To celebrate summer, my company installed a butterfly garden, because that’s the way it rolls. So here are some photos of butterflies.
They even had a poster about Nabokov and butterflies, which I thought was very impressive.
Here’s what Thomas Nashe has to say about spring:
Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!
The commuter boat from my little town got stuck in the ice in Boston harbor yesterday morning.
Later, parts of the roof collapsed at the grammar school that our kids attended.
Last night, a couple of guys we hired spent two hours in near-zero weather clearing our roof to prevent it from collapsing after the snow and freezing rain that’s coming tonight.
We need to see some flowers from Tom Whelan. Like a New England aster:
And a bouganvillea:
We will ignore all his very fine photos of ice crystals.
They look really nice in this photo, don’t they? But probably if we ever get there, things will suck on them, too. Also, they don’t have Tom Brady and Gronk.
It’s a gloomy day here in New England, and it was a gloomy election on Tuesday, so I thought I’d brighten things up with a photo of a New England aster stolen from Tom Whelan’s Nature Diary:
This was why the Internet was invented: photos of famous authors doing sports. Here is Ms. Christie at Waikiki in 1922. Dude!
Some of the photographs are meh: Stephen King throwing out the first pitch at a Red Sox game hardly counts as a sports photograph. The Winslow Homery photo of a young Ernest Hemingway fishing is cute, but that fishing doesn’t qualify as a sport, if you ask me.
But Jack Kerouac scoring a touchdown in high school? Stephen Crane posing with the rest of the Syracuse University baseball team in 1891? Wow!
In honor of Agatha Christie, here are the Beach Boys singing “Little Surfer Girl” live in 1964. Has it really been 50 years?
We went for a New Year’s Eve walk in my little town. Things were pretty bleak at the cove:
A little less bleak here:
Cold, but a little cheerful:
This is about as cheerful as it got:
Have a warm new year!
Thanks to an invitation from friends, I ended up in Provincetown on November 2 — All Souls Day. Provincetown was still celebrating Halloween. I think it likes Halloween! Here’s a zombie/transvestite mannequin:
It was a gorgeous day. Our friends’ house must have some of the most spectacular views in town. Here is the Pilgrim Monument at sunset as seen from their rooftop deck:
And here is the harbor:
And the dunes:
After dark, things get interesting in Provincetown — too bad my camera isn’t better. Here are some sailor boys and, er, girls: 
Here is a biker/angel of death:
On the opposite side of the religious spectrum, here is a nun in a miniskirt and a pope (maybe) wearing sneakers:
Everyone was headed to the big Beaux Arts Ball at Town Hall:
Provincetown is one of a kind.
We haven’t taken a photo break lately.
Here is a photo of a waterfall in the Berkshires taken by my friend Tom Whelan:
And here is a simple daisy, looking beautiful:
Here’s where I spent a couple days of my vacation last week, looking at the ocean instead of working on my novel:
That’s Duxbury Beach on Boston’s South Shore.
Now back to work.
Looks like two feet of snow fell in my little town. The world has turned gray and white. My bushes are not happy:
Lots of branches down in the backyard:
No reason to hurry with the shoveling because the streets aren’t plowed. So let’s just take pictures!
Richard Bowker 