Day 72

I went walking with my ghost dog Molly through the dancing snowflakes this morning, greeted the giant personality of the Corner Pine Tree, crunched along the path to the pond, and sat in the plastic chair there while the snow filled up around me. It is a little wild spot, with birds always in the tall trees, and sometimes a duck or two, and a good place to cry, so I had one.  It was so cold that my eyes felt as if the tears were freezing, but it was only my dramatic imagination.  The lovely fantasy writer Ray Bradbury said, "If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life.^"  I had just heard about plans to mine the Everglades for oil, and the radio article had interviews with affected homeowners protesting the destruction of this fragile and beautiful eco-system, as well as with persuasive company-men, sprouting new technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, which result in "clean" mining.

The Everglades

 "Look at our track record," he said.  Well, that's not such a good idea, because if you look at oil company's track records in general, they all have histories of "spills", that stupid word again, like spilling a little milk when you take it from the fridge.   Four years ago when I was writing this blog, I was heartbroken every day, pushing away the image of oil gushing uncontrollably from the BP well under the sea in the Gulf of Mexico for so many months!  And the US govt has just lifted the ban on BP working in the Gulf! 

I took photographs of snowflakes today, even one with my little iPhone!

At school we make cut-out snowflakes each Christmas for "holiday" cards, as it is not politically correct to make Christmas cards.  I discovered a very easy way of folding and cutting which results in a beautiful six-sided snowflake that looks like a doiley.

Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, a reclusive Vermont farmer who spent much of his life looking after his ailing mother, was fascinated by snowflakes and devised a way to catch them on black velvet and preserve them for the time it took to photograph them, beginning in 1885, and taking more than 5000 images of snow crystals in his lifetime.  He did it so well that no one bothered to take pictures of snowflakes for about fifty years.

In the 1930's a Japanese physicist, Ukichiro Nakaya, a researcher of snow crystals, took about 3000 images of snow crystals he created in his lab.  They are probably so fascinating because they are beautifully symmetrical, and each one unique, like a finger-print.  Well, that is what people used to believe, but in fact snowflakes start out just about the same, in the clouds.  It is their descent through different fluctuations of temperature and erratic air movements that form their beautiful individual shapes.  And many snowflakes are just funny shapes, just lumps of crystal.  the ones we notice, like the ones Bentley chose to take photographs of, are the Margot Fonteyns and Rudolf Nureyev's of the snowflake world, the beautiful dancers.

Little stars on the ground

When we came to America I insisted on bringing my kitchen table.  It is an old Oak table with leaves that can be taken out to make it smaller, although we have never had it like that.  I have had that table for most of my life, forty years.  I bought it when I was 18 years old, at an auction in Grahamstown for R14, a paltry sum, although it seemed like quite a lot for a poor student back then. (This is the equivalent now of about $1.50!)   No one really wanted it because it has a round burn-mark on one end from something very hot, perhaps a small cooking pot, although the mark is concave, which is odd, and not much like a pot-bottom.  We used to ask people to guess how the mark happened, and several came up with interesting ideas, but we are no nearer to the actual story.  I love imperfection, the rejects of life, so that table knew it had a good home with me.

Tim and Marc, our friend, decided to fix up the legs and sand the table, clean it up a bit before we packed it off to America.  While they were working on it in Marc's workshop, they discovered a little old stamp on the underside, proving that it was made in Philadelphia, so it was going home at last!

I love this table with a deep love.  It is rarely empty, the friendliest of tables, offering a poetry anthology here, a jug of tulips there. 

When I lived in Bonza Bay, the table lived outside on the huge verandah, where we ate all our meals, it was very tropical there.  The centre-piece was a big bowl of fruit, until the monkeys discovered it and clambered and climbed all over the verandah and the table to get at the delicious items. We kept all the fruit inside after that.

When I was a new single mother, one end was my sewing table, constantly covered with sewing machine, fabric, the pin-cushion my mother made me, etc.  The other end was where we ate our meals, my two little daughters and I.  In the magical 16 Cross Street, it dominated the beautiful tall-ceilinged room that was our kitchen.  Here children did their homework when they were little, while I made supper.  Friends sat around eating dinner or having tea and chatting about things large and significant and also small and inconsequential. The stuff of life.

It has always been my rule that we sit at the table for all our meals, together, and that we have "intelligent conversations".  (Sometimes it is quite difficult to have an intelligent conversation with a rebellious teenager.)  This sitting at table for dinner inspires interesting ideas: Matthew and Nick, puzzled little boys having just started pre-school, "Mom, we know that our names are Matthew and Nicholas, but apparently we have something called a surname, and what is ours?"  Matthew, aged about 4, "Dad, why aren't our fingers all the same length?" Emma, aged 16, "Mom, you have to let Michael move into the flat, it is a matter of life and death!"  Jess, aged 12, looking pale and worried, "I have a project on Renaissance Artists due tomorrow."  "How much have you done?"  "I'm just starting."  The kitchen table sighs at the prospect of a long night ahead. Nick, aged 5, telling the story of the operation to remove his adenoids, "The nurse was so beautiful, she smiled at me the whole time."  "But how could you see her, she had a mask on?" " Her eyes were all blue and smiley."

And here in America, we were set adrift from all that familiarity, cast off from our previously comfortable existence.  We set off on our separate journeys into the unknown each morning, but always returned to one another at the end of the day, to a good meal and the telling of our stories at our benevolent and generous kitchen table, the raft of our lives. 

Four graduates of the Kitchen Table.