Winter Wonder: Finding joy in the darkest of seasons
Pandora LaCasse Lights in Deering Oaks Park (Portland, ME). Photo: Corey Templeton
By Amy Paradysz
Winter captures us all, some of us a lot more willingly than others. Finding joy in this darkest of seasons starts with a positive mindset – whether that frame of mind is grounded in an adventurous spirit like Angie Bryan, in rugged preparedness like Wendy Brown or in mindful appreciation of winter’s stark beauty, like Pandora LaCasse. Bryan, who first came to love winter while living in Sweden, embraces the Scandinavian mindset that there’s no bad weather, only the wrong clothes. Brown finds contentment in rugged simplicity, heating and cooking on a wood-burning stove and hanging laundry outdoors when the air is crisp, dry and clean. LaCasse brings brightness and wonder to what Maine-based painter Andrew Wyeth once described as “the bone structure of the landscape.”
Angie Bryan: Nordic Inspiration
Angie Bryan snowshoeing to a taco bar as part of a Viles Arboretum table tour with Fit Maine Social Club. Photo by Shannon Bryan.
Retired diplomat Angie Bryan grew up in Texas and never realized she liked the outdoors until she got her first taste of true winter while stationed in Stockholm, Sweden for three years.
“The Swedes spend as much time outdoors as possible, regardless of the weather,” Bryan says. “Stockholm was the reason I chose Maine. I thought, ‘Where could I get serious winter?’ And I chose Portland. One time, I snowshoed to Eventide, and there was a whole row of snowshoes by the door, and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is what I came to Maine for.’”
Some days the Swedes get as little as six hours of daylight – not just sunlight but daylight. Bryan remembers jokes that you knew it was spring when so many Swedes needed chiropractors because they were straining their necks gazing into the sun with delight when it finally reappeared after the winter.
A Swedish tip to surviving the darker months is to get outside midday.
“I used to cross-country ski at lunchtime,” Bryan says. “We had a ski track about a 5-minute walk from the embassy. I could walk 5 minutes, ski for an hour, walk 5 minutes back, and get back to work.”
Scandinavians also love to get snugly, as Americans know from the 2017 New York Times bestselling book, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living, by Meik Wiking.
“It’s a Danish concept of coziness,” Bryan says. “If you go to a cafe, they have blankets so you can curl up. All the homes have lights and candles; it doesn’t have to be a special occasion. When you go inside, you feel like you’re stepping into a warm, cozy hug.”
Wendy Brown: Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs
Old Orchard Beach resident Wendy Brown, who describes herself as a homesteader, has found life during the pandemic to be much the same as life before. One difference was a surge of interest in her 2011 book, Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs: The Thrivalist’s Guide to Life Without Oil.
“The book is about learning to adapt to potential changes where you are,” Brown says. “Some of the things that I talk about in the book kind of did happen this year. We have experienced some resource depletion, and the supply chain has slowed. A lot of people are still eating at home and learning to cook from scratch – all the things I’ve been doing a long time. It’s encouraging to see people who have adapted well and are learning new skills like baking bread, cooking from scratch and learning to sew – or re-learning skills they didn’t think they’d need.”
Brown’s family of four heats with a woodstove, dries their clothes on the line year-round, grows some of their own food, raises chickens, cooks from scratch and produces maple syrup, all on just a quarter of an acre of land.
Thriving during a pandemic, thriving through a winter or thriving through a pandemic winter, Brown says, is about preparedness.
One of her simplest preparedness tips is to get to know your neighbors. Share something like, “If you need water or heat, we’re here,” she says, and they’ll usually reciprocate in kind.
Photo by Amy Paradysz.
Next, rather than hoarding ready-made products, the Browns stock multifunctional ingredients. For example, when hand sanitizer was hard to find, they could make their own with the isopropyl alcohol, aloe gel and essential oils with antibacterial qualities they had at home. “When you couldn’t find yeast anywhere,” Brown says, “I had yeast, because I regularly go through my cabinet and see what I’m out of.”
Though the Browns have a furnace with forced hot air, they choose to heat with their woodstove. You can’t cook on a furnace.
No one settles in for a cozy afternoon reading a book in front of a furnace. Nobody snowshoes home and says, “Mmm, smell that furnace.”
Brown loves the days when the temperature is in the teens or twenties and the air is crisp and dry and clean and she hangs her clothes outside. If there’s a lot of wind, the clothes get fluffy like from a dryer. Wind or not, the garments freeze under the clothespins. Brown brings them inside to finish drying in the warmth of the living room, where they throw moisture into the air.
The Browns are always preparing for the next season – and the season after that. This winter, for example, they are heating their home with wood that they prepared in the hottest days of July.
“It’s a year-round kind of thing,” Brown says. “It sounds exhausting, but it’s not. It’s the kind of lifestyle that we want to live so that when something like COVID happens, we just have small adjustments. And we couldn’t care less about power outages. I heat hot water on the woodstove, and we can take showers with it or do the dishes.”
Pandora LaCasse - Reflecting magic and mystery
“Trees have a different gesture when there are no leaves,” says Pandora LaCasse, the artist who has been behind Portland’s distinctive winter light installations for two decades.
Photo by David Lacasse.
In Tommy’s Park, three large trees stretching more than three stories high are wrapped in strings of colored lights and accented with hanging light orbs.
“Trees seem to ‘disappear’ sometimes in the winter darkness,” LaCasse says. “Color, light and whimsical forms give them a presence. The small moments of branches reaching toward each other as if in conversation can be highlighted while emphasizing the vertical drama of the trunks with colorful lighting.”
Her abstract sculptures bring color and light to the darkest months, from the day after Thanksgiving until late February, sometimes even until March. Oversized spheres spill out from the roof of Maine College of Art. Towering light shapes brighten Boothby Square. In the rose garden at Deering Oaks Park, the horizontal branches of the old pin oak tree are lit in the shape of an organic candelabra, orbs of red flame reflecting onto the snow below.
While each installation is made of stainless steel, spring wire and string lights, from a distance all that is seen is color, shape and light.
“Abstract forms retain a mystery,” LaCasse says. “They are simple organic forms of different shapes and sizes that allow individual interpretations. How they illuminate and interact within the site is the magic.”
At some locations, the sculptures look different from night to night. At Deering Oaks, for example, there are three shapes in the trees, and each shape has two color options. LaCasse has computer programmed the Deering Oaks lights to have seven different color schemes.
She has a master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania and – before light installations became her focus – worked in metals and sometimes Plexiglass and wood. When Portland Downtown was looking for a light artist, LaCasse gave it a shot, beginning with Tommy’s Park in 1999. And, as her business has grown, so have those trees.
“We used to use a 45-foot lift, and now we use a 60-foot lift,” she says.
This winter, LaCasse’s installations are in public and commercial spaces throughout Portland, as well as in Freeport, Brunswick, Biddeford, The Blaine House and as far afield as Boston, Texas and Canada. And the aesthetic is growing.
“Drive around Yarmouth, and you’ll see that people have made orbs and hung them in their trees just like I do,” LaCasse says. “It’s all over the place. I really love creating different site-specific installations for different spaces, and people are seeing that and trying it for themselves.”
Portland Downtown has a walking map of Pandora’s Winter Lights at www.portlandmaine.com/winterlights
Photo by Corey Templeton.
