Nature
I love this!
Today is the beginning of fake spring…meaning that temperatures are soaring up to the 50s and 60s for two weeks or so, only to (according to my own prediction) plummet back into miserable, clammy winter until April. Now, I like winter, but only in its proper time and place; once I get a taste of spring, it reawakens that hibernating longing for the sunshine’s warmth on my skin, for driving with all the windows down, for the sounds of birds and animals in the trees.
I finished Watership Down. I loved that book, but then I have always favored naturalist writings. Maybe I should have been born a hippie or a nomad (but if I was I would probably be declaring that I should have been born a practical meat-eating American). I guess sometimes you just can’t fit solidly into any category. Anyway, here is what Richard Adams has to say about winter:
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. Rabbits, like most wild animals, suffer hardship.
Everybody around here seems to hate the snow and I’m always telling them how much I love it, how it’s still so new to me even after years of experience, and how beautiful and silent and clean it makes everything. But now I just feel like a jerk, boo.
However, here is what he had to say about the onset of winter, a description I found very apt and surprisingly gentle for those months most closely associated with death:
In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.
Sometimes I wonder if I should be embarrassed about loving “overly” descriptive nature writing (I know I tend to do it myself) and happy endings so much, but then I realize it’s just a reflex leftover from my college English days. In that world, it seems, descriptive adjectives and making things turn out all right for your characters in the end is a mark of naïveté and lack of skill. Well, so be it: I would rather look at the world and feel happy, I think.
And…Jeremy is coming! I’m going to the airport to pick him up right now! Soooo happy.
Click to viewToday is the beginning of fake spring…meaning that temperatures are soaring up to the 50s and 60s for two weeks or so, only to (according to my own prediction) plummet back into miserable, clammy winter until April. Now, I like winter, but only in its proper time and place; once I get a taste of spring, it reawakens that hibernating longing for the sunshine’s warmth on my skin, for driving with all the windows down, for the sounds of birds and animals in the trees.
I finished Watership Down. I loved that book, but then I have always favored naturalist writings. Maybe I should have been born a hippie or a nomad (but if I was I would probably be declaring that I should have been born a practical meat-eating American). I guess sometimes you just can’t fit solidly into any category. Anyway, here is what Richard Adams has to say about winter:
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. Rabbits, like most wild animals, suffer hardship.
Everybody around here seems to hate the snow and I’m always telling them how much I love it, how it’s still so new to me even after years of experience, and how beautiful and silent and clean it makes everything. But now I just feel like a jerk, boo.
However, here is what he had to say about the onset of winter, a description I found very apt and surprisingly gentle for those months most closely associated with death:
In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.
Sometimes I wonder if I should be embarrassed about loving “overly” descriptive nature writing (I know I tend to do it myself) and happy endings so much, but then I realize it’s just a reflex leftover from my college English days. In that world, it seems, descriptive adjectives and making things turn out all right for your characters in the end is a mark of naïveté and lack of skill. Well, so be it: I would rather look at the world and feel happy, I think.
And…Jeremy is coming! I’m going to the airport to pick him up right now! Soooo happy.