Well, snow, I guess

It snowed Saturday night.  Today is Tuesday, and this picture was taken yesterday.  So much for the snow.  It's a little embarrassing, really, considering what's going on in the rest of the country.  I compare this with a picture my friend B. posted on Facebook of her little guest cottage drifted in with snow on the shore of Lake Ontario, and, well, it's a little embarrassing.

But it did snow, and it lifted my spirits to see the snow coming down, lit by the street lights, and to wake up in the morning and have to brush off the car to set out on what could have been a slightly iffy ride.  Seattle has so little snow that, paradoxically, it's more dangerous here than in Buffalo when it snows.  A few inches becomes a serious problem because there is not enough equipment (understandably--why buy equipment only to let it sit 364 days a year?) to clean things up quickly.

So the little kids went out in the snow and tried to slide and made little fencepost snowmen and got all pink and damp. On the whole, though, Seattle does kale and chard and parsley a lot better in the winter than it does snow.  Which is nice, really, especially since little C. has decided that parsley is acceptable greenery (nothing else that is green is allowed) and thus has added that to the meager list of food she will eat.

And on this morning's walk I saw tree buds ragging out, nodding hellebore blossoms, perky ornamental cabbage, primroses, and other evidence that really, guys, spring is just around the corner.

Winding the Clocks

This morning it was time to wind the clocks.  Among the many items of busy work I found to do this morning after my coffee and toast, this one seemed important.  If I forget to wind the clocks—there are three of them, all antique—they stop, and in their silence they accuse me of losing it, of not being able to act on a commitment, of not measuring up in various ways.  Still, this morning I didn’t manage to wind all three clocks at the same time.  I milled around weighing and washing yarn plied last night, made the bed, looked around for a project I knew was in a bag somewhere, and finally got it together to wind the banjo clock in the bedroom.  Then it was a few minutes before I got to the school clock in the kitchen and the grandfather clock in the living room.  Now they’re ready for another week, and all I have to do is wind them next Monday morning. 

Thus is it always: we do a task that will need to be done over again, only to know that we will have to do it again.  For me there is always a question:  will I manage to pull it off, pull it out of myself, the next time?  The opportunities to fall off the wagon of recurrent housekeeping tasks come frequently, and I fall off probably as many times as I stay on.  But clocks and dishes and laundry are quite forgiving, and that’s a small everyday mercy.

And up close to these tasks, there are homely little details that are part of the texture of my life.  The place where the key goes in is different for each of the three clocks, and there are certain times each clock cannot be wound because the hands are in the way.  The banjo clock has a lead weight that can be seen only part of the way up as it is being wound.  After a few winds, it becomes invisible in the thin shaft of the clock, where the frets of the banjo would be, behind painted glass.  The man who fixed the grandfather clock spent a few minutes on it in 2011 to get it going.  He warned me that I must not wind it until the weight hit the top: the little stop for it was missing, and it might strike the works of the clock and get in the way of its operation.  So I count how many times the winding key goes around, and slow down as I reach about ten, to be sure that if it does hit the top it does so gently.  It’s a little bit of guesswork that I must do each week, and I do it with something like affection, and with a flash of memory.  This clock was my parents’, and my father’s parents’ before that, and I know not whose before that.  It is a small window into the past.

So are the grandfather clock and the schoolhouse clock, and each offers its own little details in the process of winding. I have to get up on a stool to wind the schoolhouse clock, which is on the wall in the kitchen above the sink.  It is spring-wound and has no weight, and it winds counterclockwise, unlike the others.  Like the grandfather clock, it also indicates the date, and once in a while, when I’ve neglected my winding, I need to reset the date.  The glass window has a small crack, and I recall the time when my mother, in her nineties and infirm, remembering the crack in the window but not how small it was, insisted that I must have had the glass replaced. 

The brass key for the grandfather clock has an ivory handle, with grooves around it à la scrimshaw. There are two holes in the face for winding both the clockworks and the striker, but the striker is decommissioned, and its weight lies in one of my closets.  Thus I wind only the right side, lifting the weight for the clockworks. The clock man told me to wind until the weight reached the top of the top hinge of the door, but after a few times I noticed that there was a chalk or crayon mark a couple of inches above that.  It must be a mark made by either my father or his father. 

The schoolhouse clock was in my mother’s life in her childhood, and the other two in my father’s.  They are part of my heritage, and every time I wind them, they bring me in contact with generations before me.  It amuses me that under normal conditions I cannot see the escapements of any of the clocks, rocking with the seconds.  But I hear all the clocks, ticking away the seconds of my life, and I love the company of these mechanical presences.  

Loving that which is beautiful

Deciding to "resuscitate" my blog, as a dear friend suggested in 2011 (!), I found this draft, written years ago.  It is a curious synchronicity to find it, as I saw Rusalka two days ago on one of the Met's movie theater simulcasts.  I still believe what I said that day several years ago.  

Is it all right to love someone just (or mostly) because he/she is associated with beauty? Or maybe just because he/she is beautiful? These questions were running through my mind the other day as I pulled weeds in brilliant May sunshine and heard in my mind Renee Fleming's voice singing "O silver moon' from Dvorak's Rusalka.

I remember a parking lot moment when I could not move from my car until the Dvorak aria ended, and a trip on winding roads from Troy, NY, into the Berkshires attended by "Mariettas Lied" from Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, over and over and over. I remember seeing her spread her arms wide to the audience in Buffalo a few years ago, after a concert of such beauty that I kept thinking how glad I was to be alive, and how lucky I was to be able to be there. "I love her" was the spirit, if not the actual words, of all those moments. (Right now, I imagine it in Emma Thompson's voice in Love, Actually, as her character recalls to her husband the importance in her life of Joni Mitchell.) I don't even know Renee Fleming; does it make any sense to call this love?

Yes, I think so, but perhaps it is not really love for the person, nor even, exactly, for the image the person has created in public life. Murmuring in my mind are words written by the poet Keats. In a letter written not long before his death, he says, "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things." Perhaps it is just the "principle of beauty" that we love when we love those who produce beautiful music. Perhaps. But it feels personal. What I feel is that I love Fleming for her gift (though I admit that if she were a cold, humorless person, or a truly ugly one, there might not be so much love there).

And when you think about it, that is not very fair, if a gift is really fundamentally a gift, not an achievement. Should we love people for something with which they were gifted from birth, for which they are ultimately not really responsible? (Let us leave aside for the moment the years of work Fleming has given in her love for the "principle of beauty" in music: all of it would have come to naught had she not had a beautiful voice.)

I have felt the same love of the beautiful in the case of one or two very lovely women with whom I have had the good luck to be friends. I cared about their characters, wouldn't have cared about their beauty if they hadn't been interesting and pleasant to be with, but how I loved to look at them! And the love extends to a very select company of those I have never even known: I love Ingrid Bergman, for example.

It's there: it's a genuine feeling. If it is mixed up, okay, it's mixed up. But somehow it feels very close to a deep impulse I think all of us feel from time to time, the impulse toward praise. What I mean when I say that is not at all clear to me: it's not exactly synonymous with "praise God," though that is how it is expressed in many formal utterances and songs. Why shouldn't we rejoice in beauty? Why shouldn't love spring from us as an answer to it? That is, after all, an answer in kind.