Feathers in the Windows

"Standing before Stacy’s large glass windows this morning, I saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. I never saw such beautiful feather and fir-like frosting. His windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for Christmas and New Year’s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting surpassed them all infinitely. I saw countless feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. The half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. Other crystals looked like pine plumes the size of life. If glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be!" - Henry David Thoreau - Journal, 1857

Happy Holidays Everyone! And I'll leave it to Mr. Lennon to share any other sentiments:

The Myth of Grain

I have been experiencing some wonderful realizations. At least, they seem wonderful to me. I have been keeping an "eating journal" since Thanksgiving, and I know that doesn't seem like a long time, but I was adding breakfast this morning and went to look back over the list and the notes I made about certain foods and how I felt and I did not realize truly, how much raw I have been eating everyday. And how much better I felt on those days versus those that included a heavier cooked meal.

I actually don't know where to begin - I feel like I am having all these insights and increased brain function and cannot unravel the understanding fast enough, or relate it in such a way as it is "digestible", mentally speaking of course.

So here I have a picture of Demeter welcoming back her daughter Persephone from the underworld. And those of you have any interest or pursued any study into spiritual sciences, have encountered the Mystery Schools (Essene, Coptic, Rosicrucian, Theosophy, Gnosticism, Anthroposophy, The Elysian Mysteries, Mystical Christianity, Alchemy, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, the Grail Legends and, finally the Greek Mythologies) the endless symbolic natures of the tales told to initiates. I feel like I have encountered an understanding of the Persephone myth: It explains so much about, well everything.

When you read about the female/male attributes of the human soul, you inevitably arrive at the space in time when we humans stumbled and took a "fall" -- into what you may ask? It's in all the sacred scriptures: into materiality. There have been several books written about the nature of the Masculine influence holding a more powerful grip over the human psyche in relationship to this fall, which is what is meant to be understood when G-d tells Eve that she will be subservient to Adam. The loss of the feminine was a detriment to our evolution as spiritual beings but it was to protect us as well. Try and find books like Gnosis and the Law or the Keys of Enoch to open up deeper understandings of such things (it will take way too long for me to summarize them here with any respect to their content).

Anyway, this fall into materiality, we see in the Bible, allows the concept of death to occur in the human sphere. Now think back to Eden, and Genesis 1:29 : "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." The abundance of growth on the earth -- the continual flowering of fruit and edible plants was dependent on our innocence and communal relationship with the divine.

Now reconsider the myth of Persephone: whose mother is Demeter (later to be considered the goddess of grain). We find that Persephone was the daughter of Zeus or the God-Head in the Greek tradition. She is a young maiden playing amongst the flowers, a beautiful child, and so gains the attention of Hades, who abducts her and drags her into the underworld, the realm of death and promises her a number of things. How is this any different than the fall? Philosophically speaking? A dark seducer who ruled the underworld -- a beautiful maiden who falls below? She eats what she was forbidden to?

This loss of the feminine and in the case of Demeter, her child sends her into a shocked and deep despair. All of a sudden, nothing will grow on the earth, as Mother Demeter is out seeking for her lost child.

Once she finds Persephone, now having known good and evil -- the symbol of the pomegranate, like the apple, is itself meant to denote sexual knowing, she has trespassed the realm of child like communal relationships and wonder, and has become realized in the capacity of her material body, a sensual body: that is, composed and informed by the senses. And so Demeter cannot take her back as is. So she strikes a deal, and will have access to her daughter for 6 (+/- depending on the particular translation) months of the year.

Because of this, Demeter goes into mourning every winter, and knowing this, we are told that she descends into the realm of men to teach them agriculture so they may survive her mourning periods. In other words, I am realizing what raw food is doing to my communal consciousness. What I think about, what I do, what I eat, how I feel is all being affected. Demeter made a concession. This was not how things were meant to go. Just as the Bible relates that G-d did not intend for us to fall into materiality and made "arrangements" to ensure our survival until help could come our way. Whether you call it Christ or Sophia or the Mother, we are being given access to what will restore our consciousness. Why would such fall stories include, in all cases, food? Yes there is sexuality there too -- but even that can be reduced to a idea of self-propagating thought and creating one's reality. We are what we eat. The way I have been eating as of late, or drinking as is often the case with green juices makes me feel different. I think and feel differently. It's amazing. I am so grateful.

Outside, it has been snowing for almost 12 hours and I don't feel cold at all...

A Winter Walk by Henry David Thoreau

The essay first appeared in The Dial of October 1843.
It was reprinted in the first posthumous volume of Thoreau's works,
Excursions (edited by Sophia Thoreau and Ellery Channing), in 1863.

A Winter Walk by Henry David Thoreau

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work,—the only sound awake 'twixt Venus and Mars,—advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within. The stillness of the morning is impressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. We see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the western landscape is dim and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarean light, like the shadowy realms. They are Infernal sounds only that you hear,—the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, the chopping of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from Pluto's barnyard and beyond the Styx,—not for any melancholy they suggest, but their twilight bustle is too solemn and mysterious for earth. The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow. Opening the gate, we tread briskly along the lone country road, crunching the dry and crisped snow under our feet, or aroused by the sharp, clear creak of the wood-shed, just starting for the distant market, from the early farmer's door, where it has lain the summer long, dreaming amid the chips and stubble; while far through the drifts and powdered windows we see the farmer's early candle, like a paled star, emitting a lonely beam, as if some severe virtue were at its matins there. And one by one the smokes begin to ascend from the chimneys amid the trees and snows.

The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell.
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn,
And making slow acquaintance with the day
Delaying now upon its heavenward course,
In wreathed loiterings dallying with itself,
With as uncertain purpose and slow deed
As its half-wakened master by the hearth,
Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts
Have not yet swept into the onward current
Of the new day;—and now it streams afar,
The while the chopper goes with step direct,
And mind intent to swing the early axe.
First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof,
To feel the frosty air, inform the day;
And while he crouches still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind,
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge,
And greets its master's eye at his low door,
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.

We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers' doors, far over the frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of the cock,—though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as the waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which gross substances sink to the bottom. They come clear and bell-like, and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all being dried up or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and elasticity that it becomes a source of delight. The withdrawn and tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating in it. As they who have resided in Greenland tell us that when it freezes "the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist arises, called frost-smoke," which "cutting smoke frequently raises blisters on the face and hands, and is very pernicious to the health." But this pure, stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a frozen mist as a crystallized midsummer haze, refined and purified by cold.

The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the faint clashing, swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with a stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to their expansion.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself. It is invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. Its greater fineness and purity are visible to the eye, and we would fain stay out long and late, that the gales may sigh through us, too, as through the leafless trees, and fit us for the winter,—as if we hoped so to borrow some pure and steadfast virtue, which will stead us in all seasons.

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree. This field of winter rye, which sprouted late in the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is very thinly covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast; for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.

At length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines in the flickering and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent year, the unwithered grass! Thus simply, and with little expense of altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns, yet whither shall we walk but in this taller grass?

In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth, see how the silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon the earth.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise

"The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants."

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens, even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and Labrador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians, Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and woodchopper, the fox, muskrat, and mink?

Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its retreats, and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the submarine cottages of the caddis-worms, the larvæ of the Plicipennes; their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells, and pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks which strew the bottom,—now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and clashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root. Anon they will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of plants, or to the surface, like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth, flutter over the surface of the water, or sacrifice their short lives in the flame of our candles at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under their burden, and the red elderberries contrast with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad. The sun rises as proudly over such a glen as over the valley of the Seine or the Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor, such as they never witnessed,—which never knew defeat nor fear. Here reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities. Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate.

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the hillsides, and we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees; and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales from it, as by the scent of strong meats.

Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how he has passed the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has lived under this south hillside, and it seems a civilized and public spot. We have such associations as when the traveler stands by the ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch pine roots kindled his fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well. These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been here this season, for the ph--bes built their nest upon this shelf last summer. I find some embers left as if he had but just gone out, where he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, already falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether the last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or imagination only; and through his broad chimney-throat, in the late winter evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia's Chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep.

See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history! From this stump we may guess the sharpness of his axe, and from the slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down the tree without going round it or changing hands; and, from the flexure of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. This one chip contains inscribed on it the whole history of the woodchopper and of the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt, perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High Streets and Broadways. The eaves are dripping on the south side of this simple roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine and the genial warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene. Already the birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may track to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time, nature overlooks the encroachment and profanity of man. The wood still cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill, from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead. There must be a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. What fine relations are established between the traveler who discovers this airy column from some eminence in the forest and him who sits below! Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreaths as the housewife on the hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,—and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.

And now we descend again, to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies in a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that of the leaves which are annually steeped in it. Without outlet or inlet to the eye, it has still its history, in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which grow down to its brink. It has not been idle, though sedentary, but, like Abu Musa, teaches that "sitting still at home is the heavenly way; the going out is the way of the world." Yet in its evaporation it travels as far as any. In summer it is the earth's liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveler to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon, where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and tidiness; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each morning, and a fresh surface is constantly welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have accumulated herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In summer a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and veering on their tiny voyages. Here is one just keeled up against a pebble on shore, a dry beech leaf, rocking still, as if it would start again. A skillful engineer, methinks, might project its course since it fell from the parent stem. Here are all the elements for such a calculation. Its present position, the direction of the wind, the level of the pond, and how much more is given. In its scarred edges and veins is its log rolled up.

We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. The surface of the pond is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise abruptly from its edge, like the walls of a cottage. The lines set to catch pickerel through the ice look like a larger culinary preparation, and the men stand about on the white ground like pieces of forest furniture. The actions of these men, at the distance of half a mile over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the exploits of Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy of the scenery, and as momentous as the conquest of kingdoms.

Again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its skirts we hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the river, as if it were moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans know. To me it has a strange sound of home, thrilling as the voice of one's distant and noble kindred. A mild summer sun shines over forest and lake, and though there is but one green leaf for many rods, yet nature enjoys a serene health. Every sound is fraught with the same mysterious assurance of health, as well now the creaking of the boughs in January, as the soft sough of the wind in July.

When Winter fringes every bough
With his fantastic wreath,
And puts the seal of silence now
Upon the leaves beneath;

When every stream in its penthouse
Goes gurgling on its way,
And in his gallery the mouse
Nibbleth the meadow bay;

Methinks the summer still is nigh,
And lurketh underneath,
As that same meadow mouse doth lie
Snug in that last year's heath.

And if perchance the chickadee
Lisp a faint note anon,
The snow is summer's canopy,
Which she herself put on.

Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,
And dazzling fruits depend;
The north wind sighs a summer breeze,
The nipping frosts to fend,

Bringing glad tidings unto me,
The while I stand all ear,
Of a serene eternity,
Which need not winter fear.

Out on the silent pond straightway
The restless ice doth crack,
And pond sprites merry gambols play
Amid the deafening rack.

Eager I hasten to the vale,
As if I heard brave news,
How nature held high festival,
Which it were hard to lose.

I gambol with my neighbor ice,
And sympathizing quake,
As each new crack darts in a trice
Across the gladsome lake.

One with the cricket in the ground,
And fagot on the hearth,
Resounds the rare domestic sound
Along the forest path.

Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage fire all the winter's day, as if it were over the polar ice, with Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. The river flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness, and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer's fence is some swaying willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up within the country now by the most retired and level road, never climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows. It is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a river; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may float secure with its freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist and spray, and attract the traveler from far and near. From the remote interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one gentler inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant yielding to the inequalities of the ground it secures itself the easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and perch, and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors formed by the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand railroads had been made into it. With one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow-grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from the maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers, following the sun, have radiated from this nest of silver birch and thistle-down! On the swamp's outer edge was hung the supermarine village, where no foot penetrated. In this hollow tree the wood duck reared her brood, and slid away each day to forage in yonder fen.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a hortus siccus. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and anon these dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the heavens.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces. The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon.

Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills, stands the pickerel-fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a Finlander, with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnaught; with dull, snowy, fishy thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a few inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to be enveloped in clouds and snows, like the pines on shore. In these wild scenes, men stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and heavily, having sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity of towns to the dumb sobriety of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild, more than the jays and muskrats, but stands there as a part of it, as the natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka Sound, and on the Northwest coast, with their furs about them, before they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to him, ask what luck, and you will learn that he too is a worshiper of the unseen. Hear with what sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone he speaks of the lake pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and yet remembers the season when he took fish through the ice on the pond, while the peas were up in his garden at home.

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a few straggling snowflakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to their coverts and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how Homer has described the same: "The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter's day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves." The snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the castle, and helps her to prevail over art.

The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.

"Drooping the lab'rer ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and now demands
The fruit of all his toil."

Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry woodchopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney-top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney-side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be cruel. Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this cheerful snow. Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid zones? We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience, from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the ice.

Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with equanimity "the mansion of the northern bear," for now the storm is over,—

"The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole."

Many Exciting Returns: The Artist's Life

Those of you have been following my blog, (at all) will be happy to know I have decided to finish my MA in Literature, but I have also decided to forgo a PhD to return to my training in art and illustration. This has made me happier than I have been in years, having the faith and heart to follow my passions.

I want to read and make and write and draw beautiful books. So that's what I'm going to do.

And it's been incredible! By allowing myself this freedom of choice, my creative juices which I had been unwittingly been stifling have been flowing, rushing through my head, filling it with images and story ideas, including a new faery tale take on Sleeping Beauty, the story never told. We all know about Aurora (named for the morning star) but we never hear the other side of the story, the one told by her twin sister Vesper, the evening star.


And it has alread begun to wind its way out of my head and onto pen and paper:


"This is a story that has been told a thousand times a thousand, and never once has it been told correctly. Once upon a time, there was a tower and a dragon, a splinter and a briar, but they got it wrong, they usually do, historians are rarely capable of trustworthiness, especially when magic is involved. What you must understand firstly is that my sister was never called Briar Rose. She never made it out of the tower. I was the one who was sent away to the cottage in the woods."

Woes & Throes

Sorry I have been relatively mute for the past week or so. Class, grad school, & life - in whatever configuration you may want to order them... they have been affecting me. But, so is my ever ongoing issues surrounding my path, spiritual, occupational and otherwise. * Side note (way off topic): for those of you who were following me through my juice feast, yeah... the juicer I ordered back then, arrived. Today. Anyway. I have always been caught between art and writing. I am an academic, but I always wanted to be an artist. I was on the track too. I had private art lessons since I was seven up until the age of, (we'll be generous and say) 16, where at that point I was living in JH and the only art classes available were of the public school sphere. So, I did that. It wasn't until my freshman year at UA-Tucson that I realized, of all my classes I was taking, my studio classes bit the worst. And I fully blame this on their curriculum req’s i.e. "everyone starts at the bottom" even if one had a color theory portfolio going back to when they were nine... all the same: the experience kind of killed it for me. So -- I threw myself into the topics that were interesting to me: all those things that would eventually garner me a BA in humanities once I transferred to CU. That is, art history, literature, philosophy, religion, anthropology. I am currently pursuing my MA in Literature in Colorado as well. But here's the sad thing. I have let myself be corrupted by Literature with a capital L. I used to be mythology nerd, sci-fi, fantasy and faerie tales: stories of the mythic mind, magical realism, folklore and the hidden allegories they are the vessels for. My Masters, until now, had ruined my love of reading... but I am considering that maybe I am not reading the right things. I am insanely interested, fascinated, hooked on the comparative study of religion and their mythic counterparts: as they are all the same story, essentially. All religions conspire to allow humankind to arrive at the same place, almost always via the same ends, bearing the same path-markers. It does not matter if you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Jainist, Pagan, Egyptologist, Buddhist: everything leads to absolutely the same outcome. But our understanding of this as a culture is supremely thwarted and compressed/oppressed. We have lost our ability to relate to God on mystical levels, and have limited ourselves to the literal ones... how unfortunate...

Anyhow --- I can’t decide now: Do I go back to art? Becoming classically trained? Raise my kids in an atmosphere where I give art classes to local families, and write stories until I fall asleep by candle light like Jo March in Little Women? Do I pursue a PhD in Theology & Culture? And MFA? What am I supposed to do with all of my interests without relegating myself to being in school forever?

Beginning

So, November is National Novel Writing month and so I am back to working on mine-- I have snippets (some of which I have included here) from various places in the text, 25 page worth: but I finally took a stab at the opening, as follows:

The Electric Lighthouse

BEFORE THE STORY: LILIA’S REQUEST

The day that Evangaline gave me the book, I did not immediately know what she had handed down to me; all that had been bestowed and buried, all that we would leave behind. After the fires and the ash both fell away, it was no longer her secret to keep. As I finally opened the worn and faded cover on the long train-ride that would carry me away from Maine and my father’s Lighthouse, I felt the weight of the story seep into me. Like my sister’s fear of sadness and her love of the things of flight – and I knew finally what I was supposed to say. And with this book, with its apple green binding, the cracked leather fragile and wrinkled along the folded corners, the pen-knife engraved seals on the cover, I became the caretaker of my father’s story. In the end one might say what you are about to read is, perhaps, more a ghost story than anything else. And there are ghosts here but it is also a story of our castle and the sea.

My father’s castle cannot be found in any book. And those who once knew it, and where it stood have long since died, and the jut of land that it stood upon along that small strip of coast is now called by another name and mostly, it has been reclaimed by the water it was once guard and sentry to. But what I would come to know as my father’s castle did not belong to him either. Nor his grandfather, from whom he had inherited its keep. And this would be the beginning of all the trouble. But we must start before then.

Chapter One

At the age of eleven, Simon Weatherfield lost his mother. It was only a fever and a small cough, she said. Then one day as she was bringing in the cows from pasture, she died in the fields, watching the first snow of the year come across the White Mountains. The doctors said she had been born with an enlarged heart and looking directly into Simon’s gray eyes, made sure he understood. And since his father, had gone to fight in the Red River War and died trying to remove Kiowa Indians from the middle plains just two years earlier, there was the issue of who would raise the boy. Like his mother, he was an only child and so there were no living aunts or uncles to take him in. And his father’s family was still in England and either had received no word of the orphaned son or refusing to be bothered, they had been silent on the matter just the same. Finally, the courthouse in Exeter came to discover the whereabouts of his dead mother’s still extant father. A professor of Letters retired from Harvard, who had taken up residence in Maine with his second wife, and it was there that Simon would go to live.

_____________________________________________

He would often dream of his mother, she would come the fifth hour of All Souls and he would wake, cold and see her sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of the room, looking out over the sea. Just as in life, she rarely spoke; her movements, small. She smiled her lop-sided smile. He had always pictured her like some human-shaped hot water kettle, constructed to bare secrets, songs, mirroring the images and the mysteries. He had never seen her cry, not even when word came that his father was dead. He had waited for her to cry out in pain or fear or grief but she didn’t, she accepted everything that moved around her, as though nothing more than leaves in a burst of wind. And now she sat, full clothed in sashes and white cotton tied to her ankles, which made a shisking sound across the floor. Her eyes were cold and grey but they also shone with a bright stillness that comforted him even in their eeriness. And he would stay in bed, knowing that he could not approach her, nor touch her, for then she would dissipate like a mist burned away by the sun; he would simply wait for her to speak.

_____________________________________

It wouldn’t be until years later when I would find myself sitting with Jack at his kitchen table in a farmhouse in Iowa, that it would all seem right again. I don’t think they ever really wrote. I think Clover was ashamed, and Jack felt the smart in that -- felt in his body her absence like any lover would, the bitter tugging from a memory emblazoned by the one they had lost. I think he had just been so frightened of disappearing completely that his need to survive no matter what cost came screaming in behind his minds eye and in an instant he felt the only thing he could do was the one thing that he did: and he left all of us behind.

It was late spring. That day the sun was warm on the green grass, and the oaks shaded the porch where one could just as easily sit and hear the creek and see the rows of corn, as look over the pastures before the hill where Jack’s two little girls ran and laughed in the barnyard, skipping and dancing as they fed chickens. I realized then that he had found peace in a way that perhaps, none of the rest of us ever would.
As I had sat looking at him then, all grown up, a beard darkening his cheeks, he seemed for the first time in all the time I had known him, filled with his own light, finally a glow completely independent from his twin’s effervescence. I had to swallow, because I felt my throat tighten, and I blinked and said: “I’m really happy for you, Jack.”

He cocked his head at me, reached out to wipe the tear that slipped down my chin and he smiled. “Me too.”

Choosing An Audience

I'm having issues deciding what kind of blog this should be.

I want it to reflect my budding interests in raw food nutrition, and the highest of all nutrition-health concepts. I want to talk about art and film and life and books. Religion and spirituality. About the planet, about the stories I hope to finish and the others I am about to start.

But it seems that these blogs are very much sequestered into a "kind" -- a topic to provide them a place to be, an audience to talk to... and with that, like everything else in my life when it comes to my interests, I can't ever pick just one. I am made up of too many passions and I feel tight and squeamish when I relinquish one to concentrate on the other.

It's like they are a vast organic machine of wooden cogs and moth wings, delicately balanced and, when caught in the right light -- they shimmer just a bit. A gossamer. A glamour and then poof! it's gone. The sun has set, the household is full of hunger and homework and I have to wait another day to do what it is that I am wanting to do.

Ok. I will not try to shove this round peg into a square hole. I just need to find a better fit. Until then, I will not try to wrestle in my place like when one wears an ill-fitted coat, catching you right under the arms... I will just let go and write and do whatever it is that I do best. A little bit of everything and let the rest sort itself out. Ah, good. I'm glad we had this talk. I feel much better now.

The Ecologist

Life life life is more than
just my or your obtuse theories
about it. I think I would like to live
someday,
where I can see tides,
where I can learn movement.
Without obtuse angles to guide my eye.

To spin,
heavier at one end,
Rising in on my sandy toes,
my own emptiness, comes
and goes, my own silence;
fills with the voices of gulls,
I see a shining from within,
like the sun,
but red kelp, striped fish, and golden
lobsters, all cling to nets,
like a ribcage.

Walking about unnoticed,
by strangers, and pretending that
we do not matter.
I hear them tell me this is safer,
makes dark things grow,
stifles organs of perception.

The oil slick on the skin of seals,
the filled gills of fish
hardened matter molts
and scales, measures per ounce
the caw of organic seasons,
but so beloved by the clockmaker --
Time is of no consequence, it is a learning
mechanism. I get caught in the cogs,
I count the seconds passing.

We do not tinker with life life life
as we do gears,
when we try, the coil creaks,
we stare at white light and imagine
we hear ticking
which sets the rhythm of the heart center.

Remember our walking sticks,
and the mountain path,
we don't always recognize what’s missing,
We expire, crumble, exhale and
like rocks under moss,
underwater,
under wind,
polished by the breath that warms us,
in languages and meters forgotten,
too late for this life, life, life
we begin to dream again.

Wristwatches, upon second
and minute hands, count our day,
We wait for it to be over.

We do not sit and visit,
but shut up into towers, our own divisions
guard us, our own sentry.
Ignoring colors as impetus --
we map, in order to know.

We, so very sure of our choices, kill the explorer.
And suddenly see him far off,
slowly sinking. Slowly,
amongst where the red reeds and drowning Egyptians
are marching
between the space where hydrogen
and air made water.
Mistranslation! we cry.
Retry. Start again,
and where once we walked in river reeds,
lines are drawn now in red, stained by choices.
A monk’s hand,
a sailor, a story,
catches us in our spirit.
The Fisherman sails home.

I wonder what the fisherman sees
when nets rise up with silver slippery bodies
Glimmering fear, death
and like any light,
is snuffed out by darkness,
the lighthouse drowns.
Ships, vessels, filled with souls, save
one sole. It creak off the rocks.
Perceptions of land slighted,
by slant rhymes,
by sand bars they did not know
under low tides,
lay there sleeping.

O, yes we could measure lives in many ways
By time, by coffee spoons,
peaches or poems
composed
in open air.
By mountains conquered,
sunrises listened to. The number of
breaths you take as you fall
to the night, in sleeping.
Silences are so full of communication.

I am open to investigating pine trees,
scouting sycamores, surveying beaches,
inspecting the fashions of mist,
their long grey-blue dresses.

There is something,
in this ecosystem
that is I.

We know the storybooks,
printed with pictures.
We know when and
where there was a misstep. We can hear it.
We can feel the meter is off.
Yet, unaware of the tilt
of planetary balance,
the empty spaces, the vacancy of species,
upending, we see that finally,
we are falling.
Perhaps we have grown
accustomed to it:

Falling in love,
from grace,
out of favor,
into money,
into despair,
into depths of down, down, down.
This life, life, life is still
so mysterious,
and yet, this is not enough.
Like truths most high,
mystery is not to be trusted.

No room, no room --
those trees are blocking,
my view of the city.
It used to be a useless valley, the fisherman
remembers.
Look what we’ve done. he says.
We’ve made the space useful,
he says. To which the reply must be:
I thought being space,
was purpose enough.
But see the twinkling lights? He says.
Not breath, not spirit alone,
only now, but light too.
The microcosm exists,
no matter the times we trip,
not seeing the rock.
Blaming it on our feet,
we do not look up again.

This life, life, life, spins on
and here I sit, wishing
on tides and skipping stones:
I am not progressive,
No corner offices, please
but could I have them returned?
I want my mountains back,
I want them back
the way they were,
before you took them.
Still, with wild wilderness,
where wild creatures roamed
creating bumps in the nights,
and questions of whooooo in the winter.
The owls always asked too many questions,
you never said so, but I knew
it made you nervous.
There is a solution, but
then again, extinction
always had a cruel smile.

LRose Young March 2007

Novel Excerpts

even though I said I was going to finish it last November, I am no where near close -- just beginning to write again....

___________ "Selections" : from, THE ELECTRIC LIGHTHOUSE


Simon would come home smelling like small salty sardines and the vinegar of their solutions. The house smelled as if the drowned had walked out of the sea. He would stumble into the room below when dawn was gray over the water. The door banged open, and I would wake to whispers: "Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat, high in her chamber up a tower to the east guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot."


Inchy would lie with eyes still closed and name the source of their father's quoting (she could not help herself), "Tennyson," she'd say.

And was once again, instantly, deep asleep. And once I could hear his gentle snoring, Elaine would get up to light a candle in the kitchen. Her soft singsong murmurings of liturgy prayers would float throughout the early morning house as she made teas to stave off the conception of children. You must not blame her for this. For, she had watched over the past fifteen years, how her two golden children were invisible to their father's eyes. She had no desire to bring more ghosts into a house already full of apparitions, and so, though she loved my father, she was unwilling to conceive another soul to go unnoticed.

Every morning she spent quietly and devotedly cleaning his clothes and scrubbing his boots with apples to take out the smell. Cooking with heavy spices to relieve our nose of the stale oceanic scent and fill it with meadowsweet and chickweed, the briny sweetness of oysters replaced the brunt affront of tin and packaging adhesive. One early morning as the door banged open and the smell of the sea filled the room I was surprised to see Inchy already awake. Her wide green eyes lit by a dreary fog floating in with the light on the water.

"Do you remember that summer, Lil, when Papa first became the Knight?" Inchy whispered into the pale dark. "All those stories, and only you and I were real."

"Yes," I say. "I remember it was the same summer that the twins were born. And he smiled at them, and cuddled them like the baby rabbits you rescued that spring, but he didn't know they were his, Inch…He couldn't see that." I could hear a stumble in her sister's voice, the cracking of a slow breath.

"What makes us real, Lilia?"

I sigh. "I don't know what makes us real, Inchy."


_________________________________________

Every spring, once the ice thaw had receded and the mud broke free from its hardness, my mother had taken Inchy and me down to the water and tried to teach us how to swim. I was only four and Inchy was six and while Inchy was much more enamored with the tide pools and the tiny blue crabs with their hard shells and speckled claws, I remember I was terrified of the sound the waves made when they crashed and sucked hard against the rocks. I was much more comfortable taking the long walk around the orchard to the sort of beach at the western part of the island which revealed, at low tide, a long slender bar of silvery sand and round shiny pebbles for almost a hundred yards. And so I would take my sister’s hand and lead her down to the very lip of the water, standing barely more than ankle deep and I’d point out the little clams and urchins clinging to rocks and make necklaces and crowns out of the sea grass and loop them with shells. And our mother would walk out to the water and swim as if she could breath the air out of the water. Her long dark hair (like my hair) dripping down nearly to the back of her knees like seaweed silk, like ink; like a fisherman’s net, it caught at angles and movement, it would clasp at arms and legs and she would rise from the wet with tiny bits of shell and sea caught in her hair. Her face would be so pink from the cold water and she seemed so very much alive when she swam. But then she would get this long cold blue look in her eye as she stood in the water with the surf rising up over her ankles and sucking back out again in little currents, pulling the tiny stones and sand from under her feet, and she would close her eyes and feel the pull. A small smile. The longing of the water is always deep and it tugs on your skin like the moon tugs on the tide itself. And then her dark eyes would open, liquid, wide, dull in the gray light reflected from the water in the late afternoon and she would see Inchy and I on the shore. She would catch my eye. Even at four, I could feel the weight of that glance. I refused each year to go into the water. I did not want to be like she was, haunted by it. It scared me. She weighed her options each day, until with great effort she pulled each foot, webbed just a little between each toe and step decidedly, at least for one more day onto the earth and we would walk back home another day together.

I remember climbing into her lap in the evenings. In her rocking chair in the sitting room facing the tall, tall windows overlooking the cliff where it just out over the sea. She sat there every night with one hand playing with the small webbed flesh between my toes or pulling the tangles softly from my hair. She would sing in my ear stories of whales and lobsters and pirates. And always, she looked pale indoors, and she was always quiet.
Nearly a year would pass before the sea finally won. I was five and Inchy almost seven and my mother walked into the sea and did not come back. It was not a swimming day. Inchy and I had not been invited. And we did not think anything of it, for she often took long walks in the morning after breakfast. Early that morning, a cup of coffee from town and thick cream for McEwen’s cows; we kissed mother on her cheek. Can you keep some supper warm, Lil? I had nodded. Supper would sit until breakfast. She would often bring back crab or berries or wild mushrooms in her pockets, bits of fishing twine and large round stones perfect for flinting the Light House. Simon always said she had a knack for finding them: those small pieces of earth that looked like nothing, and yet could start a fire bright enough to sail ships by. He would smile at her with such tenderness, it creased the corners of his mouth. As if she were the sun and the light of her on his face warmed him through to the very blood and bone. Getting ready by the door. Kissed me on the cheek. When will you be back Mummy? Said Inchy. No darlings, I’ll not be back any more.

____________ and much later in the story __________

I was coming around the far corner of the lighthouse from the coop, with the eggs that Elaine had asked for pocketed in my apron, when I heard Jack call after Clover: "Stop, please!" He said. And I stopped, not wanting to intrude. I stayed hidden against the shade of the house, waiting. I leaned in amongst the rose bushes that would climb the wall in those few warm months before the frost came again, for then they would wither and die leaving their strangled brown skeletons still reaching, they were nearly up to the window boxes. I could hear them speaking but could not make out each word, Jack's voice was stern, scolding. But there was this small waver, a small fear that welled up and broke in his inflections.

"You think I don't see how you look at him?" he asked.

"You think he's good enough for Lilia."

"You will never be her, you know. And I don't care, I mean, I love her, of course, but… I don't care where Lilia goes. You know that."
"I don't know what to say, Jack." And then a long moment.

"Promise me you won't leave," He said.

Silence again; then "Wait, Clover…" And she had come around the corner and stopped, caught in my hiding place, barely worthy of the title, I was seen. I stepped forward facing my youngest sister. And Jack following after, having seen Clover and me standing there with nowhere to go, stops.

All three standing with nothing to say to each other. I see Clover's lower lip tremble. She looked long and cool at me, and I saw the tension behind her eyes, knowing I had heard everything. I could see the set to her jaw, and knew she was grinding her teeth. Jack looked at me, pleadingly. But I shake my head, unable to help this time. Not I, the one she most wanted to be; how could I tell her not to go, even knowing what would happen?

But Jack's eyes were wide and for all his height, he appeared small and helpless. And in that moment, I remembered when we had been younger, how he had given us animal names, the way Simon used poetry and myth to mold us. I was Trout. Inchy had been Rabbit and Clover he named, Moth, and she had been offended. But then I don't think she ever realized the reverence of that: that he had always pictured her with wings. Not the white feathery ones belonging to angels, but with the dusty symmetry of moth wings, the breed more delicate and less immortal than those of heaven, the ones that always in the dark to the light, are drawn.

Now here she stood between us. Our golden girl, dressed in the palest fawn-colored silk dappled gray, like the speckled moths of early summer, her wrists trimmed in feathers, her lips an eerie poisonous red. Her face looked so severe, powdered white and white pearls clipped to her virgin ears. She stood before me, meeting my eye, a stranger. And then, decidedly, she walked past and headed towards the trail to the Orchard, to the lawn of the Whitney's, dressed in the clothes Spencer had bought her, eager to be loved; she did not look back, because of Jack, and because she could not promise.