Was It Cold in Your Part of the Country?

     Last week was a cold week in America, everywhere it seemed, except in southern Oregon. After my six inches of snow and a good ski trip at Lake of the Woods, which was crowded with snowmobilers and children on sleds, suddenly the temperatures were in the fifties and everything was rain—which, of course, is a good thing, but it would be better if it were snow.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the country was having a hard time of it. Eight degrees in Blue Ridge, Georgia, my sister reported.  Minus four, said my friend in Boulder, Colorado. 

    I was so envious.

    But not of conditions just north of me, where the world turned to ice. The phenomenon, my son explained, was that the rain froze when it hit the ground. Chaos ensued.

    My nephew who works for the fire department in Portland said they were getting a thousand calls a day.

    My nephew who lives in Pennsylvania had to bundle up indoors when the heater in his house broke and couldn't be fixed till parts came in. When he built a fire in a long-unused fireplace, the house filled with smoke, necessitating open windows on an in-the-teens day.

    I might envy eight degrees and even four below, and certainly I wish my landscape would look like the pictures of snowshoe trips my Colorado friend sends me, but there are some parts of a hard winter I would just as soon avoid. 

    But I did ski at Crater Lake today, in perfect snow, with a deep blue sky filling the interstices of ink-dark clouds, occasional light snow kissing my cheeks, and snow-burdened firs on the distant mountains glowing in strips of sun. You see why I want more snow?

Words from My Father

    Every day I receive a new word, via email, from Word Daily. Yesterday's word was "obstreperous" (noisy and difficult to control). 

    Obstreperous. When I read this word, I heard it in my father's voice. "You're just obstreperous!" he would say to me, teasingly. I was too young to know what the word meant, but I could tell by his tone that he loved me. 

    He told his children they were "obstreperous," "perspicacious" and "impudent" before they understood "doggie" and "moo," but he spoke these words to us with such affection we glowed under the supposed compliment. He would say, "You're my p-i-double-l pal," and we thought it was grand to be Dad's pal. Only years later, after we learned to spell, did we get the joke.

    He could be serious about words, too. "Enunciate," he would say sternly. "Say 'get' not 'git.' Don't say, 'It's somethin' I'm plannin',' but 'It's something I'm planning.'" He and my mother were both from Kentucky, but he had no patience with poor enunciation. Surely because of that training, I was able to be a radio commentator for twenty years.

    My father had a repertoire of three or four memorized poems. When he was well into his nineties, my son called him on the phone one day and asked if he could still recite "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe.  Yes, he could, and he did, right there on the phone, and my son recorded that wavery old voice giving one final recitation of my dad's favorite poem.

    My father was famous for telling a story that centered around words. It started with an explanation that the Hottentot language built words by adding words together. "For instance," he would continue, "the Hottentot word for mother is 'muder.' The Hottentot word for children is 'trotter.' If they were stuttering children, the word was 'stridle-trotter.' So a mother of stuttering children was called a 'stridle-trotter-muder.'" And so on, until he got to the climax of the story with "the butel-rotten-lotten-gitter-wetter-cotter-Hotten-totten-stridle-trotter-muder-otten-tater has escaped." It means "the murderer of a Hottentot mother of stuttering children who was kept in a kangaroo cage with a slat cover to keep the rain off" has escaped.      It is a word dear to my heart.

 

Winter Weather Warning

     The winter weather warning was right! It snowed all day yesterday, and I am so happy! What a white and glorious wonderland is framed by my window!

    The firs and pines are bowed down with their white burden. Each limb of the apple tree is outlined with a ribbon of snow. Six inches of snow soften the ground. Humpy Mountain looks frozen in place.

    Everything is so still, hanging in the balance of beauty.

    Here is my

Ode to a Winter Landscape

Nothing is so beautiful as a winter landscape

    When fire-folks of frost in the frozen fields

        Wink rainbows at the morning sun

    When the unity of white undoes dappled things

    When the squeak of skis on snow

        sneaks into the unity of silence

        in the snow-muffled forest

    When the air is so cold it hurts your teeth to smile

        But you can't

                stop

                        smiling

Because nothing is so beautiful

    as snow-laden fir boughs against a cobalt sky

    the descending blue rushing towards whipped-cream peaks

Nothing is so beautiful as the kiss of snowflakes

    whisper-soft from steel-gray clouds

Nothing more magical than the inaudible fall

    of snow outside the window

    descending like down from overstuffed clouds

    the fire at your back shining like shook foil

Nothing is so beautiful as winter stars

    splintering in the cold air

    of a landscape which—

            winter scene

            sweet, especial winter scene—

                    is charged with grandeur

                                and

                    gathers to a greatness

                                of insuperable cold

                                unsurpassed silence

                                unconditional beauty

A Party with Harmonious Parts

     Concinnity, I think, just might be the secret to a good party.

    "Concinnity" means "the harmonious arrangement of various parts," as at my New Year's Day party, the parts of which were:

    Food. In the South, where I grew up, eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day brings good luck throughout the year, so I gave my guests black-eyed peas and cornbread. And cookies—stained-glass cookies, rum raisin brownies, date bread, chocolate chip mint cookies—on plates around the room. There was wine, beer, or sparkling water. Later, I hand-ground coffee beans for fresh coffee. (See post on April 14, 2023, for a description of my coffee grinder.)

    Atmosphere. A few days before the party, three friends came over to help me strew cedar boughs on the bannister and cedar swags along the wall, all accented with Christmas lights and Christmas-fabric bows.

With those boughs and Christmas cookies on the window-sill, the house looked festive and party-ready. 

    Theme. T. S. Eliot provided the theme:

        For last year's words belong to last year's language

        And next year's words await another voice

    My invitation had suggested people bring three words for this year. At the party, we drew words from a vase and read them aloud. "Fitness, friendship, adventure, hope, health.…" One person wanted "lots of fine poetry." Another wanted to "raise [her] vibrational frequency." This worked even better than I had envisioned. People enjoyed discussing meanings and philosophies.  (My own words came from my dread of 2024: "politics, climate change, fire," but we didn't discuss them.) My favorite word, of course, was "concinnity," as described above, which a friend had brought specifically for my linguistic delight.

    Guests. This, the most important part for a harmonious party, I had in spades. I was the only person who knew everyone—neighbors, skiing friends, hiking friends, friends from the Applegater, from the Siskiyou Crest Festival, from my poetry group—but harmony among strangers created friends. One of my favorite images of the party was seeing various people, formerly strangers, enjoying each other's company. I have such wonderful friends!

    Appreciation. As guests left, I offered each a small cellophane packet of rum balls, tied with a ribbon on which I had written, "Happy New Year." But perhaps what I should have written was, "Thanks for contributing to the concinnity of my New Year's Day party!"