Scents of the year, of the past – Reverie 2011 – Day 13

In winter.  Peppermint, balsam and pine, cypress, smoke, soot, dust, litter.  Coffee, cocoa, beef stew, burgundy, anisette.  Citrus – bitter like grapefruit, sweet and rich like blood oranges, green and trimmed with tang like limes. 

Once a boy kept whispering to me in a college class on southern literature.  No matter how I ignored him, he kept on.  In the ground floor classroom, where mildew swelled in the folds of linoleum, I glared, and still, he kept on.  Finally, the class ended and he followed me, walking backwards before me, bowing and eventually saying that I smelled of snow.  Even in a city below sea level where snow rarely flew, I couldn’t shake him off. 

When he took me dancing, the bar smelled of hot bodies, rum, tobacco, and the sulfured remains of poppers. Midnight meals of buttery omelettes, thick-cut fries, and creamy orange freezes.  In the morning the thin papery odor of exhaustion.

In spring.  Wet grass, sage leaves, mint in time for juleps in early May.  Double-barreled bourbon, wood smoke, charcoal and steaks on the grill.  Wet dog, morning breath, cloves, patchouli, and ashes.  Pears poached in pale wine and sugar and vanilla, star anise and cinnamon sticks floating atop the syrup as it turns darker and thicker.  There was a chicken in the oven, doused in sherry.  There were potatoes au gratin, turning velvety and coppery, begging forgiveness.  There was a salad of endive with a lemon vinaigrette, croutons, anchovy dares and salted secrets.

On the last morning of the year, we crush mint into the fresh tangerine juice, and we don’t even bother to add the dry and silky Prosecco bought especially, especially, especially to accompany the Benedict, Hussarde, Sardou.

Best of 2011/The List – Reverie 2011 – Day 9

Snow-encrusted walks

Reading

Plane ride over the Sierra Nevadas

Bittersweet goodbyes to The White Stripes

Sun over Alcatraz

Writing

Wintertime workers’ rights demonstrations before the Ohio Statehouse

Revision, revision, revision

Hannah's 21st!

Paul Simon’s “Rewrite”

Nancy Zafris on Flannery O’Connor

Kentucky Derby

Roses

Heat

Stop ‘n’ Go

Friends

Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont

Writing alone and together and at dusk when the hummingbirds are searching the wide-open flowers for some answers

Secrets

Wide-plank floors

Sex with a one-armed man

Surprises

Concessions

Patience

Live Fast, Die Young

Hunkering

Lighting candles

Giving thanks

Jeni's ice cream

Walks with Atticus

Wrapping

Hannah - all grown up and saving China!

Zak's 18th!

Thinking

Considering

Congratulating

Sleeping

Snow Day - Reverie 2011 - Day 1

February 14, 1972.  Valentine’s Day.  New Orleans.  Seventh Grade. 

The day started out with rain, like so many days in New Orleans.  Cold, consistent, and coming down.  That was the bus ride to school.  Later it turned to sleet.  That was in history class.  I think we were studying the Civil War.  Before lunch the sleet turned to wet, heavy dollops of snow.  No one paid attention in math class. We gathered around the one window, a tall thin affair in our modern new 1970’s building, and shouted about the white stuff.  Some of us had never seen snow.

The first snowfall I’d ever seen was on New Year’s Day, 1968.  I was eight years old, staring out the window of our Volkswagen Beetle at the snow-dusted fields and woodlands outside Tallahassee, Florida.  I remember how cold it looked, how distant, and how I didn’t want to get out of the car.

By the end of lunch period, my best friend, Amelie, and I figured out a way (how I have no recollection) for our parents to break through the already jammed office phone lines and give us permission to leave school early. Meanwhile, the headmaster announced over the intercom that what we were seeing outside wasn’t really snow.  I thought of how distressed he would be to walk the ten steps to his car, his fancy leather shoes covered in the unmistakable frozen white snow.

Waiting for the streetcar, jumping in the small white mounds, catching snowflakes on our tongues and in our eyelashes, our corduroy jumpers and thin tights barely keeping us warm.  Amelie and me.  All smiles.  The streetcar driver.  All smiles.  Slipping along the icy tracks for miles, all the way from Carrollton and St. Charles to Washington Avenue.  Running upstairs, yelling for my mother to find us the ice bucket, throwing off our jumpers and throwing on jeans, flying out the door to the little yard.  Nearly three in the afternoon, the daylight already diminishing.  At twilight, our first snowman ever.

The distant feeling I’d had in Tallahassee was cancelled out by the wild banshee yells that Amelie and I threw around the neighborhood.  We’d made a snowman no bigger than a baby, then torn it apart and reconstructed it on the hood of a neighbor’s car.  Short and round and full of dead oak leaves, our snow baby wore a smile of red string, Amelie’s pink scarf, and my striped mittens.  Its unmatched pebble eyes seemed to stare in wonder at the passing traffic on St. Charles Avenue.  Eventually, the streetlights came on and the neighbor drove off with the snow baby hood ornament.

If ever I had another snow day, I’d wish for this same one, with all the exuberance of still being a kid, yelling and freezing, and then realizing the next morning that the frozen snow in the ice bucket had melted.  The joy of all that comes down and then disappears.

February

It’s February and today the temperatures rose above the usual 25 degrees we’ve had this winter to a sultry 40.  The ice dams and icicles streamed off rooflines and along gutters so that the sound was almost one of steady rain.  Rain just about now would be welcome.  At one point this afternoon a wall of ice on the north side of the house crashed down and shattered in front of a basement window.  From my study chair I thought a large man had fallen down the stairs.  But there were no large men in the house at that time.  I circled around the upstairs and downstairs rooms to figure out what had happened, and it wasn’t until later that I leaned past the back door and saw the icy evidence roughly stacked on one side of the porch.  As if someone had split the mass apart and then laid the uneven blocks one on top of the other.

The past two days have been sunny, the first sun we’ve seen in weeks, nearly months.  And today a buffer zone of grey clouds moved in, creating a warm pocket, something like the coat pocket I'd like to keep my hands in during winter walks.  But I have two dogs and hold a leash in each hand, so I’ve resigned myself to warm and, eventually, fur-covered mittens. 

I decided to walk the dogs at dusk this evening, as the air was still and laden with wet and the hour was brighter than it had been in ages.  Slush and new puddles lined the streets, and since we have no sidewalks, I walked through them, sometimes slipping and sometimes splashing.  The dogs were glad to be out, but after negotiating the slush for a while, I decided on one more block and then heading home.  Sometimes that one extra block is worth it.

As we came around the corner past the little green house where a neighborhood couple live, I felt startled.  And this feeling turned to amazement and then a sense of calm.  Over the years the yard had been landscaped in a thoughtful, serene manner, the perennials shaped and set with an artistic sensibility.  But something seemed different, almost alive, about the place.  In the dim light it took a minute to understand what had been done for such a brilliant and startling effect.  Atop the snow-covered shrubs that edged the walkway from the drive to the front door, broken icicles had been arranged in starbursts.  And at the end of the walkway, sitting on the steps before the entrance, was the couple.  Even the dogs slowed and looked, one pointing.  But it wasn’t the couple, rather an ice sculpture, white and otherworldly, portraying them.  They appeared quiet and intimate, as if sharing a secret, something whispered, or no, not whispered, but known, simply in the semblance of sitting together. 

I stared for what seemed a long time, though it was only moments, and I said something aloud.  Now I can’t even remember what.  It had to do with surprise.  It had to do with the fact that these figures, so perfectly formed, so detailed with natural gesture, were made of ice and snow.  In the morning they would be gone, but for now, there they were, leaning into one another, watching another passerby stand in awe.

Ice sculptures - by Lewis Lower

Another New Year

Too much room,

not enough distance.

It snowed that New Year’s day.

Whispers, icy pinpricks,

a sweeping wind.

The snow, the laughter, never landing.

Not enough room,

too much distance.

Decades later, another new year,

another cold silent beginning.

Still, the snow moved sideways.

Already, bare Christmas trees lined the curbs.

The glint of tinsel,

one broken ornament in the street.

Not too distant.

Room enough.

A door opens and snow flies into the room.

The dog is in the yard, barking and barking.

A young girl runs outside,

the pom-pom of her new cap

a bright reminder of an old year.