![]() When I read the words of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, I see the woods around the Derry farm, the road curving past on its way from town. All photographs by me on my old iPhone then equipped with a now ancient photo filter app. But I still wanted to participate in the Kick About, so I decided to revisit a trip I took 6 years ago to the Robert Frost Family Homestead in Derry, New Hampshire. ![]() I’ve always held this poem close – and I’ve found that has made it difficult for me to make art about it. If my childhood in Southern California was filled with parched chaparral, cars, and Santa Ana winds, Frost described a world that seemed to me in a snow globe or fantasy book – harness bells, snowy woods, deep silence, and solemn promises. I distinctly remember being in my grandmother’s house when I was 8 years old, in my mother’s childhood bedroom, reading it in an old school book anthology I found on a shelf. “This poem was my first poetry love: I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know this poem and didn’t find it magical. I think we just wanted something to do, something that made it feel like summer again.” I’m not sure why we mainly did this in the flesh-tingling cold of winter, or why I remember it the most. Little tufts of smoke would puff from the surrounding houses’ chimneys in the distance as they started to burn out. Esmerelda, Dawn and Jessy, and, of course, the cows, would gather around us watching with perplexing bemusement. The stars would glisten and litter the sky in a spectacle, dancing even in our inebriated states. We sat in the cold we no longer felt and looked to the stars and chatted about improbable nonsense, with the night in Ireland being as black as the void. The odd time we played music that we recorded off the tv onto our Nokia phones. ![]() We drank and smoked into the early hours of the morning, sliding and jumping on the frosty, black plastic wrapped bales of hay. We were once lucky enough that a friend who would join us sometimes managed to score some poitín – an Irish illegal moonshine so strong it can apparently make you blind… It certainly didn’t have that of a dramatic affect on us but fuck, it burned our chests as it went down and our vision was definitely impaired after drinking enough of the liquid lava. Sometimes I would steal a cigar or two from our slumbering parents, and when the weather was bitter and frosting over the pavements – as most harsh, Irish winters are, we used to meet up and collate our stash together. ![]() Me and my cousin and a family friend used to creep around our houses in the dead of night, tiptoeing about the place to steal whatever booze and cigarettes we could find, until ultimately my parents noticed the dwindling of the expensive, ancient wine in our wine cellar and subsequently bought a padlock (that I got a hold of and got a key copied). I remember the forestry and the surrounding areas with utmost joy, as it houses a lot of fond memories of my rambunctious, pubescent teenage years. The stables remain with sprinklings of hay scattered around its edges and when the weather calls for it – downy flake. Unfortunately we sold them off for whatever reason. The forestry is populated with pine trees and used to house some of our horses – Dawn, Jessy, and the majestic Esmerelda, along with the cows. “My family owns a few chunks of land in rural Ireland, one of which is the forestry, pictured here on a typical misty, wintry morning in the back arse of nowhere. I was reminded of ‘walking with dinosaurs’ in the deep dark woods of my childhood, less because of the proper cold (which is the way I remember – rightly or wrongly – all the winters of my youth) and more because of the way the exposed wooded groynes against the white of the beach and frozen slate-coloured mud looked like the enormous skeletons of sea serpents or fallen dragons.” Whitstable beach is shored up with wooden groynes that extend into the sea to keep the beach from washing away. I went out to the beach to find everything glazed with ice, with even the stones on the beach in that sort of shell of ice you find around individual prawns in the supermarket freezer cabinets. Deep in the wintery woods, I’d imagine myself walking daringly amongst an entire herd of the colossal creatures – weaving between their legs.īack in February 2018, the UK was struck by ‘the beast from the east’ – a blast of exceptionally cold weather that brought with it an ice-storm. To me, they always looked like the snow-buried feet of some huge pachyderm or similar, with the thickening around the base of the trunk like the moment when the foot of the creature just starts taking the full weight of what is being carried above it. I was always struck by the impression of the thick gnarled bases of the tree trunks, very black against the white snow. “I remember the snowy winters in the woods in the village in which I grew up.
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