SCENE | Brooks School Field Hockey Lawn

Photos from the campus of Brooks School by Simons Finnerty.

I have just recently gotten to know Simons Finnerty, a talented young photographer and student at Brooks School. It is very likely that he was born the year I started boarding school, but he instantly showed me how little things have changed on the staid New England campus. A very welcome idleness indeed. When I saw these photos it reminded me of my first fall. I could almost smell the grounds from his photos. And just then my personal memories from this scene all seemed to tie into Tomboy Style.


It was 1997. As recent and perhaps modern as that year may sound, it is a year forever embedded in the last century. Our identities were more three-dimensional then. More honest, more fleeting.

I sat beneath this middle-aged New England tree in September. On the sidelines of the field hockey lawn, cleats trotted past me while I rested. I put my ear to the ground and looked sideways at the horizon. The ground was green, but not Kodachrome green, just a dark earthy green. The sky was blue, but not a spectacular Mediterranean blue. It was a sensible blue. An autumn-afternoon-in-Massachusetts-blue. The memory isn’t a fantasy snapshot, it is exactly as it was—breathtaking in its simplicity and in its quest to be only itself.