Knees are cold

I went looking for the front steps and sidewalk around 9 this morning. By noon, you couldn’t tell that I’d slaved with a spade for 45 minutes. I’m not sure how much has fallen now, but it looks headed north of two feet.

There was more than a foot fallen by the time I trudged home from the corner bar last night. Some guys were digging out a taxi cab on 14th street and the snow there was already mottled from the churning of boots. But when I turned down the side street,  my footsteps were the first.

Columbia Heights was a world transformed.

The comparison that sticks (ha, ha) is that of The Great Frost in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The chapter ends with Orlando losing his beloved Sasha as frozen London cracks apart with the thaw, but it’s the story of the frozen world that draws me in.

“Hot with skating and with love, they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstacy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him, for love’s sake, one more embrace.

And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun…

-Orlando by Virginia Woolf

If I’m a heart-rended Orlando and this is the great frost, then my poetic muse must be Bon Iver.

For the sake of the one or two people in the universe who don’t know his story… Mourning the breakup of his band (and possibly a lost love), Justin Vernon holed up in a hunting cabin in Wisconsin for four months and emerged with a mournfully beautiful album called For Emma, Forever Ago. His pseudonym is also a tease at bon hiver which means “good winter” in French.

This winter has been good at being winter, so here’s his title track. Since everybody knows the album version, I picked these two renditions from La Blogothèque’s Concerts à emporter series.

On behalf of our literary hero, I’ll send it out for Sasha…forever ago.

So apropos:
Saw death on a sunny snow
For every life…
Forego the parable.
Seek the light.
…My knees are cold.
(Running home, running home, running home, running home…)
Go find another lover;
To bring a… to string along!
“With all your lies,
You’re still very lovable.
I toured the light; so many foreign roads for Emma, forever ago.

-Bon Iver

I tried to capture the accumulation on my street every few hours during my comings and goings yesterday. Here’s are the results:

[View with PicLens]

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.