We wore red on Christmas.

Christmas 1964

Merry Christmas from The Old Granite Step!

A peaceful Winter Solstice.

The 2019 Winter Solstice is at 11:19 Eastern Standard Time.

Solstice

noun

1.  Astronomy.

1. either of the two times a year when the sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator: about June 21, when the sun reaches its northernmost point on the celestial sphere, or about December 22, when it reaches its southernmost point.
   
   
2. either of the two points in the ecliptic farthest from the equator.

2.  a furthest or culminating point; a turning point.

This photo was taken on a wintery December evening about fifty years ago, in a small Connecticut shoreline town.  The solstice causes me to reflect on the buildings in the photo which are all, unfortunately, gone now.  The peace emitted by this lone image is strong.  We can only imagine the stillness that inspired the photographer to snap the photo.  So at this time of the Winter Solstice, take a moment to enjoy the tranquility of a winter's night that will only be a memory tomorrow.

a reprint from 2014

Start your paper whites now for some greenery mid winter.

I love some fresh

Thank you Kristin Nicholas for opening your home.

It was a snowy

It's an ice covered kind of day.

After about a half inch of snow

The deer in the snow; a natural Christmas card.

 "Any glimpse

Fix-it-upper or tear-it-downer?

 My first

A snowy morning on the farm.

It was the perfect

Harvesting this year's Christmas tree.

 With a relatively

Kitten play.

 There's nothing

Abandoned and for sale in a coastal Connecticut town.

Located in the

The Art of British Cooking - Buttermilk Bread.

It's an easy

We found this in the basement of our 1810 house when we replaced the furnace.

The old furnace just couldn't go on any longer.  It chugged away for the most part but with a hiccup every now and then.  It was larger than the new one and there was a piece of sheet metal behind it that covered

a huge fireplace!  I will say that the basement of this house is beautiful.  But I can't figure out why there would have been such a large fireplace down there.  Was it used for cooking?  Was the basement built first and they lived there before adding the actual first floor of the house?  It's perplexing.

The piece of granite used on this particular fireplace is very large.  There were several operating quarries in this area when the house was built but why put it in the basement especially when the fireplace directly above it in the family room isn't this nice?

So now we're tasked with cleaning all of the rubble out of it.  It can't be used but it can be clean and it certainly makes a great conversation starter!