Details II

I’m back with another assortment of interesting details found around town.

An open garage door. The inside is cluttered with car maintenance supplies. A framed paper silhouette of a child hangs on the cinderblock wall.

I pass this car rental place walking back from the climbing gym, and noticed this elegantly framed paper silhouette of a child hung in the garage. It seems delightfully incongruous with its surroundings. My parents have similar silhouettes of my brother and I hanging in their bedroom, doe-like lashes protruding from our cherubic toddler profiles. I guess there must be a market for these, since the baby supply store near me occasionally has advertisements for a visiting silhouette artist hung in their window.

The cement lintel of a two-car garage. A strip of red-and-black checkerboard pattern is tiled along it. The centermost tile is mint green.

The cement sidewall of the driveway exiting the previous garage. A strip of red diamonds is tiled across it. The centermost tile looks like a blue four-petaled flower.

I liked these tile designs on a garage just up the hill from that car rental place. This charms me for the same reason the brick facade in my last details post did—this otherwise unremarkable garage is much like any other unremarkable garage in Somerville, except that except that when it was being built someone made the conscious decision to add this little flourish. Feels like you don’t really get that anymore.

Train tracks run across an elevated berm. Two culvert-like tunnels underneath it, made of corrugated metal, allow the passage of traffic.

A weekend walk with Kyrie turned into an extended wander as I impulsively tracked down some radio antennas I had glimpsed from the train on my way to work. One of them was inside what turned out to be a gyre of dead ends, a whole chunk of land excised from the city grid by the surrounding train tracks. I angled for a supposed pedestrian cut-through at East Somerville station but was stymied by ongoing construction and forced to backtrack from the most distant possible point.

Aside: It was while trying to troubleshoot this cut-through that I discovered an ouroboros of “bike route” signs, one placed at each of the four corners of a nearby building and all with an arrow pointing to the right. This implies the potential existence of a bike version of Charlie open_in_new .

Anyway. I was a little peeved about backtracking, but at least it meant I got to go through this interesting underpass not once, but twice. This is the only vehicular access point to this entire “neighborhood”, and it’s this strange pair of culvert-like pipes. Great echo.

A butter yellow house with a red door. Next to the door is an arched, cathedral-like window with contemporary-seeming muntins. On the second story is another arched window, with historical-seeming leaded glass panes. The horizontal siding of the house turns into a fan-like pattern of rays across the gable.

While on one of our classic jaunts with my darling girlfriend, we found this excellent house. The bottom half is pretty good already, but the top half is breathtaking. The pointed arch window with leaded glass panes, the apex of which radiates a sunburst of siding across the gable? I’m dying to know what this looks like from the inside.

A clay carving of a woman standing in front of a table of food and dishware. She has a halo around her head, and is handing a bowl to a cloaked woman in the background. Behind them both is another table. The perspective of the whole image is oddly flat.

Kyrie, a wolfy-looking mutt, wriggles on her back in the grass. Her mouth is open in a big doggy smile.

There’s a church with a great lawn that Kyrie and I walk past on our evening route. Something about the grass there makes her go wild. Actually, I heard that someone came to my site looking for pictures of her but couldn’t find any, so please accept the above by way of apology.

Anyway, despite having walked by this church probably hundreds of times, I only recently noticed these relief panels on the front facade. I would typically expect to see a detail like this done in carved stone, but these actually appear to be something like sculpted clay. This medium really imbues the piece with the physical touch of the artist. You can see the texture of the tool marks, and some of the divots are the perfect width of a finger-swipe. I’ll admit I did think the table in the background was a speech bubble at first and was like “woah, how avant-garde”. I feel affectionately about the clumsy perspective.

A tan brick building with a enclosed porch-like room hanging off it. The walls are decorated with elaborate red metalwork.

Same church complex, different time of year. This overhanging… room? has this interesting metal detailing that doesn’t appear anywhere else on any of the other buildings. It’s almost cage-like, in that it doesn’t seem to actually touch the surface of the walls but instead hover slightly above them. You know, after giving it a little more thought, my theory is that this was originally an open porch and the walls were built to enclose it. The metalwork beneath the windows feels very railing-like.

Aside: I realized that one of the reasons that new places have this fresh, exciting feel to them is because I’m always looking up. Literally, in new places I have my gaze set at a higher average angle than when I’m in a familiar area. This gives me an overall greater “impression” of the location and leads to noticing all kinds of interesting things. The other day I tried to focus on keeping my gaze up as I walked on the community path, which I walk on every day, and was actually able to capture some of that “new place feeling” when noticing the way the trees seemed to tower above me, framing the blue sky. Try it the next time you’re walking around your neighborhood!

A close up of two abutting granite curbs. A wedge of space between them has been colonized by tiny plants.

Lastly, this crack in the curb bursting with greenery. This is a deeply mundane sight, but I particularly like how dense and wedge-shaped this one was, like a little slice of cake. I’m picturing a lemon-thyme-poppyseed cake, not too sweet, covered in sugared microgreens, if that’s anything?

Hopefully with the nicer weather, I’ll be going on more adventures and have more details to report. Bye for now!