Winter
When I was reading Winter by Rick Bass last night, I dog-eared some passages that I just loved. I wanted to share some of them with you here like miniature prose poems or short short short stories - just a paragraph here and there that really spoke to me. I am posting some old picture from Montana that evoke the place where he moved to in winter...to inspire the post!
About Chopping and hauling wood in his old Ford Falcon:
"The springs are shot, the frame is scraping the pavement. I drive home at fifteen, twenty miles an hour with wood lashed to the hood, to the roof, and the trunk sprung open as if a car bomb has gone off. I've got the windows down, extra logs are hanging out the windows - wood in the front seat, wood on the dash, wood in the glove box, wood on my lap - the car groaning back and forth to Hensley Mountain, the little Falcon, never before called on to be even a passenger car, not in the last ten years, anyway. Valiantly she fills in, struggles on, knowing the severity of my predicament. ...It's do or die and she's doing."
"Love the winter. Don't betray it. Be loyal. When the Spring gets here, love it, too - and then the summer. But be loyal to winter, all the way through - all the way, and with sincerity - or you'll find yourself high and dry, longing for a spring that's a long way off, and winter will have abandoned you , and in her place you'll have cabin fever - the worst. The colder it gets, the more you've got to love it."
"If you look out at the snow, trying to see beyond it, trying to see through it to the woods on the other side of the meadow, it seems to come down fast, and your life, if you let it trick you that way, seems to be just as hurried and frantic. But if you remember to look up at the snow like a child, or a Texan - gazing up, trying to see where it originates - then the slowness into which it falls, the paralysis of its journey, will drop you immediately into a lower, slower state, one where you're sure to live twice as long, and see twice as many things, and be two times happy at the end. Snow's more wonderful than rain, than anything."
3 comments:
This is very good prose. I think its funny from our childhood I never stopped loving snow, cold winter, but I suppose that is because I left it once I was an adult. Snow reminds me of mom coming into our rooms in the dark, saying it was a snowday, how we watched the news with stock broker intensity, sledding down the big hill, building ramps, remember the plastic sheets? Best sled ever. The silence of the woods, learning to drive with dad, all of it. I still love flying in snow, its smell, K and I refer to off days with nothingness as snow days. This is what a snow day looks like...
I still love the snow..... at almost 70. I still listen for the news that there is "no School" and believe that God turns even little weed into a thing of beauty in the snow and ice.
MOM
Wow - you are so good at this.
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