After yesterday’s walk through the neighborhood, I spent some time imagining the shapes of the built environment. I really love the architecture in Barre City, especially what it’s like to see into downtown from the neighborhood above Matthewson playground, where you can appreciate the mix of shapes created in the built environment by single and multistory buildings. Then compare that experience with what it’s like to be at pedestrian street level and look up towards the decorative top floor archway windows on the Scampini, Worthen and Blanchard buildings. We took a serpentine walk through the neighborhoods around Potash brook and appreciated all the stonework happening below the ground to keep water where it’s supposed to be.

I guess I’ve had the durability of buildings on my mind these last few days, given photos on the news, (not to mention how incredibly lucky I am feeling to be living in a place that is free from military conflict.) The final photo below shows a blanket I wove two years ago. The blue ‘rectangle with feet’ shape always read as a building to me and it’s a shape that has asking for me to revisit it for a while. This time, the “feet” read to me as the deep-set granite foundations so many buildings have below ground level, but alternately, I also imagine them as a pair of legs that could pull themselves out of the ground and walk the building to safety, like the chicken legs of Baba Yaga’s house.