St.Louis: Redbird fever

Adirondacks

Another piece of history about Stillwater:  the region was logged heavily before the dams were built.
During the drawdown in the fall, the stumps emerge.

Adirondacks

Very old mountains, the Adirondacks were shaped most recently by glaciers.
When they draw the water down in Stillwater Reservoir in the fall, long narrow bands of boulders emerge.  I think that they are eskers, glacial remnants formed as meandering streambeds at the bottom of melting glaciers.
Many of these piles aren't far beneath the surface.  This lake is not popular with speed boats.  Nice for us.
I took this photo two years ago Columbus Day weekend.  The lake was lower that year, and the colors more advanced that weekend.

Adirondacks

Adirondacks

Stillwater has a large population of loons, possibly the largest in the Adirondacks.  This loon swam by me very close and unconcerned.  Seeing a loon is always a gift.

Adirondacks

When it's too windy to go in the canoe, then it's time to fly a kite!  Another sunny day, temperatures in high 50s, and very windy.

Adirondacks

A front went through overnight and the temperature dropped 15 degrees leaving the air clear and the lake calm.

Adirondacks

The boathouse, the shop and my boat.  When we were here in June the water was lapping at the base of the boathouse.

Adirondacks

I arrived this afternoon. The water is down in the reservoir and there is a lot of color on the trees now.  As I gained elevation driving out of the Black River valley, the colors increased by the mile.  There has already been a killing frost.  Loons and ducks are still here.

Gateway Arch

Here is news: Merry@St.Louis will be ending at the end of the year. Bittersweet news for us, we are returning to Central New York, from whence we came at this time last year.

Bitter only because we came to St. Louis and looked at it as an opportunity to explore a city new to us and full of amazing and wonderful things.  We found that and so much more.  First off, we found a neighborhood and neighbors we care about.  We learned a lot about this warmer bio zone and created a garden.  We savored the wonders of the city and region. We found my niece and love her to bits. We found we liked it here.

Sweet because we are going home...to friends and family, to a house we love, to a region we feel at home in even in the dark and cold of winter; home to our bookgroup of 22 years, and to the Adirondacks and Ontario, to NYC; and to Rap-Shaw.

This week I am at Rap-Shaw, having driven three miles short of one thousand miles to get here from St. Louis on Monday and Tuesday.  For the next few days you shall see this Adirondack lake in the Fall, at low water.  There is a week's worth of pictures of early season Rap-Shaw on this blog back in June.

I have brought a carload of things too fragile to entrust to movers, and I will try to bring some order to the semi-annually-weeded garden.  Wish me luck.

I am considering a daily blog of my life in Syracuse which would begin in January 2010.  It will cause me to see Syracuse in ways I have not considered in the past.

Citygarden

City Garden has its own colorful barricades. The garden takes up two city blocks. During the day the street that bisects the park is closed to auto traffic.

St. Louis: Forest Park

Basin and Art Museum atop Art Hill:  the Museum is one of the few original artifacts of the 1904 World's Fair.

St. Louis: around town

Citygarden

Gateway Arch: Captains' Return Again

This is interesting because it illustrates the changeability of the Mississippi River in a very short period of time.  I took this photo last Saturday, September 12 from a river boat.

On September 3, just 9 days earlier, I took a shot right at the water's edge from the bottom of the pile of rubble at the base of the Eads Bridge tower on the right.  I posted that day, so go back if you haven't seen it.

I shot the picture so that Lewis and Clark appeared to be coming ashore.

Here is another picture taken on that day which shows that the boat is really only a half a boat, and also shows the water level on the levee.

St. Louis: around town

I just started madly taking snaps and got lucky!

St. Louis: around town

Frosty

Transformation

We moved to St. Louis last Labor Day, 2008, from upstate New York.
We bought a house in the city.
We longed for some privacy and a garden.
In January we hired someone to take out weed trees and a dead tree and prune the dead wood off our neighbor's tree.
Later on we hired someone else to take out the cyclone fence and put up a standard St. Louis back yard wooden fence.
We read about native plants and looked at what was offered, dug beds, brought some plants from our garden in NYS and purchased others.
Now look!

Shaw's Garden

Many seeds, lots of mulch, lots of weeding, some rain...

Shaw's Garden

A seed, a little mulch, some weeding, some rain...

Shaw's Garden

There is a central pool at the garden in which grow, by now in the season, huge platter water lilies among many bright floating glass onions. Spectacular!

Gateway Arch

Reflection twenty minutes after sunrise.

Gateway Arch

The Arch at dawn, always, in any weather, a good time to go there.

Shaw's Garden: Japanese Festival

Japanese shibori is the ancient art of creating complicated dye patterns on fabric, achieved by careful folding, stitching, or twisting of cloth before multiple immersions in the indigo dye bath.

Indigo Moon People of Boonville MO make interesting and beautiful designs.  We bought a small t-shirt with dragon flies for our young niece.

Shaw's Garden: Japanese Festival

We were fortunate to secure tickets to the Tea Ceremony today.  This young girl offered warm hospitality and capable assistance throughout the ceremony.

Shaw's Garden: Japanese Festival

Anime, Pokemon, Hello Kitty... characters r us at Shaw's Garden.  Japanese culture isn't only kimonos, martial arts and tea.

Shaw's Garden: Japanese Festival

At the Missouri Botanical garden over Labor Day Weekend is a huge festival celebrating Japanese culture.

The flags and kites are up today, waving gently in the wind.

Gateway Arch: The Captains' Return

Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Seaman returned to St. Louis in 1806 after more than two years in scientific exploration of the northern part of the newly purchased Louisiana Purchase and beyond for the still-forming young nation.


The Captains' Return, sculpture by Harry Weber of Missouri, sits at the base of Eads Bridge at the northern end of the St. Louis waterfront. During floodtimes I have seen it totally submerged.  At lowest water you can walk around and below it.  This morning I was standing on rocks beside water lapping at the base of the Eads bridge abutment.


The river level changes dramatically because of weather far away from here out west along the Missouri and up north along the Mississippi.

New Harmony IN

Small rural New Harmony was home to two completely different intentional utopian com- munities in quick succession.


First, from 1814 to 1824, seccessionist German Lutherans called Harmonists  followed Johann Georg Rapp from an earlier settlement in Pennsylvania and numbered over one thousand people.  They returned to Pennsylvania and set up another community, New Economy.


Robert Owen purchased the site in 1825 to provide a place and means to support a society based on values of free education and the breaking down of material classes.  A year later this experiment was abandoned.


From then on, the town of New Harmony continued to be a center for intellectual and scientific pursuits.   Today there is a fine mix of historic and modern, creativity, ecumenical spiritual practice, communal studies and the pace and beauty of a quiet country town.

Huntington WV: Central City Cafe

Hey, Miss Joli, whatcha doin' there in front of the Central City Cafe?


This place was a find for lunch on our return trip from Pennsylvania to Missouri.  Just off the western-most exit of I 64, on a corner in the heart of the antique district of Huntington, near the Ohio River and the weekly farmers' market, this spot serves delicious lunches to a steady parade of locals and made us want to move to Huntington.  


Little did we know that it was featured on the Food Network's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.  Well deserved!


A while back Ed reviewed Iron Barley of St. Louis, also featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives