Been thinking about the concept recently while visiting some haunts both local and distant. Not ruins exactly. Let’s say slightly faded in the most perfect way.
Like the nearby genteel rose garden at the Lyndhurst.
Its blooms in November just as exquisite as the ones in June.
Possibly even more ravishing. Is it my imagination, or when you stick your nose in are they actually more fragrant as well?
Who’s to say that a rose hip is any less beautiful than the rose that preceded it?
Late season magic. Milkweed.
An old-old graveyard that by all rights ought to have been long plowed under, like the cemetery we stumbled upon behind chain link in the heart of bustling Flushing, Queens. Someone in the Episcopal church next door kindly opened the gate so we could mosey around.
In the midst of faded headstones, some of them dating back to the early 1800s, an epic mulberry thrives.
The tree might have been planted when the graveyard was new.
I like a circa-1700’s fanlight door at Philipse Manor Hall in Yonkers, similarly a survivor.
Between fall and snowfall. I didn’t come up with that one, but it’s a pretty good description of most all the things I like best.
Why do I gravitate to the tousle of brown juniper needles so much more than the vibrant green ones still holding on?
I guess everyone loves the changing hues of autumn. Who would’t care for unexpected fuchsia?
White oak leaves always get me, brown fallen ones perhaps more so, and brown fallen ones with green grass shoots still around them probably most of all.
Classic apples. At a local cider place you can bite into a russet people favored back in the 1600’s.
Nearby, a weathered scarecrow holds court over a late-season field.
Everything old is new again. Somebody or other said that. Could have been the early 1700’s author Jonathan Swift, or Mark Twain, or Churchill or even Stephen King. No one seems to know.
But most things that are old and creaky seem fresher to me than what is new. Perhaps because I feel between fall and snowfall myself?
I gravitate to things that are timeworn and true. Silent movies.
The late-season cattail by a pond.
A portrait of two sisters that suggests a mystical earlier appreciation of hair.
Or the Wenceslas Hollar engraving bespeaking the crucial importance of a fur muff.
A vintage postcard that reminds us we might not have come as far as we think we have.
Wise women from a different era.
Under the canopy of an ancient European beech, a bark bowl that holds mossy dreams.
A 350-million-year-old tree, the most ancient species we know.
The earlier depiction of a human being — really! — the Venus of Hohle Fels, carved 35,000 years ago of mammoth tusk and unearthed in 2008 in a German cave.
A Queens London plane from our time seemingly modeled on her form.
Late-season garden tomatoes and jalapenos possibly more delicious as the summer winds down.
Battered roadside signs.
A statuesque ladytree elm surviving indomitably alongside Central Park.
Every stately specimen I see.
But especially the shagbark hickory.
A historic bur oak with its distinctive shaggy acorn.
Also critters. The homely early herbivore called a lystrosaurus that lived 250 million years ago and survived the Permian extinction event to dominate the early Triassic.
The crystal-clear first Manhattan street map from 1660, called the Castello Plan.
The perfect antique manuscripts I found in the basement of the Concord Public Library, the handwritten copy of Thoreau’s 1851 Walking with its timeless exhortation, How near to good is what is wild!
Dusty, venerable things. Like the perfect cabin we inhabited for a decade.
Or the rough stone wall of our current apartment building. Don’t think anyone has noticed it in a century or so.
Speaking of stone, an expertly carved medieval lion at the Cloisters in New York City.
Not necessarily grubby or dirty, though truth be told I often like those qualities as well.
We recently visited Cortlandt Alley in NYC, dating back centuries.
Now the site of a funny tiny art exhibition space called Mmuseum. Which shares the alley with some vintage window shutters.
Along with awesome contemporary street art.
Of course I value vintage family stuff, like anyone else. Family photos of loved ones.
Or heirlooms like my great aunt’s tatting.
Or the gold cameo ring belonging to my grandfather, bearing the tiger’s eye image of two warriors — one male, one female. A popular ornament in the 1930’s, the ring was said to bring the wearer courage and luck.
I treasure my Ginny dolls from when I was a kid.
There’s also the mysterious Japanese doll already antique when my mother brought back from Japan years ago.
My mother herself gets wiser and zestier with each birthday. At ninety-two-years young, she can identify the musicians who created Layla when song comes on the shuffle.
Old cactus, new nest.
The best.
Jean Zimmerman 