Photo of the Day: Reflections and Wires, Winter’s Pond, Mahwah NJ

On a trip up to Mahwah in northern Bergen County yesterday to dine outside with a friend, I spotted this lovely site on the right side of the road. I could only make out one sign as I drove back: “Duck Crossing.” The site turned out to be Winter’s Pond, part of the township’s Winter Park, named after a family long associated with the town.

The first recorded mention of this pond was back in 1799, when John Winter used it to power his sawmill. The mill ceased to operate in 1894, but since then the site has been used for other purposes, including running ice houses and serving as a popular ice skating spot.

More recently, from 1992 to early in this past decade, cleanup of the pond and park was conducted, including dredging the pond and adding a covered bridge and gazebo, both of which added to its picturesque flavor. Even after so much time and different uses, you can still see evidence of the industry that has formed a part of this area's life in the wires and towers visible in this photo I took yesterday.

Quote of the Day (Rachel Carson, on Spring and the Healing ‘Refrains of Nature’)

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”—American scientist and nature writer Rachel Carson (1908-1964), The Sense of Wonder (1956)

Over the past week, as the dread and horror of the coronavirus have spread, I have felt even more urgently the need to get out of the house. My office, library, and theaters were closed. The other day, I was even surprised to see the gates locked at a local stadium where I often walk around the track.

It was with relief, then, and with a sense of joy that I discovered Foschini Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, to be open. I got to photograph what I came for: signs of spring on the first day of the season. 

There were few people out in this nearly 28-acre park on this sunlit day: a couple and their son on bicycles, four or five kids playing baseball, and two joggers, running separately.  (Surely glad to comply with the federal government’s new directive: stay six feet away from the nearest person.) 

Maybe, at some point a few weeks or months ago, more people will rediscover the hope generated by nature that Ms. Carson alludes to.

Photo of the Day: Two-Week Fall Flashback

If you blinked in the last few weeks, you missed autumn. I can still remember putting on the air conditioning in my bedroom at the end of the first week of October. The leaves turned color late here in Bergen County, NJ. If you worked in New York during the week, as I do, the opportunity to catch this transformation was fleeting.

Fortunately, I caught the change for one day—a sunlit Sunday afternoon—at the start of this month. The image I took that day, which you’re looking at now, came at the Paramus Roots of Discovery Park next to Paramus High School, a woodsy section created with the support of the owner of the largest mall in this retail-centered town, Westfield.

Photo of the Day: Church of the Good Shepherd, Fort Lee NJ

I took the accompanying photo of this picturesque Gothic Revival church last weekend, while walking around in Fort Lee, several miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. The Church of the Good Shepherd, built in 1867, is Episcopalian.

Photo of the Day: ‘Tranquil Restoration’ in Overpeck County Park Extension, NJ

“These beauteous forms,

 Through a long absence, have not been to me

 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

 And passing even into my purer mind,

 With tranquil restoration: - feelings too

 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

 As have no slight or trivial influence

 On that best portion of a good man's life,

 His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

 Of kindness and of love.”— English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), “Tintern Abbey” (1798)

Whenever I require “tranquil restoration,” I often head to the Overpeck County Park Extension not far from where I live, in Bergen County, NJ. I took this particular image there five years ago

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a ‘Picture of Winter’)

“To-day the trees are white with snow,—I mean their stems and branches,—and have the true wintry look on the storm side. Not till this has winter come to the forest. It looks like the small frost-work in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which the branches take. That is a picture of winter…”—American essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, journal entry, January 5, 1852, from Winter: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Harrison Gray Otis Blake (1891)

Two years ago, I took the image accompanying this post in Saddle River County Park, here in Bergen County, NJ.