Barn

It's Started!

It's started! Colonial Williamburg is decorating for the coming holidays and I'm very much looking forward to what are local wreath-makers will come up with this year.

Run & Gun

 

Christmas Spirit

 

It's beginning again to look a lot like Christmas on DOG (Duke of Gloucester) Street in Williamsburg and Fido here is helping everyone get into the spirit in front of the men's clothing store. 

Peace

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Although I'm quite aware how this is a peculiarly American holiday. I say "peculiarly" because of its odd evolution over the years. Settlers in Plymouth often as not get the credit for the celebration, even though those of us here on the Middle Peninsula lay claim to an even earlier tradition:

"Thanksgiving services were routine in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia as early as 1607; the first permanent settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, held a thanksgiving in 1610. On December 4, 1619, 38 English settlers celebrated a thanksgiving immediately upon landing at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia. The group's London Company charter specifically required "that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God". This celebration has, since the mid 20th century, been commemorated there annually at present-day Berkeley Plantation, the ancestral home of the Harrison family of Virginia." -- Wikipedia

Still, I find it rather amusing that it wasn't even until the late nineteenth century that the holiday was made official by an act of Congress, a body which has never been known to get much of anything done in a hurry. :-) 

So why the photo above? Well, whenever I think about Thanksgiving, I frequently think of how formidable these shores must have appeared to those folks who landed here for the first time from a more settled existence abroad--deep, seemingly impenetrable forests filled with all manner of as yet unimaginable dangers. No wonder, then, why some of them might have felt a deep sense of relief, not to mention thanksgiving, to have survived even a year upon leaving their homeland. 

Fall Blend

 

A couple of scenes from the Virginia Capital Trail near Greensprings. No vibrant fall colors here for the most part, but still quite lovely with its blend of bronze, yellow, and green.

Riding the Hedge

Virginia Capital Trail

Bliss

 

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

-- Emily Brontë

Extraterrestrial

Layers

 

Virginia Capital Trail

Tower Window

 

North tower window of Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg.

Linking again today with Skywatch Friday.

Gold

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

 

Concert

 

Sophie (violinist) and Ryan (cellist) Lowe moments before they helped accompany a performance by the Williamsburg Women's Chorus this past Sunday afternoon. Sophie, who is originally from North Dakota, studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. Ryan recently relocated to the U. S. from London where he graduated from the Trinity Conservatoire. He also was selected from among his international peers to "perform for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in a performance that would later feature on ITV television in the United Kingdom."

Kiln Kingdom

 

There's a new shop in town. I actually posted the photo above several weeks ago when the shop opened. The sign shown below, however, was just installed. The proprietor told me that the glass and ceramics in his shop are made by members of his family back home in Turkey and shipped here. In addition to these, he offers a variety of Turkish treats and coffee.

The Wind and the Leaves

 

"Come, little leaves," said the wind one day.

"Come o'er the meadows with me, and play'

Put on your dress of red and gold,—

Summer is gone, and the days grow cold."

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,

Down they came fluttering, one and all;

Over the brown fields they danced and flew,

Singing the soft little songs they knew.

"Cricket, good-by, we've been friends so long;

Little brook, sing us your farewell song,—

Say you are sorry to see us go;

Ah! you will miss us, right well we know."

"Dear little lambs, in your fleecy fold,

Mother will keep you from harm and cold;

Fondly we've watched you in vale and glade;

Say, will you dream of our loving shade?"

Dancing and whirling, the little leaves went;

Winter had called them, and they were content.

Soon fast asleep in their earthy beds,

The snow laid a coverlet over their heads.

-- George Cooper

Ginkgo

"Ginkgos adapt well to the urban environment, tolerating pollution and confined soil spaces. 

They rarely have disease problems, even in urban conditions, and are attacked by few insects." -- Wikipedia

Ox Whisperer

Mostly Sunny

 

Linking again today with Skywatch Friday.

Gray Day

 

Finished reading O'Neill's book last night. It's his account of the role he played in exposing and arresting Robert Hanssen, the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.

CRPTR’S YD

 

Election Day

Round Food

 

You asked for pictures of the food at the Jamestown Pie Company. Well, I confess that I didn't take any photographs of the actual food itself. However, I did snap this photo of a more recent sign on the front of the restaurant showing some of their "round food". 

Jamestown Pie Company

 

Expo

 

Hey, this was a pretty cool event! A kind of one-stop-shop for everything having to do with health and wellness.

On my way out, after working out, I was even able to get my annual flu shot. I wish I could have gotten my Covid booster at the same time, but from what I’ve read and heard, it’s probably just as well not to get my Covid and flu shots together at the same time. 

Three Ordinary Girls

 

Brady's book is deeply disturbing and dredged up all kinds of old questions I've had over the years about violent versus non-violent forms of resistance.

Mycology

 

In retrospect, give my lifelong fascination with fungi of all sorts, maybe I should have been a mycologist. In any case, I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity these before and after shots of the fungus I tentatively identified in a previous post as Brefeldia maxima.

Footbridge

 

I stopped to talk with the contractor responsible for replacing this footbridge. Simple, right? 

Uhm, no. Few things in life are truly as simple as they seem. Part of what made this job more difficult was because it had to be built in an area certified as wetlands. But this area also serves as part of the plan to mitigate the effects of storm water runoff from a nearby housing development. AND, on top of all that, the drainage pipes running underneath the bridge had been crushed. So, of course, they had to be dug up and replaced. 

Fortunately, the contractor had experience in all these areas and was able--amazingly enough!--to get the job done in just a matter of days. He also thought it might have been a nice touch to install solar-powered lights. But, alas, no one wanted to foot the bill for those. So it is what it is, and a very nice change from the rotting footbridge it replaced.

Ox

 

You can almost immediately tell the difference between people who have been raised around farm animals and those who have not by the way they refer to the animal shown above. I have overheard many folks, including well-meaning mothers and fathers, refer to it as a "cow". Well, I guess in the broadest possible sense, they are at least on the farm, if not quite yet in the barn. 

It's actually an ox. While there are many more specific reasons why it's an ox rather than a cow, I like this explanation:

"An ox . . . is a bovine, trained and used as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle; castration inhibits testosterone and aggression, which makes the males docile and safer to work with. Cows (adult females) or bulls (intact males) may also be used in some areas.

Oxen are used for plowing, for transport (pulling carts, hauling wagons and even riding), for threshing grain by trampling, and for powering machines that grind grain or supply irrigation among other purposes. Oxen may be also used to skid logs in forests, particularly in low-impact, select-cut logging." -- Wikipedia

Photoreceptors

 

I find red maple trees fascinating, especially around this time of year when they offer a whole range of colors. And I've heard that different people actually see different colors, depending upon the particular array of photoreceptors in their eyes. 

Sky Blue

 

Linking again today with Skywatch Friday.

Red Maple