« Why these shells? | Main | Delusions of Grandeur »

January 16, 2018

Comments

Wow, Beth - life and hard times on the northern and digital frontiers simultaneously! Stay warm, both...

Love this picture of you two!! Knew you would be staying busy during these tough weather spells. Enjoy your hibernation phase!!
xxoo

To suffer colds as well as enjoying gangrene-inducing low temperatures seems like piling pelion on ossa. One might have thought - hoped, anyway - that the viruses themselves would have felt uncomfortable at -30C, disinclined to put on their après-ski boots and saunter out infecting people. But no, these sturdy fellows, conscious of, and conscientious about, their role in the human condition obviously operate under the same slogan as the US Postal Service which escapes me for the moment.

But the worst infliction must surely be psychological. The constant awareness that without the presence of certain modern-day artefacts the city you live in would not support human life. That you are there under sufferance, much like the Inuits in Inuit-land. That given a certain set of unfortunate circumstances cannibalism would be just round the corner, that neighbourliness would take on a much more sinister meaning.

Or am I allowing my imagination to run away from its host? Quaere: Is imagination warming?

I remember a Christmas in Montreal long ago when my boyfriend and I walked through the city wearing our Canadian army coats (5.00 each). Looking and feeling like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz at about 25 below.
It was about the same here in the mountains. Something that cheered me was seeing the empty shelves of wild bird food in the grocery store. We were all feeding them.

We know how to do this: projects, dressing in those wooly layers, communing with friends, making soup. The sun glints through my park's tree branches, a friend beckons to join her in the neighbourhood café for hot chocolate. Children bounce by in spherically-padded snowsuits; a man of at least seventy-five boards the bus, holding his skis, en route to a cross-country tour on Mt. Royal.

I feel more vital in the cold than in sticky heat. In this, my natural habitat, I relish winter but admit that freezing rain, which lays black ice on the roads, is scary.

Sorry to hear of your computer ailments.

The comments to this entry are closed.

My Photo

Who was Cassandra?


  • In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

MY SMALL PRESS