While I was in high school, I made a discovery that would change my artistic life. Simply put, I just wasn’t good at drawing or painting. Sculpture? Forget it. Ceramics? Meh. Printmaking? Nope. Photography was a different story. Almost immediately, I felt like I was born to do it. In photography class, I was introduced…
In my previous post, I noted my family’s move to the woods when I was eight years old. Our house was just two doors away from the neighborhood elementary school, and I went there for three years. Unfortunately, I quickly ran into the same problem I experienced at my previous school. I was a smart…
When I was eight years old, my family moved to the woods. Although we were an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, the city seemed like it was light years away. And light, what was that? The interior of our new house was so dark, we had to keep the lights on during the daytime. No sense…
In my previous post, I noted the nature that I experience at my place – the ornery landscape plants, opinionated birds, and gardening triumphs and tragedies. So, will this be book that stays home? And this going to be another one of those “pretty picture, worship nature” books? No to the second power! Early in…
Continuing with my annual series of “What I Did On My Christmas Vacation” posts. Here’s the fourth. There’s a farm down the street from my folks’ house… The farm is part of a private school’s property, and the athletic fields are adjacent to the cornfields. After the geese chow down in the cornfields, they adjourn…
Here’s the conclusion to my annual series of “What I Did On My Christmas Vacation” posts. Cold outside! This really was the temperature at the Retallick family home in Westtown, Pennsylvania… Mom’s back from seeing if the newspapers had landed at the end of the driveway. None of them had… Okay, so we can’t read…
Continuing with my annual series of “What I Did On My Christmas Vacation” posts. Here’s the second. I spent the latter half of my grade school years at Penn Wood Elementary. Which had a nice woodsy setting that was full of distractions for a budding artist. Like textures and colors – the building blocks of…
Continuing with my annual series of “What I Did On My Christmas Vacation” posts. Here’s the third. A leafy one from eastern Pennsylvania. I guess I should do Mom a favor and remove those beech leaves from the screen door. But they’re so photogenic…
It’s time for my annual series of “What I Did On My Christmas Vacation” posts. Here’s the first. Day after Christmas was a great one for planting the Retallick family’s tabletop Alberta spruce. Off with the pine cone decorations… And into the ground… Mom takes the one-gallon pot away before I tamp soil around the…
Being a native Pennsylvanian and photoblogger, I’m will never pass up a good snowstorm. Those flakes start falling, and I’m outside with the camera. But wait a minute. I’m writing this post from central Tucson, Arizona. This is the desert! It doesn’t snow here! Oh, yes it does. Here’s the evidence from my place. Poor…
Winter in southeastern Pennsylvania is one of those trips through months of waist-deep snow and sub-zero temperatures. In some years, you get the full arctic treatment. (Years 1985 and 1986, I’m looking right at you.) Other years? Let’s say that winter is on one day, then off the next. Here’s a nostalgia trip through my…
My childhood memories of Philadelphia are not good. In the 1960s and 1970s, the place had a well-earned reputation as a crime-ridden hellhole. For suburban kids like me, Philadelphia was the #1 place to stay out of. And so we did. But, as they say, that was then and this is now. During a late…
In November 2012, I started taking classes at The Studio for Actors. The long-term goal is to create a show about my bicycle travels through all 50 of the United States and living car-free in Tucson. This show will combine storytelling, photos, and live music. While it’s fun to talk about long-term performance goals, there…
During a recent visit to eastern Pennsylvania, I experienced something I hadn’t seen since the late 1980s. That would be spring coming to the Northeast. There were the signs of imminent spring like daffodils sprouting everywhere… The rhododendron bushes were budding… The moss was growing fresh and furry… The streams weren’t brimming over with snow…
Always fun to go back and visit the last grade school I attended. If it’s not peering into classrooms and seeing wall charts teaching skills that adults take for granted – remember what life was like before you learned how to tell time – it’s taking a walk around the school grounds and realizing how…
When I was growing up, Westtown was that hippie-freak Quaker school at the end of the street. The long hair and love beads crowd were quite the contrast to the buttoned down, straight-laced kids in my neighborhood. I can remember one of the moms making jokes about “Westtown’s finest” whenever she saw students heading away…
Nothing like a backed-up septic tank to enliven an eastern Pennsylvania family’s Christmas Eve. The family in question would be mine. And this story’s almost a carbon copy of the one I blogged two years ago. Once again, a call to Hickman Sanitation, and out comes owner Dave Hickman (below) with one of his employees….
A Christmas holiday visit to family in Pennsylvania reveals a timeless truth about the Keystone State’s winter weather: It varies. On one day, it’s cool enough for a jacket. Perfect weather for my mother to stroll around the neighborhood with Buddy the Labrador Retriever… Looks like Buddy’s found another interesting scent. This one merits very…
Like much of the rest of the eastern United States, Pennsylvania just got walloped by another big snowstorm. According to family reports, thick hats, heavy jackets, waterproof boots, snow shovels and plows are now the height of fashion. And will be for some time. Although my Westtown, Pennsylvania family and friends may find it hard…
One of the most memorable features of a southeastern Pennsylvania winter is that it’s highly variable. You can be deep in snow and shivering in sub-freezing temperatures, and then the weather warms up to the point where the hats and jackets are unnecessary. Such was my recent trip to the Land of Winter Variability. Not…
My recent trip to southeastern Pennsylvania featured no-problem air travel and foul weather that didn’t materialize until after I was on the ground. What the weather forecasters billed as a blizzard turned out to be underwhelming. We didn’t even get half a foot of snow. After the weather cleared, it was time to go exploring….