snow photo

“Snow Time” ’18

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: I am always very pleased when the gift of a great photo for the Pictorama library falls into my mitts and this year it came via a holiday card from our friend in Texas known here by the moniker of @curiositiesantique, aka Sandi Outland who works there. (This doesn’t happen often, a photo coming to me this way, however I do remember recently posting about a splendid photo postcard I found in my pile which turned out to be sent to Kim by Robert Crumb. Really would have picked that photo myself. That post can be found here.)

Sandi and I had a wonderful, lengthy holiday DM exchange over antique angry snowmen (photos, cards and items) which actually lead to last week’s kid in a snowman costume post which can be found here. She collects deeply in this area and recently sent a photo of her mantle, piled high with grumpy snowman goodness. I may not be able to contain myself and maybe the house in Jersey will be decorated in grumpy snowmen next holiday season. We shall see. Meanwhile, I am trying to tempt her into coming up for a Brimfield fiesta with me. (Talk about larks! More to come on that and future post I hope.)

This was the book we were discussing. Kim bought it for me at a con we were at a few months back and Bob Eckstein was there selling them!

While I have never had the chance to visit Dallas and enjoy an in-person peruse of the physical store I have followed their Instagram account now for many years. The shop is owned by Jason Cohen, and I have chatted with Jason and Sandi on the phone over numerous purchases. In addition to what catches my eye on my the feed, they keep an eagle eye out for my cat related interests, and as a result a jolly box arrives from them periodically. (Some of their goodies can also be found online here. Right now there’s a bronze statue of greyhounds romping and a pirate bank, both which I find very tempting in different ways. See below.)

Some of Sandi’s collection.
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Sadly the photo did suffer a small bend in transit, but in no way does that diminish its appeal. Someone has applied the tiniest bit of sparkle along the line where the snow meets the building, on the bottom of the one girl’s shoe and coat and also and under the sled. (The one under her foot leaves me wondering if she is wearing skates or does it create that impression? Why would she be sitting there with skates on?)

Postcards from Sandi’s collection.

Of course it has all the elements you want from a snowy scene, they are bundled up in their winter best and they have this great little white dog perched on their wooden sled. They are clad in perky hats, heavy coats and scarves. Behind them is a back stair and a somewhat indistinct house. It is an old fashion typewriter that inscribed it at the bottom. The photo has been mounted on cardboard so I don’t know what the back is like and that cardboard mounted on the card stock. Sandi told me she had been saving it for me and I am most grateful.

My dad couldn’t have resisted this little bronze which makes me tempted to buy it!

If I were in New Jersey I might be able to dig out a photo of me and my sister in the snow with our dog and sled, circa 1968 or so. At the time we were in a house in a town called Englewood in north Jersey. It had a backyard I remember as huge, with a rock garden going up a hill. That incline was probably just enough for us on our version of a wooden sled which was the classic wood and red paint model of the day. We were stuffed into the snow suits of the day – amazing we could stand up and walk in them at all.

I really thought this was a cowboy at first and I would have really had to have it. Still, a pirate bank is very good...

Meanwhile, our German Shepard (Dutchess) shown in that photo loved to play in the snow with us. My father would make little snowballs and pitch them to her and she would leap up to grab them in her mouth – must have been cold! She was very young at the time though and my memory is that she was always up for any play with us kids outside, all seasons.

It’s a snowless, but gray January day here in Manhattan as I write this. However, contemplating all this fun in the snow has me considering braving for a run or at least a stroll later.

Peggy and Ruth

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: I just found this photo, purchased a little over a year ago. Somehow it has been overlooked, but today seems like the right day for it finally. For many of us this past week was smacked with a weather front we now refer to as a polar vortex. While it plunged our compatriots in the midwest into negative double digit weather, closing offices and schools and terribly even killing a number of people, here in New York it was just very, very cold, requiring many more layers of clothes than we wanted to wear and waddling like down covered penguins as a result.

In the midst of it we experienced something called a snow squall, which I admittedly liked the name of very much, but the experience of a bit less. I saw it from a conference room at work, overlooking the south end of Columbus Circle and within view of the southwest most corner of Central Park. We could barely see out the window and the wind was so bad it snowed upward! For a little more than an hour it poured snow and pounded Manhattan. Visions of pioneers struggling through sudden deadly storms came to mind, although we remained safe in our office tower perch. It resulted in a sheet of ice covering all the sidewalks which somehow the denizens of buildings responsible for snow removal didn’t see fit to address.

Of course my relationship to bad weather was quite different as a child, as I am guessing is true for at least most of us who experience childhood in the suburbs. For me, childhood hurricanes brought floods caused by the nearby river and had a holiday effect, a cause for excitement as water rushed around the house and under the floors, chilling them, ducks quacking at the backdoor. (I think about that now and how my mother was often home alone with us, three small children, when it happened – Dad off at work in New York or traveling as often as not. Mom was and remains, one tough cookie.)

Snow was of course the best because it resulted not only in a day off from school, but in ice skating (that same river flowed into smaller tributaries that froze solid) and sledding. Now, before I create an image of a sylvan childhood of Rockwell-like jolliness, I will state that as a child the meteorological conditions seemed to rarely result in weather that both closed school and was prolonged enough and appropriate for skating and/or sledding. It seemed to be something you were always waiting for that rarely occurred – making it all the better when it did.

Born in February blizzard, I have experienced many snowy birthdays. I will not opine on them right now, but frequently canceled birthday plans created a love-hate relationship with the white stuff. However, I do remember getting a new sled for, I believe, my eleventh birthday, and even without snow on the ground that year it remains a splendid gift that lives in memory.

While this photo was taken twenty-one years before I popped onto the scene, it could very easily been me and my sister Loren, and our cat Snoopy. We owned this very type sled and peaked caps, just like Peggy and Ruth. Snoopy was white with black cow spots, instead of this nice tabby type, and I believe Loren and I at 19 months between us, were closer in age than Peggy and Ruth appear to be. (A nod to Edward who would have shown up on the scene later in the game.) I have trouble imagining a photo of us this angelically posed – I believe most of the snow photos of Loren and I have us fighting, appropriately enough. Still, I purchased it thinking of us.

Unsurprisingly, at the moment the long-range forecast has precipitation predicted for my February 11 birthday. Last year it was a torrential, icy rain – none of the jolliness of snow I am afraid. I am working next weekend, but taking my birthday off to enjoy with Kim and cats here, snow or not, at Deitch Studio.

 

Some Snow!

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Brrrr! This is the kind of snow you somehow imagine when you are a kid, but never really experience – at least most of us won’t anyway, global warming notwithstanding. I think every kid who has built a snow fort has dreamed of something as grand and massive as this. Bigger even than the igloo I always imagined building, but evidently quite secure since our four formidable ladies perch safely atop.

It is indeed unfortunate that there is no indication of where or exactly when this was taken and I can’t help but wonder. It is a photo postcard and there is nothing on the back. The clothes lead us to realize this was probably no later than the teens, a full century ago, the women above in full length dresses, thick warm black stockings on all. There are coats of the heaviest wools with trims and bits of fur. I am not positive, but this image may be populated entirely by women. There’s one figure, on the bottom, second from the right, which may be a young boy, but I cannot see well enough to declare.

I assume that the tunnel through was perhaps of necessity – a path through this extraordinary snow drift – but maybe it was also for fun. I do wonder how someone even managed to make that tunnel though – and where did the excess snow, no small amount, go? Is it just off camera?

As I write this we are commencing the earliest days of winter after a notably mild fall here in the Northeast. (And I for one am heading for Florida for work as I write this – I will be searching the closet for something to wear in 80 degree weather later this week.) The other morning, up very early, I was surprised to see about 20 minutes of hard, fluffy snow – the first of the season, to my knowledge anyway. It didn’t stick. Our extraordinary and notable weather events have been more of the hurricane nature this fall. However, one never knows with winter and weather. Perhaps this will be the year of a big one and we too will make strange burrows and pathways under fifteen and twenty foot drifts here in Central Park.