What Possessed Me

Snow blind

Two hours upstate, winter is still in full effect. A thick blanket of pristine snow covered the rolling hills of The Fields at Art Omi - a sculpture garden in Kinderhook, New York, where our friends have just bought a cute little house.

A few others before us explored the Fields on skis and snowshoes; we ventured out on foot, making tracks through the perfect, powdery snow.

It seemed as though a tiny creature had already tackled this climb. Look closely to see its tracks…



We stumbled across this gravestone marking the demise of chalk. Buried under the snow, was a box that allowed visitors to write their own messages. Ours was not particularly inspired.



Somehow, the snow made everything seem slightly more incongruous and…sculptural.









Back in Brooklyn, the snow has thawed and the air has an unusual freshness. There are small signs of spring – namely, the urge to buy these seeds and germinate them for planting. I have in mind a white garden, like Vita Sackville-West’s at Sissinghurst.



Never mind that our balcony is three feet by nine feet. One can dream...

Oh, the horror, the horror.

You know, I love Martha Stewart as much as the next person, and I'm not afraid to say it. She runs a tight ship, her people are wildly creative, and she churns out a good product. But now this.

Holy Mother of God.

This is truly and utterly disgusting. This is going places we don't want to go. Please stop the insanity. Please somebody do something.

What's next - Eastern European salon technicians making throw pillows from our bikini waxes?

Link Love: Photo Diaries

You know when you find a new blog that you love and you just can’t get enough of it? When you refuse to leave the house because you are too busy refreshing your Google Reader eighty million times a day hoping against hope that your new favorite blogger will post? When you are so obsessed with this new blogger that you Google stalk her and move to her city to haunt her favorite coffee shop? You know when you start rifling through her garbage and dressing exactly like her and making her CDs of your voice telling her that you two are going to be best friends? And then she gets a restraining order against you?

Yeah, I think you know what I’m talking about. This is no ordinary love, people. It’s link love – and it’s fierce. And because I am so in love, I just want to shout my love from the rooftops. I just want to share it with all of you good people.

I’m going to start with photo diaries – my current obsession - and then feature other delights each week. This saves me from having to come up with a real post, which is good because I am running out of material.

Strandgut, or “flotsam” in German, is a series of photographs and ruminations that collect the stray bits of daily life – the ordinary made extraordinary through the discerning eyes of the talented and pensive Anne.



3191 chronicles a year of evenings captured in film by Stephanie and Mav, friends who live 3,191 miles apart. Their photographs – posted side-by-side, form a daily diptych of quiet intimacy.



How silly of me to think that you haven’t already discovered Nectar & Light and the designer/photographer Jenifer Altman, who was the creative genius behind this blog banner and this one (among others, I'm sure). Her latest venture is a kind of ode to the beauty of domesticity – hip mama style. I adore her soft, gauzy polaroids, which (lucky you) are available here. They make me want to curl up and drink hot chocolate all the live-long day.



What blogs are you reading these days?