm misty tones, especially on the new hewn railings that guide us over Mt. Dune.

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Next, a summer treat from my youth (I wonder when that was).  Every summer when the Jersey tomatoes were in, my mother would prepare a feast by frying them, then making a milk gravy with the leavings and serving it all with bread.  What a great memory.  Then a few years ago I found out that Barbara’s mother also made them so now once a summer Barbara prepares this treat for us.  Yum!

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Another August, season-ending event is the art show held at the club.  Members showed their talents in painting, photography, decoy carving, and sculpture.  Here were my offerings.

 It was an all-canvas array including the largest I’ve done.  I had the two larger pieces done by a lab but printed and stretcher-mounted the two smaller ones myself.  Except for the lower right twilight scene they were all worked up with software to create a painterly effect.

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The four cat boats scene was from last year’s Twilight Sail , and the image was selected for the club’s 2016 events calendar.  The selection was made by my long-time friend (and powerful tax advisor) (and son of long-time friends Fran and Joe) Vice-Commodore Joe O’Neill.  The painterly version canvas went home with the lead boat’s owner.  (Honest, Ken, I didn’t set you up.  😉 )

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Sunsets and sunrises are an important scenic focus all year round but summer seems to bring more drama and opportunity.  This one is iconic which is a fancy way of saying, yes, I’ve seen this kind of scene before.  But it appealed to me to have the chairs off-center and closer to the viewer, the sun centered between them, and that boat on the right for tension.  Also, Barb and I saluted a lot of sunsets this summer from these chairs.

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Finally, here’s another favorite of mine from past posts.  I’ve not come across a more moving way to say again,

Shucks, the season’s over.

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