Red Red Door

Headed to CT this weekend for wedding showers and opening day at Yankee Stadium (actually, both of these activities would be my wife's). I'll be hanging out with the kids at my in-laws.

They rent this ridiculously beautiful house. Gorgeous, inside and out. A couple of Christmases ago, I became fascinated with trying to capture a picture of the front door, which is painted a bright red, and really stands out. Here are my results.

Snow Snow and More Damn Snow

So, March 1st shows up, and what does it do? Well of course it snows.

Serves me right for living in New England, I suppose.

Still, it was a Saturday, and we didn't have to go anywhere, so the girls and I bundled up and headed outside for some good old fashioned snowman building.

Cage

This is one of those "happy accidents". While at a town fair a couple of years ago, I was walking around taking pictures of various things and animals. There was a tent filled with nothing but caged poultry. Ducks, turkeys, roosters, all kinds of barnyard foul; some of it for sale, some of it for show, some of it for dinner.

This duck was sitting peacefully amidst the cacophony of noises, warbles, and cockadoodle-dos. So I took out my camera to snap the picture.

The camera I was using was set to auto-focus. So, while I aimed at the duck, what the camera picked up was the bars of the cage and focused on those. The image of the cage as the focus and the duck in the fuzzy background struck me, and it's become one of my favorites.

As much as I like the color version, I think I like the ominous feeling of the black and white even more.

Dog Tag

This hangs around my neck. It is a dog tag from World War II. It belonged to my maternal grandfather, William Lawrence Roeth Sr., better known to myself, my sister, and our cousins as "Poppop".

Poppop was stationed in the Pacific and was on one of the beaches of either Okinawa or Iwo Jima (I can never remember which). While on the beach he took a piece of shrapnel in the back of his pack. What kept it from going through the pack and into his body was the pair of dress shoes he had packed for later event. He kept the shrapnel, which I now have, an ugly piece of metal, bent and twisted along its edges.

Poppop was one of the most gentle men I have ever known. When asked the million dollar question ("Did you ever kill anyone?"), his answer, as gentle as he was, was always and invariably "Not that I know of."

Poppop died in 1986 after battling cancer for a few years. He was 67 years old.

Clouds Over the Field

This, like the two shots of the apples below, were all taken on a trip my family took to a country house owned by some extended family in Virginia in October of last year. The trip is a brute, driving hundreds of miles from my home in Massachusetts, but the house and the surroundings are so wonderful, it's like a retreat, even when we're working.

Apples At Sunset

The same basket of apples in the exact same spot, with the sun hitting them at sunset.

Apples At Sunrise

Apples my daughter picked, sitting in a basket at sunrise, at the country house.