igloo building . . . 

. . . and inside . . .

Saturday night was the cub scout's yearly winter campout at Alton Jones.  

Rich, Alex, Kinter and I were the only ones to take the night hike.  After a day of sledding in the bitter cold the cub scouts and the parents were happy enough to stay in the warmth of the lodge.

But the night was crisp and dark.  Only Alex had a light -- a headlamp on his forehead, but it was plenty for a snowy forest.  Especially since the crust of snow had smoothed all the rocks and hummocks and stumble spots into a gentler topography.  This snow has lain for a week and is crisscrossed with tracks of deer, hare, fox, mink, squirrel and coyote.

We walked out onto the white expanse of Eisenhower Lake.  Upon our cheeks the cold's sharp bite abated.  Cocooned under half a foot of ice the lake still transmits a gentle warmth.

Then the snow began to fall.  Perfect flakes that spiraled down through the beam of the lamp.  And we stood there each infused in quiet peace and pleasure.

Our bellies were full of lamb saag and naan, mouths still tingling from the rogan josh's red Kashmiri chiles.  Monica and I made our way to New London's Unitarian church for music.  Geoff Kaufman sang alone on the stage, a smallish, compact man with a clipped white beard.  He wore olive-colored corduroys with suspenders and a yellow collarless shirt and played guitar to folksongs and shanties.  

Among his songs was a fishermen's chant from Ghana, Ao Yona Eh, that was one of the most perfect pieces of music I've ever heard.  As Monica put it, there is some music that is already in your soul and the singer just reaches in to touch it.

He led into a performance by the phenomenal Moira Smiley and Voco.

Ah, what music!

Moira Smiley, Jess Basta and Aurelia Shrenker (who was filling in for the cellist, laid low by the New England winter) really seized the audience.  Ranging from Appalachia to Ireland to the Balkans to the Caucasus -- they took these musics and loved them and showed them enough respect to seize them and change them and make them their own.  And they mixed their beautiful voices together as if that were the simplest and most natural thing in the world.

Have a taste -- here's a one they shared (sung in this version by the quartet as it is whole):

Through a crust of snow the branching trails of mice show like varicose veins beneath white, shiny skin.  

For a moment it gave me a chill to imagine that I was walking upon the winter body of one of the frightful Irish fairies.

The morning's clear skies gave way to glowering steel as a storm crept up the coast.  I went with Maggie Jones and some birders out to Avery Point to watch the loons and mergansers.  Brants, compact and elegant, were dabbling for eelgrass.  The stormish light made the cinnamon plumage of the widgeons gleam strangely.

I'd left the boys at the Nature Center with Monica and their friends Jacob and Filip had joined them.  

After the birdwatching I trailed behind them as they made their way back to their house, where Sarka would make us cocoa and tea and we'd all wait for Monica to finish up her shift.  

I don't think they ever stopped chattering away at one another.

At the meadow, the four of them linked arms.  To the tune of the Oz song they chanted, "Follow the white flake road!" and skipped through the snow, laughing at their own cleverness.

This week a storm coated everything in a sheath of ice.

In the morning a breeze scraped the lilac against the house and for a moment I thought an animal was scrabbling heavily up the clapboards.

Rain fell and dripped from the icicles onto the hard and crusted snow. 

Another storm comes tomorrow.

Yesterday, I spent the workday strolling through data -- reading the responses to various arguments we're testing out in an effort to build public support for a ban on nuclear weapons.  I was assembling the pieces that would illustrate our analysis.  If you listen closely you can actually hear the sounds of people's mental gears grinding as they try to think on the subject . . . 

In the evening, I backtracked a full century, and took down from the shelf David Harum, a book of my great-great grandfather's that I'd never read.  It was a best-seller in 1899 and still a thoroughly entertaining portrait of 19th century life and language in central New York state -- pretty much the setting that Bayard Tewksbury (the ancestor whose book I've inherited) would have lived in.  

Sometimes Monica gets oppressed by the burden of books that I carry with me, but they are like roots to me.  The Zane Grey novels from my grandfather's study in Airydale, the pressed plants in my great-grandmother's herbarium, the smoke-stained Dumas and Edgar Rice Borroughs novels from Galilee, the Little Feather books that my father got for his 11th Christmas in 1951.   The books that I discovered as a child on the dark shelves of the shiproom during long summers at Lake Como: Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Dave Fearless, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, stories of Edgar Allen Poe.  They all connect me to generations of my page-turning, book-devouring ancestors.

Everyone threw on an extra blanket for the night.  In the morning ice had formed on the inside of the bedroom window, despite the fact that I'd gotten up in the night to feed the woodstove.  It's a testament to the architecture of the Cape Cod style that we can even heat this house with wood when the wind chill is ten below.  

The upstairs is cool, the ground floor ranges from cool (for Monica) to comfortable (for me), and the basement is hot -- where the laundry and the snow-gear dries, the cats loll, and the boys play on the Wii in short sleeves.

20 degrees outside with the snow-driving wind pushing the chill down toward zero.  And dark, but the boys have strapped headlamps on and are burying each other in the snow.  

The family gathered down in Mount Gretna for the holiday.  Eating, visiting, playing games, singing Christmas carols in our usual complex of idiosyncratic keys and uneven tempos -- and staying out of a rain that washed away the snow.  A Christmas eve ice storm was enough to cut us off from phone and internet for a few days, which was a nice bit of enforced virtue -- all the laptops lobotomized.  The boys got piles of swag that only bordered on excess.

And the entire family in more or less good health and good spirits.  And really, what more can you ask for.

Porter made a black cat pinch pot.

He set it on the snow 

and took a picture

to show his aunt Chris.

 

Because she has cats and she makes pots.

Now the days get longer.  The northern darkness has run to its depth and the sun will be coming back.

Whatever the time of year in Ireland I would often stand with my back to a standing stone or settle within some hilltop circle and imagine the ancient Irish gathering for the solstice vigils.  I wondered whether they treated the miracle of yearly resurrection with trepidation or with confident pleasure.  

There's no way to know for sure, but one of the things that I learned in my scramblings around was that the pagan sites were nearly always in physically striking settings.  

Exposed places with views and with drama or beauty -- not places for hiding.  I like to think that the stone-setters marveled at the way the world ran along and took pride in their human abilities to see and to mark the patterns.

-----------------------

Lauren and Rob had invited friends over to their place for food and some solstice bonfire.  Roast chicken, white bean stew, acorn squash and latkas.  Red wine, candles and conversation by the Christmas tree.  A vicious wind was freezing the day's slush into an icy gravel, so there was no pagan exultation by the fire.  But there was tobogganing and a few wind-whipped fireworks to mark the occasion.  Civilization's not so bad on such a night.

It's Snowing!

In the last few months, trillions of dollars of imagined wealth has dissipated like sorcerer's smoke.  Now people are trying to hunker down out of the draught to hold on to whatever they're to be left with.

The economic pain is real - there are kids going hungry, houses going dark, and cancers going untreated.  But as we look for an exit I hope that we can seize an opportunity to imagine going somewhere other than just back to where we were before.

In the eyes of this anthropologist at least, our Earth-wrecking consumerism and the autophagic worker-consumer-producer nexus that we subsist within hasn't created impressive amounts of health and happiness.

And yet, I know from teaching my course on utopianism that we have tremendous - usually insurmountable - difficulties imagining that things could really be much different.  At some level people truly believe in the brutal inevitability of the way things are.

(It's not surprising that elites desire to create an aura of inevitability about the status quo - a lot of cultural energy is expended on this wherever people squabble over power - but it's been startling to see how successful they've been in our otherwise relatively open and diverse society.)

So will our fear and pain drive us with even more fervor toward the over-worked and over-spent materialism that is being threatened - or will the scales fall from our eyes and let us see something new?

Bad weather, so we thought we'd put out some birdseed.

Yesterday a warm, wet, drizzly morning turned crisp as cold air seethed in.  It was Nico's 7th birthday.  With help from Charles I brought him and 7 of his classmates back from school.  They swarmed the treehouse and quickly found the zip line out of the climbing tree.  I'd had some games in mind, but never got to most.  We strung up a pinata up in the tree, and they made short work of it.

Inside, they rummaged the costume bin and put on a play, The Stolen Slipper.  Nico was decked out in beads and red silks as the rich man -- Annabel in sparkly blue was a flute playing princess.  Grace was the thief in prison stripes who would make off with the slipper.  Jamie was the guard in gray armor with sword in hand.  Anya was a wizard with a battle ax.  Matteo made a racket with the musical instruments.  Robin ran the lights, and Camille tried to direct.  And it was all as chaotic as a real opening night.  

Monica arrived with pizza and ice cream cake.  Candles were blown out -- presents opened.  And out in the windy darkness we built a campfire and toasted marshmallows.  Finally, I drove them back to school, where the older kids were staging their own play, Charley and the Chocolate Factory.  And there the parents gradually gathered them up.

Singing in Sign

On the days that I ride the bus into the city I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Each short story is a carefully crafted set piece.  The characters, in Calcutta or Boston or London, circulate past one another, never quite in contact.  The author only hints that the cool, enameled exteriors of people serve to contain magmatic emotions -- a vulcanism of feeling kept in check by every artifice of politeness, habit and culture.  The stories describe a tension between, on the one hand, the fight against and resentment against the isolation caused by silence, indirection and artifice, and on the other hand, the desperate reliance upon this artifice and self control in order to make life livable and save oneself from emotional destruction or dissolution.

On my way home from Pennsylvania I stopped at a restaurant in Port Jervis on the Delaware river.  It was an old-fashioned little place with uneven low ceilings that kept the sound in and made everyone an eavesdropper.  I stared out the window into the drizzle.  The 50-ish woman at the next table was eating with a burly and bearish older man, maybe her husband.  Faded traces of a Germanic accent thickened his speech.  As she fumbled distractedly in her purse to find payment she complained about having three checkbooks and the burdens of other people's finances.  The old German didn't voice the sympathy she wanted and instead asked her why "Sue" couldn't look after her own money.  The woman said with irritated defensiveness that right now she just couldn't deal with it all, and added wearily that anyhow she was never any good with money.  As they debated back and forth I stared into the rain at the brightly placarded army surplus shop across the road and tried to imagine the dramas and comedies that had brought three checkbooks into her purse -- and this blunt, grizzled German to her table.

At the other table sat another woman in her late fifties, with a heavy, pouchy face and rough, yellowish hair.  Her companion was an elderly man with reddened, watery eyes.  I wasn't paying attention to them until she said to him with utter contempt and viciousness, "My god, you think I've never heard that story before?  Every single time you tell me that."  And I had to replay in my mind moments of conversation that I had only half heard.  She had expressed surprise that the mannequin across the street was out in the rain, that she thought they would have brought it in.  (It was an infantryman in camouflage fatigues crouching in front of the knife shop.)  He had said pleasantly, "My son-in-law went to buy a knife there . . . " when she had cut him off so acidly.   I felt a jab in my chest for the old man -- whose stock of stories had gone stale and whose life was now so circumscribed by age that he was not likely to add much to it.  Certainly nothing to interest the embittered woman who shared his meal.  But like the characters in Lahiri's tales the man and I both remained silent and said nothing at all.

As I walked toward the house in the dark I heard a squeaking twitter in the branches above -- too low-pitched to be a bat.  I stood a few moments patiently and a small form skittered to a branch tip.  It launched itself, unfolding into a cream-colored swatch that glided smoothly across the night to land and disappear onto the dark skin of an oak.  The first time I've ever seen a flying squirrel take flight, and that must be a good omen for something . . . .