Fleeting Autumn | West Hartford Reservoirs

Remember when the leaves just changed every year, as leaves are wont to do, and no one went to any great lengths to do anything about it? People appreciated their usual drives or walks a little more for a few weeks, but that was mostly it. There were no limited edition takeout coffee cups with leaves printed on them. There was certainly no "leaf peeping." (Such a strange phrase, isn't it? "Peeping" implies a special effort to catch a momentary glimpse, while viewing fall foliage is the opposite of that; changing leaves are everywhere, you couldn't avoid seeing them if you tried.)

But now, fall is a thing. With foliage comes pressure. After all, you have just a short window to capture the autumnal trees in all their fragile spectacle - one untimely storm or strange stretch of weather could doom them. Afraid that I would soon wake up and look out my window to find bare branches and a street full of withered brown leaves, I hurried to the walking trails at the West Hartford Reservoirs. Luckily, I was not too late. There the leaves were, yellow and red and orange and green, still, but also pale peach and rose and colors I couldn't name. So don't panic. There's still time.

In related news, yesterday I (along with fellow Connecticut writer Jan Mann) was a guest on the WESU Middletown radio show "For Women Over 40," talking about fall travel. Though I'm not yet 40, I hope I gave some tips - including about where to see foliage - that will work for travelers of all ages. The show is available on the WESU website for the next two weeks, as well as on host Cyma Shapiro's For Women Over 40 website, where you can also listen to an earlier show we recorded about traveling in Connecticut.

Another Day, Another Historic House

I know that this blog has been very heavy on historic buildings lately. I never intended to focus on that aspect of Connecticut in particular; I like writing about shopping and state parks and other local attractions that aren't buildings. But when you live in southern New England, you really can't turn around without tripping over a historic house. (I would have said New England in general, but I'm pretty sure I've spent hours driving through New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine and encountered nothing but trees.) And when old buildings are everywhere, it becomes very easy to write about them. This one, the Sarah Whitman Hooker House, practically threw itself at me.

I was just driving along in West Hartford when I stopped in the parking lot of a bank to check my phone. And then I looked up from the screen to see this 1720 house, bearing not one or two but three different plaques attesting to its significance, just chilling there while the madness that is West Hartford traffic swirled around it.

Similarly, this house has stood through several additions and renovations, and many inhabitants. (Mrs. Hooker lived there the longest, hence the house's name.) It stood there while part of it became a tavern for passing travelers, and while Rochambeau led his troops past it twice, coming and going. It stood there while its address changed, when this section of Hartford became West Hartford. 

Today, it is the oldest surviving structure open to the public in West Hartford. It has changed a great deal since it was John Seymour's "mansion house on Four Mile Hill in the West Division." But it hasn't changed nearly as much as everything that surrounds it.

Old West School

I've hit a personal favorite thing trifecta: an old schoolhouse...with a cool door...which is turquoise. (Yes, that last link is a picture of a random door in Missouri I once took a picture of just because it was turquoise.)

And this schoolhouse is in West Hartford, one town over from where I live! I don't know how I didn't come across it earlier.

The Old West School (which sounds like a place where they teach you to swagger dramatically through swing-y saloon doors looking for horse thieves, doesn't it?) was built in 1878. It was "one of the first brick school houses as part of Henry Barnard's campaign for safer school buildings."

These days, it's one of several buildings used by the West Hartford Art League.

Henry Barnard, by the way, is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Before The Light Fades

I've passed this lonely red structure on Route 4, a.k.a. Farmington Avenue, in West Hartford, a couple of times. Each time it struck me as almost mystical-looking, something from a dark suburban fairy tale. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that the thousands of people who drive or jog past it every day would laugh at that notion. Familiarity makes the most fantastical things seem normal, and newness can make the most mundane things look wonderfully odd.

I had to be in West Hartford Wednesday evening, and since I had some time, I stopped here by the reservoir in the minutes before sunset.

This is the front of the building, which you don't see from the road. From this angle it looks a little less magical, which - I think - only makes its situation by the reservoir even stranger. But if anyone else shares my fondness for this little building, they're not writing about it. After a (short, admittedly) search, I found no description of what it is.

So although I hardly ever follow that bit of Blogging 101 advice that says to call for comments, I will do it now.

People of West Hartford! What is this thing?

Peace, Love and West Hartford

Most of what gets posted on this blog falls into the category of things unique to Connecticut, or at least things sort of unique to Connecticut - things that strike me as unlikely to be replicated somewhere else.

And when I saw this, planted in the grass in front of a church beside the Noah Webster Library in West Hartford, I thought it definitely fit into that rubric. Where else but a town like this, I thought, would people honestly believe a piece of wood with a little message printed on it could change the natural, millenia-old tendency of humanity to fight amongst itself? (And I say "a town like this" with eye-rolling affection, having grown up in a place that prides itself on earnestly protesting various world conflicts, despite the fact that its entire experience of war consists of having been a jumping-off point for William Tryon.) So upon seeing this thing I a) burst out laughing in the middle of the sidewalk, then b) walked across the grass to take a picture of it.

But I was wrong! Completely, utterly wrong! This thing is a Peace Pole, and a crazy number of them (possibly 200,000!) have been erected in 180 countries around the world. The concept originated in Japan in the 1950s. They come in four, six, or eight-sided versions, with the same plea for peace written in a different language on each side. This one was of the four-sided variety, and the other languages were Spanish, Hebrew (Everywhere!) and Hindi. I'm not sure how I've escaped seeing one until this late date, and I'm pretty sure I will now see them all over. (But don't worry, I won't chronicle them here.)

After I walked away, I noticed that my little outburst of hilarity had drawn two other people over to examine the pole. They were reading it aloud, probably wondering what could possibly be so interesting or amusing. As it turns out, not much - the only funny part is I now spend so much time thinking about Connecticut that I assumed something universal must have been entirely home-grown.

West Hartford

Lately I've been reading lots of fashion blogs, the kind where girls take pictures of themselves in pretty outfits against interesting backgrounds. Now some impressionable section of my brain keeps telling me I should do that too, every time I see a cool-looking wall or tree. But I don't want to write about fashion, and even if I did, I don't have the wardrobe or the looks (or the patience) to take daily pictures of myself. But when I noticed that my front steps have a really cool texture, which I'd somehow never stopped to look at before, I figured I could at least take a picture of my feet.


Then I went to West Hartford, to which - much like my front steps - I'd never devoted a moment's thought. But I needed to go to a large chain bookstore, and since my local Borders has gone the way of all Borders, I decided to check out West Hartford's Barnes and Noble. It's in Blue Back Square, which is one of those outdoor upscale-ish shopping malls that cause me to vacillate between "Ugh, this is why our nation will be destroyed" and "You know, this is really rather pleasant." I didn't get to see enough of the rest of the city to say anything intelligent about it, but I saw just enough to make me want to go back and check it out. My instinct is that it all might be too upscale-ish for me, but it looked attractive, and busy, and far more established and just...there than I thought it would be. (Because I never really thought about it being there at all, this was a nice surprise.)

Anyway, the B & N and the Library both front onto a little outdoor seating area, which leads to some stairs and this alphabet wall. The reason I only got the end of the alphabet was that three girls were taking fashion-blog type pictures of each other in front of the beginning.