You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
beneath the heavy silence
of a dead-white winter sky:
a glimmer of verdant green and gold
bowed with the weight of finger-thick
icy tapers, cold-glittering and mirrored,
that slowly release their hold
drop by drop
beneath the sun’s slow rays
the world is still:
the awed hush just before
The Beginning,
a captured breath held
against the moment
the moment passes, and in
its wake,
a pair of sculpted, crystalline wings:
the ice angel caught
off guard in its passing
This has been going on for several weeks now, ever since the start of the really cold weather, but this is the first chance I’ve had to photograph it. A couple of apartment complexes around the north end of town had these spiffy waterfalls installed over the summer, and apparently they have absolutely no intention of turning them off for the winter. A bit odd, definitely, since everyone else turned off their fountains and waterfalls and blew out their sprinkler systems at least a month 
and a half ago, but you can’t argue with the results. Absolutely incredible to watch these waterfalls ice over, the water still gushing at full strength while the decorative rocks turn to huge ice sculptures. Draped in snow and mammoth icicles, glinting in the late afternoon sun, they take the shapes of ancient deep-earth rock formations, the kind I’ve seen in Carlsbad and Longhorn Caverns. It’s absolutely magical, breathtaking, to come upon one of these icy waterfalls in the middle of an average day’s drive to the grocery store. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and 
each day they take on new dimensions as the weather warms for a brief melt-off or dumps another few inches of snow on the city. I feel like I couldn’t possibly take enough pictures–it’s something beautiful in this dead winter season, something to remind me that this time of year has its own kind of elegance, something beyond the grungy black snow slush on the city streets and the biting cold. These waterfalls of ice are their own poems, ever-changing odes to the season. It’s funny what a person will do to capture a picture of something that has enthralled them. Today, I waded through inches of melting snow, getting soaked to the ankle–and believe me, that is not something I would normally do; I hate the cold with a passion. But it was definitely worth it. I have been discovering this year that things like that always are, because the moments they capture are too beautiful to pass up.
It snowed even earlier than predicted yesterday…By noon Spokane was a winter wonderland once more, and it was pretty clear that I will be snowed in for the rest of the week. I may hate driving in winter conditions, but I do love the silence of a snowfall at night, the way the snowflakes drift down without even a whisper, and how that stillness is so peaceful and so all-encompassing that it reaches out to wrap the entire world in its quiet. And four years out of TX, I am still amazed at the way snow glows at night, reflecting moonlight and street lamps so that it is never truly dark.
This week is going to be very big on getting to know myself–who I am when nobody is looking. Because really, now that I think about it, I have never been completely alone for an extended period of time before. I’ve had a tendency all my life to define myself by my relationships to other people–in elementary and middle school, I let my classmate’s negative opinions of me shape who I was; in high school, I managed to start becoming my own person, and I thought I had become quite an individual. Since moving to Spokane, I have felt that I have simultaneously stayed the same and changed alot, and have started to realize that who I am is not exactly what my high school friends would expect me to be. It is just now, 6 years after graduation and 7 years after my father’s death, that I can 
look back and see that even though I was more free, I still fell into all the neatly labeled categories: The Best Friend of the Youth Pastor’s Sister; The Daughter of a Man with a Brain Tumor; The Somewhat Quieter Part of the Creatively Weird People Clique–and those are all anyone, including myself, expected of me. And ever since, with my father dead and the rift between myself and the youth pastor’s sister and high school over, I have often felt adrift, lost, not myself. The only thing that has stepped into that void to define me is my illness, and it has defined me more clearly and more horribly in the last 3 years than anything else ever has. I have barely been a person at all–I am PCOS, with almost nothing at all in me except the lack of sleep, the fear, the mood swings and insane emotions, the bleeding, the pain. I started this blog to combat that, to force myself to remember and to unearth all the things underneath that sickness. And it’s been working pretty darn good; I’ve been feeling like a decent and rather creative human being. Now I have an entire empty week stretching ahead of me, an entire week of the kind of solitude that my PCOS loves to take advantage of. But I cannot let it define me anymore, especially not now. Who I will be when I emerge on the other side of this week is anyone’s guess, but whoever she is, she will be her own person once and for all.
This week is also a Happy Sock Week. I am cycling through all my pairs of cute/brightly colored/fun socks (most of which are toe socks *hooray*!) Yesterday was the day of the brand-new moo-cow socks, which have probably skyrocketed to my absolute favorite pair of socks–they even have lovely little stars on them, although you can’t see it. (thank you Joan!!!) It’s funny how much I love socks, even though they are an accessory seldom seen in public because they are hidden by my ugly, clunky shoes. Which is why I like toe socks so much–I can wear them even with flipflops. My mom also has a sock fetish–maybe it’s genetic? Whatever the reason, I will revel in it. And then buy more socks.
I don’t do so well by myself. Oh, I love my solitude…but only up to a certain point. There’s only so much time I can spend with me, myself, and I before I start getting antsy and lonely. It’s ironic that I am often so easily distracted, but when I am alone, there is almost nothing I can do to distract myself from the silence once it begins to get to me. And here it comes: 6 days of solitude and a high probability of being snowed in the entire time… *shudder* Serious measures must be taken to prevent total breakdown.
Meet the triplets, who will be my inseparable friends next week. I picked them up when I cut off all my hair and bought a wig, mainly because strange things appeal to me but also because I have a fuzzy hat and a beaded head thingummy that I really don’t want to store folded up in a drawer somewhere. Alas, they are only styrofoam, but I have discovered that Mod Podge won’t chemically alter and/or melt them, so I am moving ahead with my plans to alter them. I’ve been wanting to do this for a couple of months now, but have been really busy with the holidays. Now, staring down a seemingly endless stretch of solitary hours, I find myself unspeakably excited to finally get started on this. And the 
wait has been very productive. A couple of months ago, I had only the most vague idea, and then just the glimmerings of a plan. Now, my brain has churned out a lovely Greek trio of ideas: the head with the beads will be The Oracle; the fuzzy hat head will be The Dryad; and the one wearing the wig will be The Muse. Someday, I will probably add a fourth one so that I can pull out the silver hair net I wore at my wedding from storage, and that one will most likely be a Naiad or something else related to water. But for now, three is plenty. So tonight I am going to flit about town making hundreds of color copies and buying up 
random supplies, like extra glue, paint and ink, swaths of cloth, lovely little beads, and anything else that catches my fancy. I will also ransack the library and probably come home with at least a dozen lengthy novels. I am stockpiling weapons and girding my loins–come Sunday, I will begin waging war on all those inner demons that haunt the silent spaces of my mind. And I am going to conquer them with collage.
