David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Milton Avery in Collinsville: The Power of Place

Celebrated American artist Milton Avery spent the summer of 1930 painting and sketching in the small Connecticut mill village of Collinsville, my hometown. His stay “turned Avery into the painter he would become,” observes Connecticut historian Gary Knoble. Up to that time, his paintings were “generally more ‘academic,’ while after Collinsville they became more ‘modern.’”  With this change, “his career as a painter really lifts off.”

The difference in colors, perspective and brushwork is easily seen when walking through “Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years,” an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum that includes the artist’s early work along with that of teachers and colleagues (image 1--all images credited below). If you can’t make it to the museum by October 17, 2021, the exhibition still lives between the pages of a beautifully illustrated catalog.

History, Memory and a Cemetery without Burials

A cemetery without burials? It seems a contradiction. But that’s just what you’ll find in the northeastern corner of Burlington, Connecticut. A roadside obelisk about twelve feet tall is inscribed with names of three members of the Ford family, their ages, and dates of death between 1855 and 1901. None of them are interred beside the monument.

Mentioned in town records, searchable via internet, and noted on some maps, the Ford Cemetery fails to meet Webster’s definition of “an area for burial” since no one is buried there and none can take place. The three bodies once resting in this spot are said to have been removed over a century ago by family members after the site was sold to the Hartford Water Works (now the Metropolitan District) for construction of Nepaug Reservoir.

Making Sense of Wood Scents

My garage reeks of parmesan. Reminding me of a fine Italian dinner, it’s a great smell, just surprising. I’m neither making nor aging cheese where I store my lawnmower, garden tools, canoes, and keep a supply of firewood along one wall. But I recently stacked some freshly cut and split white oak. It smells for all the world like parmesan.

Like most of us, I’m surrounded by wood every day. It’s in furniture and floors, doors and window frames, tool handles, and the clapboard siding of my home. From a sculpture of the Buddha to a kitchen spoon, the beauty and utility of wood is part of daily life. I often admire its grain, color, feel, and capacity to be shaped into fine details, but not since I stepped into an old-fashioned cedar closet years ago have I thought much about the scent of wood.

Tunnel Visions

Entering Stone
A dark, craggy opening carved into solid rock grew larger and darker as I drew close. Mythic portals to the netherworld flashed to mind. On entering, the air felt like a chill breath. Dripping water echoed in rhythm with my heartbeat. It was only a railroad tunnel abandoned for the better part of a century, but you can’t separate tunnels from mystery. They taunt the imagination.

At once exhilarating, creepy, and inducing claustrophobia, there’s an irresistible fascination in concealed travel through a rockface or beneath the earth’s surface. No doubt I become energized in defiance of natural barriers, but there’s also a haunting quality when the sky disappears and the mind ineluctably searches for light at the other end.

Eight Parlor Stoves and the Future of Museum Collections

A Wealth of Objects
Why do museum collections often include objects that visitors never see? Although I’m a devotee of museums from nationally known art institutions to small town historical societies, from assemblages of farm tools to medical curiosities, the question didn’t dawn on me until by happenstance I saw eight nineteenth century parlor stoves in the attic of the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS). Bequeathed to the organization in 1945, I was told by the chief curator that they had never been on display and would likely never be exhibited. I was intrigued.

Like the venerable CHS, many museums have attics, basements, and closets stuffed with materials in racks, on shelves, occupying floor space, or even hanging from the ceiling. Some have such abundance as to require offsite storage. No doubt many museums have more objects stowed away than on display.

Of course, public gallery space is precious and of limited capacity, and a surplus of artifacts allows for changing exhibits. Permanently stored materials may also include items that are damaged, can’t be authenticated, or were acquired so long ago their provenance remains a mystery to current staff, volunteers, and trustees. There may also be mission relevant items worthy of safekeeping even if they don’t rise to level of public display. The presence of such stranded or orphaned objects only amps my curiosity. What is hidden away?

Connecting with Tree Roots

But when you think of all the roots they drop,
As much on bottom as there is on top.
A double tree, widespread in earth and air,
Like a reflection in the water there.
--Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What are trees hiding? That’s what I want to know. Like most people, when I see a grand old tree my eyes soar upward along the trunk and into a network of branches reaching skyward. But while I’m looking up, my imagination probes belowground in wonder at unseen tangles of roots. I may marvel at a spire of spruce or an ancient oak with muscular, gnarly limbs defying gravity, but I’m intrigued by what I don’t see.

Trees give definition and beauty to the landscape. Their greenery provides an array of solar collectors and air purifiers. They are habitat to wild neighbors from squirrels to bears. My home is built of their very substance. Among the largest, oldest, and most useful of living things, they’re not possible without the roots most of us don’t notice until tripping over one that’s tilted a sidewalk, or gawking at an occasional specimen snaking along a rock.

Nathan Hale and the Face of Heroism

        Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
                    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Discovering Nathan Hale
He’s the face of heroism, yet no one knows what he really looked like. His home is a shrine, but he never lived there. Most every school child knows his inspiring last words, though it’s not clear he uttered them. Nevertheless, Nathan Hale is designated by statute as Connecticut’s official hero, an honor that no other state appears to have bestowed on a native son.

Hale died at age 21. Probably no one so young has had so many monuments dedicated to them. There are statues in in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, St. Paul and elsewhere. College buildings bear his name as do public schools from New Jersey to Washington State, Ohio to Oklahoma. But nowhere is he so well memorialized as in Connecticut where a trip along the “Hale Trail” exposes travelers to natural beauty, history, architecture, sculpture, and an invitation to encounter a legend.

New England's Real Fall Season

It’s like awakening with a hangover from a monthlong party celebrated with tons of colored confetti. When leaves have dropped and leaf peeping tourists are gone, that’s autumn in New   England for many of us living here. Time for leaf cleanup.

We’re world famous for October color. It might as well be a sunset caught for weeks like a kite in the trees. It’s a regional icon essential to our identity and economy. New Englanders delight in flaming sugar maples, lemony birches, and late blushing coppery oaks. The vibrancy of the year’s colors is a subject for discussion on street corners, in supermarkets, and around dinner tables. The effects of rain or drought, the previous year’s snowfall, hours of sunlight, and an early or late frost are among variables providing almost as much partisan passion as politics.

Bright autumnal tints elevate the spirit, put us in touch with natural cycles, and are kaleidoscopically beautiful. But as much as we delight in color, for many of us it’s not the main event as measured in time and energy—at least if you have a lawn and garden. As the season’s more evocative name suggests, it’s the fall of leaves and their cleanup that provides the most immediate connection between people and nature.