Sunday Photoblogging: The Last Day of Summer

by Belle Waring on August 31, 2014

For some people, anyway. I don’t normally post photos with people, but this little girl was born right on this blog and look at her now! All grown up and going to Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone’s glad to be home in Singapore eating roti prata and murtabak, though. Well, no, I miss real summer like that. High dunes and cold water and fresh corn and berry cobbler and lobster rolls. But if you read my aunt Laura Wainwright’s book Home Bird you can hear that it gets wickedly cold in the wintertime.
lastdaysm
Later when I’m not tired I’ll make it be so you can click on a high-res version, this one is kinda lame but it busts the margins otherwise…

{ 21 comments }

1

Randy McDonald 08.31.14 at 5:34 pm

Lovely.

2

mud man 08.31.14 at 5:52 pm

I think that’s the view across the sound towards Woods Hole isn’t it? Whereas the happy island of my youth faced East Chop. Still it made my heart leap up.

3

Main Street Muse 08.31.14 at 8:31 pm

What a sweet picture!

[I have two 10-yr-olds. A fun age!]

4

Meredith 08.31.14 at 10:04 pm

Beautiful. No longer a frail sapling. Becoming a tree.
This reminds me of when I noticed one day, when my daughter was about 3 or 4 and was drawing as she perched at a low counter, how gracefully straight her back was, how intent her concentration. I knew then (as I pretty much knew already, since the day, as an 8 month old, she bit her 3-year-old brother when she’d met the end of her rope with his “playfulness”) that she was ready to take on the world and do good things in it. Sarah, straight and tall.

I miss the Cape, but I did have a lobster a few days ago in Trenton, Maine. (The corn on the cob was, as always at lobster pounds, a bit overcooked, but the coleslaw and potato salad were superb.) Maine’s trees — they really are beautiful, not like trees elsewhere. Life is good.

5

vinteuil 09.01.14 at 12:25 am

Ah, life amongst the 1%. So lovely (1). So happy (2). So sweet (3). So beautiful (4).

Oh, and the lobster! Did I mention the lobster (4)?

But the corn on the cob was a bit overcooked (4).

So it seems that the skull still lurks beneath the skin.

6

John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 12:34 am

It’s teh First of Spring for me! (Great Pic!)

7

Belle Waring 09.01.14 at 1:45 am

Yeah, John, it’s teh infinity day of summer for me, so…
Yes mud man, that’s pretty much right, but it’s at Lambert’s Cove looking towards Wood’s Hole.

8

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 09.01.14 at 2:05 am

Beautiful!
~

9

Tom Slee 09.01.14 at 2:56 am

My brother has a picture of his youngest, cycling away from him down a pathway, that is very touching. There is something about pictures of children looking away, or moving away, that always says that time is passing and it’s a good thing and it’s a sad thing and it’s all kinds of things. Best of luck to her, and to you.

10

Laura S. 09.01.14 at 3:31 am

That’s a beautiful pic, I Love Martha’s Vineyard :-)

11

maidhc 09.01.14 at 10:19 am

My mother’s basic image of herself is a little girl on the beach. She has a couple of paintings on that theme in her house. That beach of hers is now behind a world war, the collapse of colonialism and some personal tragedies, so there’s no going back.

I also spent my earliest years on a beach and then had to go away. We have beaches here; that may be one of the reasons I decided to settle here. But they are beaches you go to for the day; enjoyable enough, but there’s no feeling of possession.

I’m not that familiar with the East Coast, so the photo doesn’t resonate with me for that reason. But it seems like one that could carry a meaning with it for a long time.

12

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 09.01.14 at 1:36 pm

13

Eszter 09.01.14 at 3:02 pm

Lovely indeed!

14

Meredith 09.02.14 at 3:38 am

Wicked cold, Belle. I knew I was raising New England children the day my son, maybe 6 or 7, described something or other as “wicked fun.” Checked out the link to your aunt’s book – and will check out the book itself. Thanks.

15

mdc 09.02.14 at 9:38 pm

No need to be a hater, vinteuil. A lobster roll in Trenton will only set you back about 15$. Totally doable as a summertime treat! Afterwards, you can stroll the shoreline AS IF you were a Rockefeller, in Acadia National Park.

16

vinteuil 09.03.14 at 12:15 am

@ mdc: $15 for a *lobster roll* – *in Trenton*?

Are you mad? Are you possessed of any sense of moral perspective whatsoever?

17

Belle Waring 09.03.14 at 2:24 am

Actually one of the local firefighter charities does $16 lobster rolls with chips and…tea? that seems like the natural thing to serve (keeping in my half my family is from S.C.) but also wrong (keeping in mind one is on M.V.) Same as a local church but the firefighters are more generous with the lobster. No getting around the fact that you need to a) get to the island, b) find somewhere to stay. But they have decent buses, unlike some *cough*Hamptons*cough* I know of. vinteuil, you’re just lucky I’ve stopped blogging my family bittersweet summer farewells from Georgica Pond. I feel very sad about it now that my grandfather’s house has been sold. If I put up a photo from the last summer ever, at the top of the dunes at the Association Beach in Wainscott, I would be all blubbery and expect you to feel sorry for me because I am a a tone-deaf asshole. I AM DEAD SERIOUS. Count your blessings. Wait, no, I guess I would have been an even broader target for fun then. Well, now that you know that I am nursing painful feelings of sadness about never seeing the sun come up to the west of the gut again in the winter, briefly reddening the colorless landscape, and that I love the strange smell of salt and privet flowers on their towering hedges, a little too like semen and cut grass for some people, you may proceed to make fun of me on this basis. (All privet-based perfumes have either failed to–no, they never really even tried to get the smell right. My cousin Marcie hates it. She says, “I feel like hedges are coming all over my face.” this is quite unfair. It is a lovely smell. Then, in addition to not getting the smell right, the perfumes failed.) vinteuil, also, you must guard against displaying any sense of humor whatsoever or we will know you as an old troll “by A Different Name” as Aslan says, and then we will ban you. Keep with the humorlessness. You remind me why I really don’t particularly like the comments section at my own blog very much. It’s bracing, like a salt wind with loads of privet pollen in it.

18

Belle Waring 09.03.14 at 2:27 am

Also there is no point to this comment whatsoever but mud man, I misread your initial comment and imagined you thought you were at a specific spot further north and I was mildly correcting you saying, “yeah but Lambert’s Cove.” Whereas you were 1200% right. Sorry.

19

Alan White 09.03.14 at 3:23 am

I love the composition with the boat, but black garb that betokens cooler weather rather than summer whites. Lovely for the theme.

Why some feel the need to go all-out political at every opportunity is beyond me. Byrds’ Ecclesiastes and all.

20

Meredith 09.03.14 at 5:34 am

Alan, maybe I am too much under the spell of Chris Bertram’s photographs, but I am noticing the lines (back and mast and upright grass), the back-of-the-knee horizontal, the boat’s horizontal, the sea and clouds’ horizontals. Also, the straightness of the hair (like the green grass) until the curls come (like the blackened grass, the curves of the billowing black shirt). Anyway, fine photograph and a little girl looking to voyages. Blues, greens, whites, blacks. Feet on sand, as if that boat rested so securely on the water, the sea on the horizon. The clouds may be a hint of the secure lines, but also the buffeting, yet to come. Horizontal and vertical combine here in the back, knees, and feet, combined with a sense of something beyond that horizon, to give hope.

21

mud man 09.03.14 at 2:57 pm

Hey, no sweat.

… the family sold the cottage in the 50’s … nobody asked me. In those days it was an all-day job to get to the island from Boston and it was pretty much a different place. Big loss I say, but kinda that’s what Happy Islands of Youth are about.

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