The independent bookstore R.J. Julia’s email notice that they were closing early Saturday) and all day Sunday because of Hurricane Irene including a photo of a shop employee setting up an umbrella and rainboots as part of a window display.
For appropriate illustrations of the impending storm, however, it’s hard to beat the Yale Center for British Art’s use of John Constable’s painting Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames—Morning After a Stormy Night.
Constable painted the scene in 1829, and on overcast days in Southern England it still looks like that.
Kathleen and I honeymooned in Westcliff-on-Sea, one town over from Leigh-on-Sea, where Hadleigh Castle still stands.
We resolved to hike to Leigh one morning.
We’d heard about the castle, but I hadn’t make the connection between it and the painting in the Yale Center for British Art which I must have passed a thousand times.
It stormed during our hike. It had stormed before. It would storm again. It had been storming on and off since at least 1829.
Kathleen lost a shoe in the treacherous thick brown mud of a potato field.
At one point I looked up at the sky and actually said, “Those clouds look like they could be in a Constable painting.”
We made it up the slippery hill to the castle, wondering why Vikings would ever have bothered. But if the British hadn’t thought there might be invaders, they might never have erected a castle, and Constable wouldn’t have done a painting, and we wouldn’t have had quite an incredible a honeymoon.
There was a paved road on the other side of the castle. We took that back to Westcliff.