Sunset, Wednesday, 23 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The simple purity of the snowfields, bands of bright crystal and blue shadow, changes with falling light. Into the white comes faint gold, then soft rose, colors often seen in the winter sunset. As they deepen, auras of gold and rose over the white seem the work of real snow angels.

Sunset, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Shipwrecked as I am on a thousand-acre island of snow, my car with the clutch I foolishly burned up now blocking the ‘driveway’ (quarter-mile dirt lane) and inaccessible in the snow to tow trucks, I walked several miles along the side of four-lane U.S. 29 to get to a store. Following my Boy Scout training, I walked facing the traffic, which was rushing just two feet or so to my right. Now and then I hopped up onto a plowed snowbank to give tractor-trailers the respect they so fully deserve. Only a few drivers stayed conspicuously at speed or on message and peppered me with plowed slush.

The scale of life is so different on foot.

U.S. 29 is pretty much an antipedestrian landscape. No sidewalks, of course. Usually if you see anyone along the road it’s the itinerant homeless. But I was one of the few, the proud, the marooned.

I took a cab home (a first in my years in Virginia) – I really didn’t want to be the husband who incinerated the clutch one day and then, impaired by four shopping bags, got plowed into a snowbank by an oncoming SUV the next. More precisely, I had the cab take me to a dropoff point where I met Laura and we only had to carry the bags about a mile, through the fields.

(Critics/observers of this site will have noted that I thought the problem with the clutch last night was ice, but it turned out to be fire. You know how that poem ends.)

The ride back in the taxi gave me a further chance to reflect on this difference in perspective between being stuck here on the ground, as G. Lightfoot wrote, or zipping along in a vehicle. On my right, in the east above the Southwest Mountains, the sky at the horizon was a rare and perhaps indescribable blue that you almost never see except opposite the sun. It’s a sky that seems more illusory than distant – like robin’s egg blue, except not as brilliant and more delicately transparent. In the blue were a few vague shards of gray, their indistinct outlines adding to the impression of something not quite really there.

It struck me how an arresting moment like that would be much the same for a person standing in a field, traveling in a car, taking a train, or looking up out of the kitchen window. It’s a stillpoint. The still image is the hub of the wheel.

Sunset, Monday, 21 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I watched this solstice sky develop as I was walking back to the house, having been lying prone under my car in a snowdrift, trying to clear ice out of part of the clutch. 

Laura and I started dating on the winter solstice, December 21st, 14 years ago. We became engaged exactly one year later, on the next winter solstice, and were married the following June 21st, which was the summer solstice. A midsummer night’s wedding and a midwinter night’s dream.

Sunset, Sunday, 20 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

With the solstice just one day away, I wanted to show some of the sun.

What’s Happening?

On December 11th, I picked up some effects, papers pertaining to family history, that had belonged at one time to my aunt Elizabeth Van Doren Ankers. In the top of the box was a letter from 1947, sent from the Russian sector of Berlin, concerning a German woman my father had been engaged to, at age 19, before he came home and met my mother. This is something neither I nor any of my siblings had known about. In any case, the letter informed my grandmother – Dad’s mother – of the woman’s death in a railway accident. The date of her death: December 11th.

A few days later, I signed a contract to edit and produce a book commemorating the anniversary of the founding of a local hospice. That night, we turned on the television, as we usually do – currently, having exhausted our favorite rentable series, we’re going episode by episode through a British series, Midsomer Murders, that belongs quite solidly to the second tier.

That night’s show: murders involving the founding of a hospice.

O.K., fine. A few nights later, the episode was titled “Dead in the Water,” It included several references to rats, including a dead one. Meanwhile, we had placed a vase under a leaky pipe. Surprising that nothing like this had ever happened in 15 years of living in a house so permeable to mice, but, you guessed it: that very night, a mouse ... literally ‘dead in the water’.

(We often are aware of having a mouse or two around – no rats that I know of, although for a while we suspected we were hosting a mouse we called, thanks to The Princess Bride, a ROVUS – Rodent of Very Unusual Size.) 

The next one is not quite as unnerving. Last night, as the snowstorm was finally ending, our lights kept flickering – the power would go off for half a second – and we kept wondering, especially given our many power outages here in the country – Are we about to lose power? We filled more water jugs (important if you depend on a well) and made other preparations. We didn’t lose power, fortunately. And that meant we could watch another episode! This one just happened to take place at Christmastime (not a planned coincidence). It opens with folks placing Christmas lights outside ... and seeing them go out for a moment.

“Not another power cut!” they cry, before power comes back on – and someone inside the house shoots himself.

So, that’s it, up to the moment, I think. Perhaps I should be worried, except that strange synchronicities have happened to me many times before – just not quite so thick and fast. As for the connections to mortality, I ignore them – or take them simply as a sign of something serious. Something’s happening – I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is.

Sunset, Saturday, 19 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

About 20 inches of snow later, here we are. Interesting how the color of the snow changes in the depth of the storm, from all the fugitive tints I was talking about yesterday to a sort of deep silver.

Once again we had firewood chores, and I cut and then Laura and I carried wood through the drifts from a shed about 100 yards or so away. Before that, she took this shot of another of the landlord’s neglected sheds, near our front yard:

Laura Owen Sutherland

As we were going down to the other ‘barn’ to get the wood, we looked back at the house:

Laura Owen Sutherland

The strange glow – in the same direction as my sunset view – comes from the GE Fanuc facility about a mile away on Route 29.