“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Tag Archives: Winter
Ice Contains No Future
“ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they’re alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That’s the essence of ice, the role it plays.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
I have always enjoyed the slightly dated but still beautiful fountain at Richardson City Hall, behind the library. It, for example, was one of the destinations on the famous Richardson Sculpture Bicycle Photo Scavenger Hunt.
Today, I dropped some books off at the library after work, and noticed the fountain had a different look about it.
Richardson Fountain
Richardson Fountain
Richardson Fountain
The Inability Of the Human Mind To Correlate All Its Contents
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu
Buckingham Road, Richardson, Texas
Ice Nine
(click to enlarge)
“…suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle…?”
“The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.
“And all the muck around the puddle?”
“It would freeze?”
“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“You bet they would !” He cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”
—-Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
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Just like the Inuits of the North have thirty-four names for snow, so do the denizens of Arkansas have seventeen names for misery.
—-Xander Redwood
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A Sprig of Rosemary on Ice
Tell her to find me an acre of land
(On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Washes the ground with so many tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strand
(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
—-Scarborough Fair/Canticle P. Simon/A. Garfunkel, 1966
Click to Enlarge
There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes – and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. … [T]he sun became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.
—-Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Crape Myrtle in Ice
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During the killer summer heat here in Texas one bit of beauty that survives are the bright colors of the Crape (or Crepe) Myrtle trees, blooming on the warmest of days.
Crape Myrtle blooms.
They also have these amazing limbs, covered in smooth bark.
Crape Myrtle grove at the Dallas Arboretum
This winter, the ice storm showed another side of their beauty, glowing like crystal in the faint sunlight filtering through the clouds.
(click to enlarge)
A Rose Embedded in Ice
“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I’m in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current’s too overpowering; I don’t have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I’ve never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there’s no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
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My old chainsaw quit working a year ago, so we had to go down to the hardware store and buy a new one. I was afraid they would be out of stock – a lot of people around here must be buying them right now – but they had two left. We bought the smallest, least expensive, least powerful, corded electric one. It’s only for trimming and, like now, clearing fallen limbs – not a lumberyard – plus, the smaller the saw… the safer the saw (in my opinion).
It was cold work, but quick work, to cut up the limbs of the red oak in the front yard and move them to the curb. It took a little more time to chop up the thicker pieces into chiminea sized chunks of firewood, but waste not want not.
Actually, our old chiminea has bit the dust too, so we need to get down to Amigos Pottery and buy a new one. This is the season of renewal – new chainsaw, new chiminea to burn the old limbs while we wait for the new ones to grow back. It is a shock to see how much wood the weight of the ice tore off the tree – there are still some detached limbs suspended high up, waiting for a thaw and a good breeze to fall – but there are a lot left and the old tree keeps growing.
Covered in Ice
“Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow
The trees that still had their leaves, mostly oaks, were the ones to suffer the most.
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I read on facebook where somebody here in Dallas wrote, under a nice bright picture of downtown, “I remember when it was sunny and eighty degrees… wait, that was yesterday.”
The freezing rain blew in overnight, coating everything in a transparent crystalline shell. I bundled up, breathed the bitter clean air, and carefully walked around the familiar landscape of my yard – transformed into an alien arctic spectacle. When the breeze would blow the world would tinkle with tiny crackling ice. The sun was behind thin clouds but enough light shone through to light up the glassy ice crystals like myriad clear jewels strung everywhere.
We have a huge oak tree in our front yard. Overnight, I could hear wood splitting as the tons of frozen water dripping down the still-attached leaves weighted the wood past its breaking point. In the morning, the yard was littered with limbs, with more broken ones suspended overhead, still stuck in the thick canopy. I’ll have to wait a day or so and then cut the fallen limbs up for firewood and haul the rest to the curb for the city to pick up.
A guy was wandering the neighborhood looking for work – he offered to clear the fall for twenty bucks, which is a more than fair price. I said no… and I’m not sure why, but I think I want to do it myself.
Short Story Day Twenty-Three – Hunters in the Snow
23. Hunters in the Snow
Tobias Wolff
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/huntsnow.html
This is day Twenty-three of my Month of Short Stories – a story a day for June.
Tobias Wolff is one of my favorite short story writers. His story In The Garden of the North American Martyrs is one of the best pieces of short fiction ever scribbled out.
I remember one time, years ago, he was giving a talk at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of the Arts & Letters Live series. Well, I’m poor and can’t afford the full price ticket to these lectures, but, for a pittance, you can attend and sit in an auditorium off to the side where the lecture is beamed in on a screen. I was sitting there, waiting with a few other people (the main room was packed) when I looked up and there was Tobias Wolff, walking between the rows talking to us. He said he didn’t think it was fair that we had to sit in the other room and had arranged for an extra row of seats down across the front. We all marched into the big room and saw the live lecture, thanks to the author.
It was better that way.
I’m afraid today’s story is one that I had read before – but had forgotten until I was about a third of the way in. That’s not surprising… I guess Wolff is another writer that I have read, if not everything, then almost all his output.
At any rate, it’s a good story, with a few differences from similar modern realistic tragedies. First, the origins of the story is pretty obvious. First, there’s the eponymous painting by Pieter Bruegel.
Hunters in the Snow, by Bruegel
The tone of the story is different from the balanced and optimistic winter scene in the painting. A more accurate source of the story is an old joke about a man asking a hunter to shoot his old dog for him, as a favor.
That’s what is so odd and interesting about the story is the juxtaposition of the realistic horror of the situation and the humor that laces the story. It’s an odd combination – sort of like the three stooges, but the blows actually hurt.
Some juvenile delinquents had heaved a brick through the windshield on the driver’s side, so the cold and snow tunneled right into the cab. The heater didn’t work. They covered themselves with a couple of blankets Kenny had brought along and pulled down the muffs on their caps. Tub tried to keep his hands warm by rubbing them under the blanket but Frank made him stop.
They left Spokane and drove deep into the country, running along black lines of fences. The snow let up, but still there was no edge to the land where it met the sky. Nothing moved in the chalky fields. The cold bleached their faces and made the stubble stand out on their cheeks and along their upper lips. They stopped twice for coffee before they got to the woods where Kenny wanted to hunt.
Tub was for trying someplace different; two years in a row they’d been up and down this land and hadn’t seen a thing. Frank didn’t care one way or the other, he just wanted to get out of the goddamned truck. “Feel that,” Frank said, slamming the door. He spread his feet and closed his eyes and leaned his head way back and breathed deeply. “Tune in on that energy.”
—-Tobias Wolff, Hunters in the Snow
The Geometry of Nature
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
—-George Santayana
Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he’d found his purpose in life — to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us.
I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return.
—- Melissa Coleman
Spring comes early in Texas. Spring comes in the middle of winter. The green shoots that will collect the energy, energize the chlorophyll, store the sugar needed for this season’s flowers are already pulling themselves up out of the black soil.
The curve of the leaves is still pristine – not yet tattered by the windstorms to come or eaten by the insects still sleeping in their eggs. On my way to work I watch the green tips poke up, multiply, and spread out to catch the fire of the morning sun peeking over the horizon.
The dead heat, yellow straw and the dry dust is still a long way off, but it will come. Let them grow when they will – while they can.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
—- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Bill Chance 