Holidays – Michael Stephen Wills Photography

At Home with Tom and Hen Turkey

Thanksgiving Freedom

November 28, 2019November 26, 2019 MichaelStephenWills14 Comments

The Catskill Mountains are not mountains. The Catskills started as a high plateau. Over eons, before the first humans, water, the sun, and wind carved high steep peaks: rounded, forested and teeming with life.

October 2008, on a return trip from my Mother’s house on Long Island, we traveled the winding road called “Route 17”, through the high autumn hillsides, one of our last trips to see her. She broke her hip on New Year’s and lived with me and my sisters until her 2013 passing.

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Fishs Eddy

We left Long Island early afternoon, as the sun passed over the western hills we stopped to explore a place called “Fishs Eddy”, a town on the banks of the Delaware River.

On the east side, facing sunset is a formation that would be a cliff if it was not for the hardwood trees growing from every available nook, crevice. Everywhere a root could be sunk, roots fed trees that, one late October afternoon, made a hill bright with autumn.

Turkey Habitat

Turkeys live in this type of habitat. We took a trail, barely a road that climbed past failed farms and hunting shacks.

The Hens Flee

On a level place, in front of a ruined home, we came upon a Tom (male) turkey and his four hens. The hens fled at the sight of us.

With barely time to raise the camera I caught Tom and the last hen as she fled into the bushes.

Tom Turkey Defiant

I say she, because Tom stayed behind. He stood erect, all three feet of him, defiant and strutting in a direction opposite from the hens.

This is the bird Benjamin Franklin proposed as the national emblem of the new United State of America (the bald eagle won that competition).

Hunted into almost oblivion, across the United States the wild turkey is making a dramatic come back in many places, including the forests and farmland of rural New York State.

This fellow made no noise. His strutting posture and head bobbing said it all.

We left Tom Turkey in peace to his domain and hens.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, my friends.

Fourth of July

Fireworks!!!

July 4, 2019 MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

Here’s a fireworks display to help you celebrate the Fourth of July. Click on any image for a larger view.

Our home on west hill has a great view of the Ithaca fireworks. I had to shoot through overhead electricity wires. Some of the photographs were enhanced to remove the lines.

Click photographs to view larger images as a slide show.

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Christmas Ornaments 2018 VII

Angels on High

December 24, 2018December 24, 2018 MichaelStephenWills13 Comments

Click this photograph for my Fine Art Photography gallery

On this Christmas Eve we offer you our sincere wishes for a blessed celebration of your personal holiday tradition.

Click this link for the first post of the “Christmas Ornaments 2018” series.

Christmas Ornaments 2018 VI

December 23, 2018December 20, 2018 MichaelStephenWills12 Comments

The past summer, the first of my retirement, my early morning hours were spent on Ancestry.com researching our family histories to bring this process, started 2013 in preparation for our tour of Ireland, to a point where I can start to consolidate it into a document shared with other family members.

It is a wonderful feeling when the pieces come together. For example the passenger manifest when Grandfather McArdle brought Grandmother and then three year old Mom to Quebec, Canada from the port of Belfast April 1926.

Outside the exhibits there was this collection of authentic emigration trunks on a hand cart.

My father’s trunk from the war was stenciled with his name. A. Lett. took such care marking this suitcase, blocking out the black ground for the carefully hand written white letters.

Their belongings are gathered together in just such a manner. My parents marked all my belongings that left the home with me with my name and address.

Our thought were on this when we selected this suitcase marked with the shamrock from a “Christmas Store” along the streets of the Pennsylvania town of Jim Thorpe, as the memory of our ancestors our exploration of Ireland.

Click this link for the first “Christmas Ornaments 2018” post.

Click this link for another post about Cobh, Ireland, “Annie Moore and her Brothers.”

Christmas Ornaments 2018 V

approachable alternate reality

December 21, 2018December 19, 2018 MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

Our Nutcracker wooden figure carries a weight of memories. Early memories are of my sister, Christina’s Sugar Plum Fairy solo for Saint Aidan Parish talent program, Mom’s appreciation of performance of Swan Lake in her pre-child past, a friend of my Mom was a former dancer who taught Christina ballet. Hanging quietly, these memories swirl around the Nutcrackers open maw.

Ten years ago we observed New Years Day 2009 in the lobby of Winthrop Medical Center, Mineola, New York waiting for the outcome of Mom’s hip replacement surgery grateful the head of Orthopedics was performing the surgery. That year saw large changes played out in the last four years of her life, she never returned to her home of 52 years.

From then on her winters were spent with her daughter Diane in Mesa, Arizona. Mom would call us, amused at the sight of neighbors walking by in 50 degree weather in winter parkas. She was well known in Albertson for her habit of walking everywhere, it was fortunate she never needed to learn how to drive a car: all she needed was readily at hand.

I needed to return to Albertson several times a year to our childhood home. December 2009, Pam and I melded the trip with a day in New York City. Memories of Mom’s enjoyment of Swan Lake drew me to purchase tickets for The Nutcracker. The New York City Ballet has performed The Nutcracker every Christmas season since 1954, when I was one year old. The 56th performance was our first.

As with Dante’s version of hell, the David H. Koch Theater has rings. I sprang for the highest ring, the fourth, the least costly and, optimistically, the best vantage to view the formations of grouped dancers.

A full orchestra is dedicated to each performance, the hall acoustics are fabulous, and we were able to appreciate the scenes, the grouped dancers and, even, the soloists. The last scene of the first act, the Snowflakes (or Snow Crystals), brought tears to my eyes, the music, the scene was impossibly beautiful and brought back some experiences of mine in winter nature.

We were hooked after that, immersed in the very real (i.e., non-virtual) alternate reality at least two Sunday afternoon performances each year, seeing all Tchaikovsky’s ballets in the style of Balanchine for which the New York Ballet is famous. For the 59th season of The Nutcracker were brought two granddaughters, took fourth third row orchestra seats. We marveled at the experience. It included, during intermission, a photo session with a character from the performance.

Here they are with a Snowflake. This is a scan of one of the 8 x 10 prints we received from this session.

Click the photograph for my Fine Art Photography gallery — Nia and Gabby with the Nutcracker Ballet character “Snowflake” during the intermission of a December 2012 performance.

We planned to share a performance of Swan Lake with Mom during the September 2013 season, in her 90th year. Mom passed away in her birth month, June, 2013.

Click this link for the first posting of this series.

Christmas Ornaments 2018 IV

tongues of flame

December 19, 2018December 19, 2018 MichaelStephenWills24 Comments

Carrying on the thoughts on lambency from my last post, “Christmas Ornaments 2018 III”, here is a macro of our Christmas tree. There is no element of the Christmas celebration so puzzling to outsiders as the practice of sacrificing a beautiful tree, to drag it inside for display, presenting a part of the forest as a sacred object, touched by light or, in earlier times, tongues of fire (candles).

Stories of the fragrance of holiness, sometimes attributed to the Holy Spirit or Saints, are sprinkled throughout traditional Christianity within personal testimony and scripture as well as in our celebrations and rites as incense. A character of the freshly cut pine that melds well with this tradition is the unmistakable fragrance of a freshly cut evergreen conifer , reminiscent of the precious, aromatic resin frankincense, one of the gifts to the infant Jesus from the three wise men of the east. In spite of saving several dozen authentic trees, our artificial conifer has not acquired the sacred fragrance.

The first blown-glass bulbs, such as our large elaborate specimen of the photograph, were produced by heating sand to the melting point, putting a dab on the end of a very long heat resistant pipe. When encircled by a clay mold, when the pipe is blown into the glass expands to coat with clay with a thin layer of glass. The addition of silver and other shiny compounds allow the finished product to capture and reflect light. Each bulb is its own lambent tongue of flame, licked with captive light.

Click this link for the first post of this series.

Christmas Ornaments 2018 III

of this world

December 17, 2018December 16, 2018 MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

The attitude of today’s resin figure, alert, vigilant, aware while not exactly at odds with her accoutrements, provide a counter point to the flower banner and crown, a basket of flowers.

After publishing my previous post, “Christmas Ornaments 2018 II”, a word that escaped me during that writing came to mind. Lambent came to mind. From the Latin meaning “to lick”, used in the sense of “to glow with light”, as in a tongue of flickering flame, a visual analog to the numinous as in halos of the saints such as the “Immaculate Conception” of the first post of this series.

This fairy is entirely, by her dress, of an older version of this world, defiantly hanging on. Proud of her accomplishments, ready to vanish in a moment. Doing exactly as she pleases and happy to leave lambency to a fellow traveler, the Christmas Tree.