Category: United States

Sunday Serenity: Small Things

Posted on by Annie

The oceans are wide, the beaches are long, and both give me a sense of my place in this world. I’m small and transient compared to the endlessness of water and land. I am more like the small things I find near these places. These periwinkles most stay attached to the rock, waiting out the low tides till the life-giving waters of the high tides bring them food. Sometimes, one will strike out for a new home, slowly making their way across the grains of sand, hoping to arrive before the tide can sweep them away. I can relate: driving…

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Beach Walking

Posted on by Annie

The place where I’ve been staying (and am now housesitting for two weeks) has a beautiful little beach at the end of the road and a small dirt path. It’s a locals-only beach and there’s rarely anyone else on it when I’m there. At one end is a huge condominium project on the site of the old Cape Codder hotel, which survives only as the name of the street there. At the other end is a small path to a slightly larger dirt road that comes out onto a loop of really pricey houses, about half of them newer and…

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Lancaster

Posted on by Annie

If you’re looking for a place to hide out for a few weeks while seeing doctors and physical therapists, I have to admit you could do way worse than Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s a quiet place at first glance, and if you stick to the highways, you might not give it a second glance on your way to Philly or Pittsburgh or somewhere else. This post may convince you to stop over and stay a while. The city itself is a mix of old and new, with architecture and eccentricity creating visual delights like this section of a downtown street. There’s…

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Longwood Gardens

Posted on by Annie

There are few things I enjoy photographing than flowers these days, so a few hours at Longwood Gardens was a slice of pure heaven. It also marked the first time my left hand was strong enough to work with my favorite (and heaviest) camera, the Sony A7, since the accident on Memorial Day. From the home of the Lenni Lenape tribe for generations to the farm of Quakers descended from William Penn that over two centuries became a tree-filled arboretum, this place has a long history. When logging interest threatened to level the trees in 1906, Pierre S. DuPont bought the…

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Gettysburg

Posted on by Annie

I grew up in Southern California, thousands of miles and a century removed from the Civil War, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park last week. I knew I wanted to pay my respects at the National Cemetery there (my parents are buried in the National Cemetery in Riverside, CA) but other than that, I didn’t have an agenda. It turns out I didn’t have a clue what Gettysburg meant to my country, then or now. I spent time today — Independence Day, and 154 years after the battle here ended —…

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