The Coming of My Favorite Season

Ah, spring is finally here! For me, spring is the season of hope. The season of potential. Little green buds emerge from the ground, and weeks later, grow into the first flowers of the year. The landscape is still mostly brown and gray of the winter groundcover. Yet these first flowers inspire hope.

It reminds me of looking at my babies when they were new to this world. They were a bundle of potential -- what would they become? What would they be like?

So, too with the first buds of spring: what wonderful flowers will bloom? And what will this new year be for all of us? Here is a sampling showing the coming of spring here in the city. (Some other photos are included in my Other Thoughts blog: "Almost Spring!" and "A Beautiful Day in March.")

Below left: The happy faces of my daffodils blooming in the sunshine of a warm 1st day of spring. Below right: some crocuses blooming in the yard next door.

Below: My jonquils (march flowers) a few days before they bloomed.


Below (4 photos): Sampling of crocuses popping up all over Cambridge.





Below: The buds in the trees foretell leafing out in April.


Below: After 4 days of warm weather, the yellow forsythia blooms are showing. We call this lot the "forest." In the city, even a 1/2 acre that is not developed is like a 100-acre forest to us urbanites.


Below: The warm weather brings every one out from their winter hibernation. Left: The first day of spring and temperature is in the 70s (over 20 deg C) and the banks of the Charles are littered with sunbathers. Note the leafless trees. Right: Another sign of spring: music in the park! On my lunch stroll through Boston's Public Garden, a jazz trio is playing.

Below: On a warm day in March brings out a couple of rowers (see lower left) on the Charles River where Harvard University lines both banks.

Below: A warm last day of winter and I'm riding my bike home from work when I stopped along the Charles River Esplanade to get a backlit photograph of a footbridge. (My favorite picture of this footbridge is bathed in the pink light of sunset -- see my post "Sunset Along the Charles River")

Below: I came home late to find my jonquils blooming. Here is a flash lit night photo of them.

Sugar Snow

The other day we got just a dusing of snow, something I call sugar snow. It reminds me of the texture of confectionary sugar dusted on a pastry.

While the region from New York to Virginia seemed be getting pelted with one big storm after, way up here in the Boston area, we got rain, rain, and more rain. No shoveling, no slipping on ice, but no snow days off either. So, when we got this little bit of snow this week, I captured a few views of the sugar dusting of Boston Common.

Newly Fallen Snow

Nothing is as pure and beautiful as newly fallen snow. I can just sit and watch the gentle flakes fall, turning everything -- lawns, trees, streets, sidewalks, houses, cars, lawns, and even the trash in the gutter. Especially in the city, the transformation can be most dramatic.

After our winter drought, we had a little bit of snow again in the Boston area.

Below: Snow falling in the halo of a street light and covering steets, sidewalks, cars, and the roofs of houses.

Below: close-up of falling snow covering the branches of a tree.

Below: The next morning, snow covered tree limbs contrast with a bright blue sky.

Below: Snow covered lawns in the Public Garden complete the winter sceen of a Back Bay skyline.

Winter Drought

We usually think of droughts as happening in the summer. With no rain for weeks, lawns and flowers and crops dry up and wither. But, droughts can happen even in the freezing cold of winter.

While Washington, DC, and the surrounding areas were pounded by 2 to 3 feet (0.7 to 1.0 meters) of snow, the Boston area missed out on the entire storm. What snow we had graddually disappeared, melting little by little on the colder days and then disappearing when we got a brief thaw.

Now it's freezing cold and again and snowless. These photographs in Boston's Public Garden illustrate what a winter drought looks like: the brown lawns, bare trees, and fozen ponds, but no snow. It's not the kind of sceen you'll seen on any Christmas card where the snow is always beautifully white and freshly fallen!

Below: The snowless lawns are brown and the lagoon is frozen solid in this view looking down Newbury Street.

Below: A little contrast of morning and evening showing the same view. The church spire is that of the Chuch of the Covenant. The evening view was in December while the morning view is February.

Below: A comparison of the lagoon bridge in a snowy winter (left, Jan. 2009) and a winter drought (right, Feb. 2010)

Below: A close-up of the brown lawns and bare trees. One advantage: a young couple taking a shortcut across the fozen lagoon.

Below: During a winter drought, there's no snow for skiing (except at the facilities with snow making equipment). If you can't ski, at least you can skate: a business man did just that on his lunch hour.

Industrial Strength Photography

The bad side of town. The oth-er side of the tracks. The place you don't want to go during the day, much less at night. The place where the tow lot always seems to be, you know, the one where they've towed your car to, and it's late and you take a cab to and you have this feeling "this is where organized crime goes to eliminate their opposition!" Every city has its industrial area.

Where else would you go to sell your scrap metal? Not far away, you can buy used car parts: doors, fenders, hoods (automotive recycling)

My personal favorite is "radiator man" -- no one has a better selection of used units!

The '50s through the early '70s saw highways cut through urban neighborhoods, often through the industrial zone. While this 50-year old elevated highway is showing some rust and exposed reinforcing bars, the properties in its shaddows often show more distress. Built to rush commuters home to the suburbs, these highways cut up urban neighborhoods and condemmed them to decades of economic and social distress.

This view, within 10 blocks of my home, could be somewhere in the 3rd world, perhaps the suburbs of Lima, Peru or Tiajuana, Mexico. How to tell it's not the 3rd world? There would be perhaps dozens of people in the photo.

Urban Wilds: The Wilderness Around A Frozen Fresh Pond

Even within the city, one can find wilderness views that evoke a more rural setting than where you are standing. Fresh Pond is in the western extent of Cambridge and part of the water supply system. A hundred years ago, ice was harvested in winter and shipped around the world. Today, the pond itself is fenced off, but its perimeter contains a fringe of urban winderness, a small wild in the midst of the city.

. Below: A gatehose on the shoreline




Below: The only open water in the otherwise frozed solid pond.



Below: Tracks run through it -- a rail line through the woods next to the pond.



Below: red berries add color to the snow covered landscape.



Below: Reeds mark the snow-covered shoreline.



Below: Sun setting peeking through the pondside woodlands.

One Building or Two

Driving around Boston recently, I saw this interest-ing view. Taken from Travelers Way in the South End, looking from Harrison Avenue towards Washington Street, one sees this slender tower in Back Bay.

On the top, the glass and steel Hancock Tower, at 60 stories, it is New England's tallest building. But, it looks as though the lower floors are of a different design consisting of a masonry facade.

But what is it? Well, it's a new building called "The Clarendon" located one block closer than the Hancock Tower. But from this angle, the width of the two buildings exactly line up, as though they were one building, the product of a somewhat scitsofrenic architect!