Every once in a while, we have need to go to the places we came from.
Climbing into a little machine to take to the air is always a strange experience. Grinding through the turnstiles for the privilege is always trying. It helps to plan ahead, though, and do the little things that make the experience a little bit better for everyone. I left the ground here, and ended up down again over there, breaking through a floor of cotton to see a familiar landscape, all set up with white. It was quite pretty.
When afforded the opportunity for closer inspection, there was nearly a foot of snow on everything. It was still quite pretty, and most welcome.
There is a new mixed-use development plonked in the little stream valley next to the commercial center that is an easy walk away. It is a rollicking thing, making little canyons full of boutiques, chocolate stores, coffee shops, purveyors of climbing gear and other assorteds. Above, offices, apartments, condominiums. It is a little unsettling: it is a bold development, all put up in short span, and it has not yet shaken out how well it will do (although the sheer scope of the place gives rise to the fervent hope that it does well). There is a gallery of paper art nestled in there, a nice touch that must persist only with the nod of subsidy. This sort of thing bodes well for it, I think.
There is also a place where you can get cheesecake. Well, you can get cheesecake after waiting. Most times, after waiting at least an hour. I do not understand that part. I find it heartening that in that part of the world this is still sufficiently strange that people note it. Some of them write articles.
If there was ever a need for crates and/or barrels in that place, they are now most assuredly covered.
There were church bells. Some tolled close, to mark hours. Others drifted across the wide valley air, marking unknown things. I go to visit a church with a new organ. It sounded quite nice, but the acoustics of the place betrayed the thing: there was no place for the notes to play in there, lingering in the vaults, and the gentle echoes of final chords were lacking.
The nights were near silent. This is a good trick, if one can get it.
At one point my brother wanted to go running, so I joined him in a trek up the road to the lakes on the ridge, bodies of water serving as reservoir and park. He took the left fork, for it was plowed and clear. I took the right fork, up back behind the curve of ice over the water, up into the trees and the beckoning mist. The path itself was compacted snow, making for a gently drunken lope over the broken crusts. I swung my arms and kept my limbs loose and remembered how to walk on that.
Off the path, the snow was undisturbed, sometimes sinking me to my knees. By the lake, the fog cowled everything, making near trees disparate and far trees unremembered. Bits of mist drifted into the leafless wood, gently combed by branches.
My family has always had good use for good tools. One of the recent acquisitions for the house was a telescope, and a good one, too. Using it, I got to learn a little of how the world and sky can be laid out with declination and ascension, which is another unfortunate set of orthogonality that is now bouncing around in my head. We took the thing out into the yard and pointed it up, for some new and strange value of up.
I can tell you this: Mars is round.
There was a fair amount of this.
We did a bit of eating out. There was the Afghan place with the pilaf and sides of squash and dumplings and baskets of crispy flatbread that was sweetened with a little oil and light as air. There was the Ethiopian place with spoonfuls of this and that along with extraordinary chicken on the bone, all mopped up with spongy, tangy pancake, new plates arriving unbidden and just in the nick of time. There was the Indian place, with the cabbage curry and the buttery naan, still hot. The only place we went for cheesecake was a little Italian bakery, coming away with a ricotta pie perfumed with citron and a sack of sfogliatelle. There were long pulls of local ales on draft into tall glasses, sliding across the long bar: a Christmas miracle. There was coffee.
We made things, too. There were lentils cooked with apples until everything fell apart. We toasted minced garlic in a little butter before adding ground, roast almonds, an used it all to dress green beans. From the pantry we pulled down things for those times in the kitchen when a meal was not called for: unsulphered apricots, teas, dates to be pitted and stuffed with a mix of cream cheese, honey, and mint. There was squash of many kinds to be roasted unto candy, all of them local, all of them good. There was bread. For the big dinner we roasted a heap of roots, mashed potatoes with garlic and parmesean, and made good work of a ham along with stout dark bread and fresh horseradish, which turned out to be more popular than expected. We made french toast from a panetone.
Along the way, there was a bottle of Georgian (the other one) wine, a green wine from Portugal, others I've forgotten and only now carry with me as suffused experience. There was also a bottle of Madeira and a bottle of Tokaji, both of which came in very handy...
Someday, I hope to reclaim the hearth that sits yawning and lonely in my living room. Happily, there was a perfectly good fireplace where we all were, and it would have been a shame not to use it to send good smoke into the sky and warmth toward our feet. As a happy side effect, we got to split some wood.
I am getting better at that. I can give a good, full arc at the wood now, and my arms and eyes understand enough of the mechanics of it to nudge the sharp edge of the thing true for me, most swings. It was important to learn that there is no time for thinking, and thinking is best dispensed with. It is most satisfying to send the edge home, and have two halves of log tumble to the driveway with a clatter. We only had to get the wedge out once.
When the wood is burning low, it can sound of chimes.
I managed to get a seven letter word this time. All told, we didn't do that well, but it was a classy board when we were done.
We had a copy of Dark Tower. Remember this game? With a cardboard map and innumerable fiddly bits and a great rotating thing in the middle that beeps and boops? We dragged it out an set it all up. The dragon token had long since snapped, so we used the little scotty dog from the Monopoly set instead. We spent the evening marauding the countrysides, merchants at the bazaar giving us poor prices, mad and frequent dashes to the sanctuaries, and the doors of tombs slamming uneventful shut.
Then, with the endgame in sight, the malevolent, unassailable fortress of all that is evil, well, crashed.
The scrabble set never crashes.
In the place I call home, the season causes all sorts of lighting to be tossed up on houses, trees, of any and all color, sometimes blinking. It is all quite pretty, but mostly ephemeral. In the place I come from, they do things like this:
The hills roll, the sky is slate, the winds are gentle. It's good to be home.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Mail accepted for the bears in the basement. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.