Category: Melancholy Thoughts
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Fathers and Coffee
One more cup of coffee before I go… –Bob Dylan [My photo] This gray, almost monochromatic morning, I lounged in bed reading yesterday’s New York Times. It’s something we did every weekend for years while we lived in Manhattan. The…
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Roadside Grief
You see them along the Interstate highways in Kansas, Arizona and nearly everywhere else in the country. Those haunting small white crosses and bouquets of flowers that are mostly plastic. That way, they survive the weather. These are the roadside memorials for those who lost their lives, while driving along major highways and lonely roads.…
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On Front Street At The End Of October
Different times…different places…different memories… [Photo source: Google search.] I should mention that, as a child, one of my favorite things to do this time of year was to kick a pile of leaves along a stone sidewalk. It’s gloomy, rainy and windy here in the North Country. It rained hard before dawn this morning so…
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Confessions Of A Gravestone Photographer
[At work in St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Chateaugay, NY] I would strongly object to anyone who would dare call me morbid. It is not morbid, in any sense, to appreciate and love old (and new) cemeteries. It is not morbid to stand over a grave of a total stranger and contemplate his or her life. I…
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The Summer We Never Had Is Gone
“I see your true colors shining through…” -Cyndi Lauper Green is still the dominant color in the foliage around Rainbow Lake. Each day, however, brings out a few hundred more leaves that have lost their Chlorophyll and are showing their true colors. We’ve had our first frost warning on my weather app…and that was in…
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May Day, 2017: Take the Long Way Home
[Photo source: Me] So, here I am looking at the new page of my really cool calendar. It’s May. Most people will think of flowers and perhaps rising waters. I used to think of crocus. That’s when my mother always said spring was here. “The crocus are up beneath the evergreens,” she would say….for so…
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Walking In A Winter Wonderland
Sure, I could be walking down this snowy, quiet and picturesque road. I could be thinking about the approaching holidays, the snow men, the fire in our downstairs living room wood burner…but I don’t imagine I’ll be making this walk. Don’t get me wrong, I love snow. I always have. But as I stand in…
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A Farewell Letter To Jimmy
Hey, Jimmy…I can’t bring myself to call you James. For most of my life you’ve been Jimmy, so there it is. Mariam and I were in Burlington just this past weekend. As I wandered up and down Church Street I kept wondering where the restaurant was that we met for the first time in over…
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Where Are The Castles In The Sky?
When I was a young boy, my mother would walk with me down through our backyard and toward the river. There was a decline on the property that, in very old times, was the bank of our river. Now, it was simply a gentle slope down to a lawn that took my father decades to…
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