All week, the weather flipped back and forth between spring and winter, day to day, sometimes hour to hour. Monday, Presidents’ Day, was a pleasant day. By midday the temperature was 51°. It was sunny and there was a nice breeze blowing. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to do some garden work. The lower end of the long border is where most of my early spring flowers bloom. There are crocuses, muscari, primroses, and hellebores there and they are starting to emerge now. There was also a mat of chickweed covering most of it. Chickweed is one of those plants that continues to grow all winter long, even under snow. So I got down on my hands and knees and tried to pull as much of it out as I could. It felt good to be down low, close to the earth, with dirt on my hands. I didn’t last long at it. I’m soft from too much indoor inactivity and I have to be careful not to overdo it.
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| After pulling chickweed on Monday. |
On Tuesday we started to see warnings of approaching bad weather. The forecast said to expect snow and sleet turning to freezing rain on Wednesday. It looked impressive on the weather map, a storm stretching across the entire nation. But my theory is, the more hype there is when these storms approach, the less actually ends up happening. And I’m usually right. But, to be safe, I filled the downstairs bathtub and every pitcher with water in case the power went out. I brought in several loads of firewood from the outdoor woodpile onto the back porch. I felt prepared. “Bring it on,” I said to myself.
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| The Big Storm on the weather map. |
The storm arrived around 10:00 Wednesday morning. It seemed mild enough, soft snow falling gently. By noon two or three inches had fallen. Then around 3:00, just when it was time to go down to the barn for the afternoon chores, the snow turned to rain and everything turned to slush. During the night, the temperature began to climb again and by midmorning on Thursday, the slush was melting. By the time we got home from school it was 57° and there was no sign of snow or slush anywhere. So, in the end the Big Storm, at least in this part of the world, didn’t amount to much. A little snow and a bit of slush that melted away within hours.
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| After the storm. |
After school that day, Miriam and I did more garden work. I cut down all the remains of last year’s perennials, the phlox and coneflower stems, the sedum and miscanthus clumps, and Miriam raked them up. We piled them up and burned them and while we were at it we burned the Christmas tree too. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do so much garden work in the last week of February. By the end of the week, my winter atrophied garden muscles were sore and I loved it.
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| After cutting down the old perennials. |
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| Burning the garden cuttings. |
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| Burning the Christmas tree. |
Friday it was clear, but cold. Saturday morning it snowed again. Back and forth, back and forth, but it looks like starting tomorrow it will settle on being winter for a while.
All winter I’ve been exploring Classical Music – Italian, Russian, and Scandinavian. Last week I sat thinking one morning about what to listen to next and the famous phrase from Monty Python popped into my head “And now for something completely different.” [As a teenager, I loved Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I always stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch it with my sister Mindy. My friends at school were divided into two groups, the Saturday Night Live crowd and the Monty Python crowd and I was a member of the latter group. Later, in September 1980, I saw Monty Python live at the Hollywood Bowl – not the 1982 filmed version, the actual live performance at the Hollywood Bowl. But I digress.] Although Classical Music is the great love of my musical life, it is not my only love. My interests range widely. So sitting on a gloomy morning in the last days of February, I chose something American, something not strictly Classical, and something I adore – ragtime piano by Scott Joplin. I first encountered Joplin’s music when I went to see The Sting during Christmas break in 1973. The soundtrack to that movie is Joplin’s piano music orchestrated by Marvin Hamlisch. After seeing the movie, I sat down and learned how to play The Entertainer (in a simplified version that I can’t even attempt to play now). So all week I reveled in the brilliant melodies and syncopation of ragtime.
Scott Joplin (1868 – 1917) was an American composer and pianist. He was known as the “King of Ragtime.” He wrote over forty ragtime pieces, a ragtime ballet, and two operas. I love all his piano ragtimes, but I have my favorites, The Entertainer, Maple Leaf Rag, and Solace.
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| Scott Joplin. |
I was in another bookless quandary last week. That’s happened to me several times this winter. It’s rather ridiculous when you live in a house filled with books. I couldn’t find anything appealing to read. I was tired of history. All the fiction I tried seemed tedious. This happens to me especially during the latter half of winter when I’m prone to succumb to a hybrid ailment, a combination of two seasonal fevers – cabin fever and premature spring fever, that makes me restless and a little crazy. In order to ward off that malady, again I thought “And now for something completely different.” I needed something to entertain my brain, some very strong mental medicine – and that means Shakespeare. I find there is something powerful in indulging in a Shakespeare binge. Processing the scope, beauty, and complexity of his language requires parts of my brain that need exactly that sort of exercise. My binges take different forms. Sometimes I read his plays. Sometimes I watch his plays. Sometimes I read and then watch his plays. And sometimes, like this time, I needed his sonnets. It had been several years since I last read them. They are the best poems I know of. Sometimes mysterious in their complexity, sometimes as lucid as crystal, their rhyme and their rhythm and their structure – they are perfect brain food.
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| Shakespeare. |
I first discovered the sonnets when I was in my twenties. I knew most of his plays by then and loved them, but had never paid attention to his poems. Then one day, after I’d finished reading The Tempest his last play, I kept turning the pages and there in the back of volume two of my Works of Shakespeare were – The Sonnets. I started reading and, that was it – I was hooked. Over the years since then, I’ve turned to them over and over again to inspire and entertain me. I even tried at one point to write some sonnets in the style of Shakespeare. My pitiful attempts made me appreciate his genius even more. It isn’t an easy discipline. One year, I remember it was in a cold March, I sat down and typed out all one hundred and fifty-four of them. The combination of reading them and using my brain and my fingers to work through them at the same time opened new understanding to me. So after saying all of this, what I’m saying is – that I’m bingeing on The Sonnets right now. I read three or four a day and then ponder on them.
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| The Sonnets, first edition. |
The Sonnets were first published in 1609. They express ideas and thoughts layered with multiple meanings covering themes such as the passage of time, mortality, love, beauty, and jealousy. The first 126 are addressed to a young man, and the last 28 are addressed to a woman – the mysterious ‘dark lady.’ But they all have two things in common: they each have fourteen lines with the rhyming pattern abab cdcd efef gg and, they are written in iambic pentameter.
Here is one of his most famous and one of my favorites as an example:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
When it went on sale in 1609, the first edition of The Sonnets cost 5 pence. Only thirteen copies of it exist today and if you were ever lucky enough to find a fourteenth copy somewhere, it would be worth many millions of dollars. I sometimes have daydream fantasies of finding one in a used bookstore, maybe with a Da Vinci or Rembrandt sketch as a bookmark stuck between the pages. That would be nice.
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| The Lady in the Glass Case. |
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| Lucille Ball's grave. |
Last Sunday they made changes in our branch, enlarging our boundaries, and moving us to the Jamestown New York Stake. This weekend was Jamestown Stake Conference. When we were in the Palmyra Stake, because of the distance involved, they broadcast the meetings to us at our chapel in Wellsville. This weekend, because they were changing the Jamestown Stake Presidency, they wanted us to attend the meetings in person. So yesterday and today we drove to Jamestown and back for meetings. It used to take us two and a half hours to drive to Palmyra. It takes just two hours to get to Jamestown, which I guess is better, but only a little. It was still a lot of time in the car. The members at the meetings were very friendly and welcoming. After our meeting today, we stopped at the Lakeview Cemetery in Jamestown to see two of the famous graves there. The Lady in the Glass Case is the grave of Grace Galloway who died in 1898. Despite all the haunting stories about the grave, the truth is she died of tuberculosis and her father had a very detailed life-size statue of her made and then had it encased in glass to protect it. It is a strange and rather eerie monument. The other famous grave was Lucille Ball’s. From there we came home again. So in all, over the last two days we spent eight hours in the car. I’m ready to not go anywhere for a while. When we got home it was time to do the chores right away. Looking ahead, I see more bad winter weather coming on Monday and nothing looking much like spring any time soon after that. I wish it did. I’m ready for something completely different.
