David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

More than Where to Go: Distinctive Road Signs

They tell us where we are and where to go. What more could we want from standard street and roadside directional signs? Ubiquitous in our car culture, we pass one after another even on   short drives. Taken for granted, they’re truly noticed and appreciated them only when one is missing or we’ve lost our way. Like anyone else, I rely on them wherever I go. I don’t doubt their   value. But what really grabs my attention is a sign out of the ordinary.

Almost universally made of reflective, adhesive vinyl pasted over aluminum, standard street and directional signs are perfectly utilitarian, relatively easy to read and understand. There are slight variations in typography, color, or the presence of government seals, but the monotony of off-white lettering on a green background is the rule. Yet every once in a while, I pass signs that buck the lookalike trend. Whether they supplement or substitute for regulation signs, they convey much more about a place than names and distances. Distinctive signs may speak to creativity, history, a sense of humor, or a special notion of place. To sight one is to feel you’re in a singular community.

Tree Messages

        These trees shall be my books and in their barks my thoughts.
                Shakespeare, As You Like It

Why do some people carve messages and images into trees? Do words and sketches on a living thing enliven the thought, give it vibrancy lacking on other surfaces? Perhaps drawing on sylvan skin shares in the mystique of tattoos.

Gouging the bark of a tree is a form of vandalism I don’t condone. Whether conifer or hardwood, it leaves its victims vulnerable to insects and disease. Why would anyone endanger a lifeform that puts oxygen into the air merely to post a message? Trees may be usefully cut for house framing, furniture, and fuel, but to incise the bark just to mark one’s presence seems an unnecessary imposition of ego, at best. Nevertheless, some tree carvings intrigue me with synergies that connect natural objects and human expression.

Everyone’s seen carving on the smooth, smoke-gray bark of beech trees. Call them social register trees, they often bear names, dates, initials, hearts, and other designs. Analogous in some ways to canine-like behavior, apparently there are people who can’t help but mark their territory with knifepoints on bark. To those who admire the vigor and quirky growth habits of trees as an antidote to the regularity and endless written messages of the built environment, carvings seem self-defeating. A tree trunk is not meant to be a postcard.

In Praise of Cobbles

Stone cobbles are the most elemental of construction materials. No two structures built of them are exactly the same. Endlessly fascinating for their unique appearance, I’m on the lookout wherever I go, and often stop and stare at homes and public buildings, foundations, streets, commemorative arches and monuments, even porch railings and flower planters.

Cobbles are smooth, naturally rounded rocks not much bigger than what most people can easily carry. Webster defines them as “larger than a pebble and smaller than a boulder often arbitrarily limited by geologists to a size ranging from 64 to 256 millimeters in diameter,” about two-and-a-half to ten inches. They were ground down, polished, and then dropped by the glacier that retreated from my area in southern New England about 12,000 years ago. Today, they are most easily found in streambeds and along lake and sea shores, exposed by the erosive power of water. They also arise from tilled fields by frost action, appearing like fossilized potatoes.

Miniature Magic in the Landscape

Artistic Miniatures
A vacation back to childhood. That’s how my wife Mary and I feel each October when we visit the Florence Griswold Museum’s We Faerie Village in Old Lyme, Connecticut. We are among thousands who make the annual pilgrimage to the impressionist art mecca’s beautiful riverside grounds where we wander in wonder among gardens, on the broad lawn, and beneath trees to see a display of over two dozen expertly designed and built small scale structures whose fine detail and whimsical vision always leaves us gobsmacked. And nature is in conspiracy with art as breezes stir the constructions and sun and clouds play with shadow and light.

Landscape Forgeries

We crave authenticity, but often settle for imitations in the objects with which we surround ourselves. We believe in the real deal, but put up with simulated materials that sometimes look   foolish.

Not far from my home, there’s a huge telecommunications monopole poorly disguised as an escapee from a grove of giant California redwoods. Standing on a hill with ersatz branches bearing pretend conifer needles, it towers over the surrounding Lilliputian forest. More distracting and uglier than an unadorned steel pole, it calls attention to a ridiculous idea. It screams: I’m a fake.

Along the same road some miles distant, is a hollow, gray lump of plastic articulated to look like a boulder. It hides a utility installation in front of a shopping center. At first, I thought it was a joke since it’s obviously not fooling anyone. But no, it’s a serious attempt to hide an unsightly electrical connection with an even more hideous container meant to look natural. Even a young child would not be deceived. Their plastic toys are much better made and do not masquerade as the real thing. The usual gray or green metal cabinet, however bad-looking, would have been, much better. At least some talented artist could paint it with a clever design.

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.