Ponderous Thoughts

Because my hands are so often idle during these frozen months, my brain tries to make up for it by going a little crazy. I haven't reached the Cabin Fever or Spring Fever stages yet, it's still too early for that. This is a quieter kind of crazy where my bored brain latches on to odd themes and plays variations on them. I like to call them "ponderous thoughts," a little play on words. To "ponder," meaning to deliberate on something, has the same Latin root as "ponderous," meaning heavy or bulky. Both words convey the idea of weight and weighing, whether it be a thought or a piece of luggage. Even that little mental diversion I just took, where I had to stop at a word and go look up its meaning and etymology, is an example of how my mind copes.

One evening a week or so ago, Stacey and I were out running errands. It was a cold day and we were driving up to Wellsville in the dusk. It was a beautiful winter twilit evening. As the last light of the sun was fading, the sky was dark blue paling to green toward the horizon. As we drove along, I could see the lighted windows of houses we passed, giving glimpses into the interiors of unknown lives. It filled me with a feeling I can hardly describe. All those windows. All those lives. People I did not know and who did not know me. And I remembered the first time I felt that feeling. I was young, maybe seven or eight, and I was riding in the car with my family at night. We were driving home from church in Harrisburg. We stopped at a traffic light and I looked out the window at the car stopped beside us and saw the people in it, a family with the father driving and the mother beside him and two children in the back seat. There was a boy sitting by the window closest to me and he was looking over at me. The light changed and we drove away. It occurred to me then for the first time that there were countless other people I did not know who had lives I knew nothing about and they did not know I even existed. It was a revelation to me.

By the time Stacey and I completed our errands and arrived home, it was dark. The moon had risen and the world was transformed. The sky was inky dark and speckled with a million stars. I saw Jupiter shining in the west, a brilliant and unblinking point of light, and Orion rising on his back above the hilltop to the east. The moon that night was in its waxing gibbous phase, more than three quarters full and bright. The moonlight cast purple shadows on blue snow. As we walked to the house, the snow was powder dry and squeaked like corn starch under our shoes. I stopped on the front porch steps and looked around me. I wanted to remember the moment. I wanted to find words to fix it all in my head. I came into the house and tried to write it down before it left me.

I don't know why I feel such a compulsion to put things into words, but I know that it began when I was a teenager. In 1975, when I was seventeen, I bought a notebook at the stationery store in town and began to keep a journal. From that time until now, I've filled many notebooks and journals. I've written hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters, emails, and blog entries. I'm always taking mental notes, thinking of ways to describe what I see, hear, and feel, and then put it into words. If I come up with what I deem to be a good description, I try to remember it so I can write it down. More times than not, by the time I sit to write, the words are gone and I have to settle for some feebler phrase. 

I love words. There is a term for a lover of words, logophile, based on the Greek, logos (λογοζ), meaning "word", and philos (φιλοζ), meaning "love."  I am a logophile. To take a thought, a story, a scene and find the right words and then arrange them properly to describe it, is like magic to me. (The word "describe" comes from Latin describere, meaning to write down.) I admire the great authors, playwrights, and poets, and envy their ability to craft words into beautiful, inspirational, even terrifying phrases. To make another person feel joy, anger, sadness, or fear through words is a powerful thing. It is a gift I long to possess.

Sometimes people say that they are at a loss for words. That is a feeling I know well. There are a lot of words in the English language, enough to get lost in when I'm looking for the "right" word. English is a bit different from many other languages because it began as a Germanic language and then got mixed with Norman French and then borrowed or made many words based on Latin and Greek. I wondered how many words there actually are in the English language and how it compares with other languages, so I looked it up. Different sources use different criteria for determining the number of words in a language. I decided to go with the ones that count the number of words in the standard dictionary for that language. The Oxford English Dictionary, whose second edition fills twenty volumes and is considered by most to be the definitive English dictionary, puts the number at around 600,000. Apparently Korean ranks at the top in the world's languages with over 1,100,000 words. I'm glad I don't have to grapple with over a million words, 600,000 is enough.

As for being at a loss for words, I experienced that feeling again last week. Early Tuesday morning at 3:00, I got up to check the woodstove. It was burning low, so I put in another log. On my way back to bed, I checked the thermometer. It was 12° outside. I looked out the window and beheld wonderous beauty. It was the night of the full moon. There were no stars visible because of high clouds, but the full moon was shining through the clouds and everything was bathed in blue light. I don't know how to name that color of blue. It was really dozens of different shades depending on where the light fell, on the smooth snow on the lawn, in the delicate shadows under the bare branches of the crab apple tree, or the deep shadow cast by the house. There are 144 names in English for the different shades of blue. Maybe it was because it was 3:00 a.m. and I was half asleep, but I couldn't think of any that fit that scene. It was like looking out at a different planet. It reminded me of photos I've seen of sunset on Mars, an eerie blue sunset. It's odd that Mars, the red planet, has blue tinted sunsets, while Earth, the blue planet, has red ones.

Sun setting over Gale Crater on Mars, April 15, 2015.

From Tuesday to tomorrow, Miriam has been house and dog sitting for the Fosters. That left me home by myself through part of the day. The weather was dismal. The house was too quiet. I filled the void with music. I went on a "B" binge. I chose music by classical composers whose surnames start with "B"—Byrd, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Bruch, Borodin, Barber, and Bernstein. There are lots of other "B" composers, but I only picked nine of the ones I like the most. The ones I chose span a wide range of musical periods, from William Byrd in the Renaissance, through Bach in the Baroque (1600-1750), Beethoven in the Classical (1750-1827), Brahms, Bruckner, Bruch, and Borodin in the Romantic (1827-1900), and Barber, and Bernstein in the Modern (1900-Present). I selected several of my favorite pieces by each composer and listened chronologically, starting with Byrd on Tuesday, and ending with Bernstein on Friday. It was a fun adventure.

Byrd, Bach, Beethoven.
Brahms, Bruckner, Bruch.
Borodin, Barber, Bernstein.

Wednesday was a slow day. It was cold and snowy and it made me think of the old idiom "slow as molasses in January." That's how I felt, thick and slow and slowly congealing into rigidity. While I was out doing the chores, I noticed some big icicles forming on the barn and house. Through the day, I continued listening to my "B" composers while sitting by the woodstove and reading. I only budged from my chair to get more wood to feed the stove. It was a day fit only for cerebral adventures.

A four foot long icicle hanging from the barn gutter.

Icicles on the side of the house.

Thursday I spent the morning running around. I had a doctor's appointment, followed by a haircut appointment, then a trip to Wellsville to buy chicken feed, and then on to the Amish feed store to buy scratch. All of that was done by noon. It was another cold and snowy day. The rest of the day I worked on experimenting with my watercolors. I haven't used watercolors much. I've used acrylic, latex, and oil paints, but I mostly dabbled in watercolors when I was a child. Remember those plastic watercolor trays in elementary art class with all the colors muddied together? Watercolor technique always seemed a bit fiddly to me, but I've always admired beautiful watercolor works by artists like Dürer, Blake, Turner, and Sargent, and illustrators like Beatrix Potter. One of my favorite watercolorists is Al Rounds, especially his paintings of our temples. So I opened my new set of Windsor and Newton colors that Miriam gave me for Christmas, and started to experiment. I love the names of the different colors, names like Cadmium Yellow Pale, Ultramarine, Cerulean, Viridian, Sap Green, and Burnt Umber. I picture myself eventually painting masterful landscapes and botanical illustrations. We'll see.

My watercolor setup.

Wing of a Blue Roller, watercolor by Albrecht Dürer.

On Friday afternoon, Stacey, Hannah, and I headed south to visit the Thayns and to go to the temple. Miriam couldn't go with us because she was housesitting. We packed the car with all the things the Thayns left here on their Christmas/New Years visit and left at 3:30. We arrived at their house at 8:00. It was too late to do much of anything, so we just played a game or two and enjoyed being together. On Saturday we ate breakfast and then went to one of Hazel's basketball games. From there, Stacey, Hannah, and I drove to the Pittsburgh Temple for a 1:00 session. It was the first time we attended a session at that temple. It's much bigger than the Palmyra Temple and I got lost twice, turning down the wrong hallway. Luckily, there are always lots of kind and helpful people in the temple. We had a wonderful experience. There is nothing quite as soothing and uplifting to my soul as time spent in the temple. From the temple, we drove straight home again. We arrived home at 7:00 and found all as it should be. Our weekend visit was far too short. I don't think we'll all be able to get together again until the middle of February.

At Hazel's basketball game.

It occurred to me as I was headed down to do the chores after church this afternoon that I have stewardship over two flocks. One is a flock of forty chickens. The other, as branch president of the Wellsville Branch, is a flock of people. Of the two, I'd say the chickens are usually easier to deal with. Their behavior is pretty predictable and their problems are not difficult. Not that I have big problems with my little congregation. The stalwart members of the branch are some of the best people I know. There are only about twenty-four members that regularly attend these days. The problem is, there are one hundred and twenty members in the branch. There are ninety-six members that we seldom or never see. And we are a geriatric branch for the most part. The average age of the whole one hundred and twenty is fifty-two. The average age of the twenty-four who come and participate is sixty-four.  I've been the branch president for over two years now and in that time, I've seen our membership shrink bit by bit. We've had members move away. We've had four members die, the oldest was a hundred years old. Of those of us that remain, quite a few have serious health issues. But we manage. We hold our meetings every week, sing hymns, give talks, participate in lessons, and we are uplifted and edified I think.

We're getting some very cold weather this week. The forecast says to expect a high temperature of 8° tomorrow and a low of -7° tomorrow night. Tuesday is even colder with an expected high of 2° and a low of -11°. This being cold Gold, I'm sure we will be even colder than that. We're always colder. So I plan to stay indoors as much as possible. We have a good supply of wood. I've got a houseful of books. I think I'll go on another alphabetical music binge. This time I'll do composers with surnames starting with "M." There are some great ones: Mahler, Mendelssohn, Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Mozart. It's going to be a fine week despite the cold.

On Thursday Stacey and I are taking a short trip to Utah to visit Geoffrey and his family. We won't be home again until Monday night, so next week's Journal will be late, but it will be full of adventure. Good Sabbath.