Fighting off Winter Funk

     Just when I had last year's leaves raked, just as I saw the first snowdrops start to bud, almost bloom, just as the first seeds were sprouting in the Plant Nursery, the weatherman announces that we'll have a few inches, updated to four inches, downgraded to about an inch...but as the night progresses, and I plow away 4 or 5 inches every few hours, we wake up to nearly a foot of snow in the driveway, and huge icicles hanging from the eaves.(Yes I know, it's a run on sentence)  So I asked friend Ed to model me fighting off winter funk, only to look into a mirror and find a fat greenie who was already to plant in the garden, only to find that this March is coming in as a lion...hopefully depart as lamb.
     Waves of Gadaffi blend with the grey clouds and waft through my soul looking for a light at the end of this tunnel called winter, and the beginning of a new world of spring and light and flowers, and a new generation of repressed but intelligent hard working region of the world can have some control over their resources and lives.

Wheatland Abandoned School on Highway 2

Somewhere in the middle of  a plateau of snow and wheat, stands an old school.  For thirty years or more, I have stopped each time I came by and photographed the graffiti on the walls, watched the deterioration of the building, and wondered where our sense of history went.  I have never had a clearer image of what childhood out here was like for the early settlers, than to read on the wall that a teacher had molested a student in the closet.  Look out these windows, nothing but an expense of white in winter, an empty landscape where horizontal takes on a whole new dimension.

Then what would a student do?  And with bitter cold, and a wood heater, a mix of all ages, no doubt...the one room school.  No book could have given me an instant sense of the karma and character bred under these wheat land, remote landscapes where blizzards and snowdrifts divided these people from the rest of us in winter.

The Smell of Old Pencils

     Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.  My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.   The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambiance of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slips an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing. 

          

In Praise of Snail Mail

     Envelopes and Postage Stamps went with childhood for me...as a young immigrant in Canada, my Grandparents would write me in Dutch, and to keep me interested, my grandfather would collect as many stamps and send them on.  Holding some real paper in my hand with the pictures and history of my homeland, and the countries we had immigrated to and from made it real for me.  I became interested in Geography, and History seeing the colonies and the heads of various European Kings and Dictators as they controlled Africa and The Middle East.  Recently I read that the post office system will probably be gone in 10 years, with UPS and Fed Ex taking over.  The era of affordable mail brought about by the Universal Postal Union which allowed people worldwide to send paper, handwriting and pictures that could be held, read, savored, and stashed for the children, will probably cease, as Facebook Accounts and e-mail substitute for real paper, a pen, a stamp and a legacy.

     I remember my folks complaining that since the phone came into the world back in the 40's, people no longer came to visit as often, and since TV, people didn't eat meals together as often, and on and on.  I'm sure one day an envelope with a well crafted stamp will be as rare as the antique washboards and the horse and carriage...but I shall miss them...miss counting the Christmas cards, where the number meant how much you meant to others, miss soaking stamps and looking in the catalog for its companions, seeing drawings of history before Wikipedia could answer all your questions.  I know, at 66 I'm history, too.

The Motions of the Moment, The Forces Dancing

  

Freezing and Thawing and Freezing and Thawing 

     More and more I am awed by the miracle of the moment when I go to places like the edge of a wild river on the morning after a freezing cold night, the rise and fall of the water due to contraction and ice formations lowering it at night, and the meltdown of the afternoon when the sun barely melts the edges of winter.

    Gratitude for the mind and awareness my soul has granted me to exercise and the encouragement of the many in my life who saw something worthy in me that the would encourage...my artistic mind, my fluency in thought, and my expression of my fundamental values.

www.flickr.com/photos/pictoscribe  michademia@yahoo.com