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🛷 Sliding Down That Hump ❄️
On a post-snowmaggedon Hump 🐫 Day, what’s more fun than taking advantage of the leftover snow to enjoy some sledding?
❄️ Covers The Winter Grass ❄️
In a snowfall that covers the winter grass a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear. ~Dogen
What we need on a snowy Wednesday is some classic zen.
The fallen snow holds a certain magic.
It changes the sound of the world around you.
It amplifies the sunshine.
It creates shapes that you never see any other time of the year.
Heaps, glassy expanses, still waves captured before crashing.
You can see who has come and gone because there are curious little tracks in the snow.
Birds foraging, leave tiny indentations. Rabbits and foxes leave deep paw prints.
If you happen to have a hill on your property, as we do, you can practically see the ruts of sledding fun from years past.
If you’re still young at heart, you might grab a sled and slide down just because it’s there.
🛷 Snow Glow, Go, Go! 🛷
Galactic Snow Tubing at Camelback | Pocono Mountains
If you don’t have a hill on your property or you need the challenge and thrill of a bigger one, you can visit your friendly neighborhood ski resort.
Being situated in the midst of some relatively small, people-friendly mountains, there are plenty around here to pick from.
I’ve been to Camel Beach in the summertime. If I knew they made snow tubing this cool, I might have gone long ago.
❄️ Falling White ❄️
It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black. ~Charles Dickens
A passage like that makes you feel as if you’ve been there.
Going to be honest. It’s not my strong suit.
It’s not that I can’t write descriptions. I could probably do a pretty good job if I put my mind to it.
The thing is, it goes against my nature to describe what people will already have in their heads.
My contemporary works are typically dialogue-heavy.
Mostly, this is because I find more depth in the interpersonal aspects of the story.
I’ve mentioned this before, but you know what a bedroom looks like. You know what a kitchen, a diner, a police station, a barber shop look like.
Even if you’ve never been in some of these spaces, you’ve probably seen them in movies and TV.
And it doesn’t matter if your idea of what the inside of a diner looks like doesn’t match mine.
When people are having a dinner date at the diner, you’ve likely got that all mapped out in your head and that’s okay.
Unless there is something specific about the layout of the diner that matters, then it doesn’t matter.
I’m familiar with diners of varying configurations. I know a broad, sprawling diner with sectioned rooms.
I know diners that look like somebody parked a railroad car and covered it with chrome and neon.
If I have somebody meeting their CIA handler for a cup of coffee, it literally doesn’t matter which one I’m thinking of until there’s a need for specificity.
If all I care about is the coffee and the hand-off, it just doesn’t matter.
If a KGB hit team comes in and shoots the place up, I probably need to be a bit more specific about how it’s set up so you can understand the sight lines for the gunfight.
You can be fairly vague in that situation, but I should probably still give you enough description to let you know this guy was here and that guy dove under the coat rack.
Maybe you didn’t realize there’d be a coat rack where the guy could dive under it. That’s specificity driven by narrative need.
In most cases, there simply isn’t.
Across many chapters, you feel the layout of the apartment where Claudia lives. It’s pretty basic, but it’s relatively specific.
Why? Because I want it to feel like the same place as you saw the last time we were there.
You come in the door from the hallway and there’s the dining room table that they’re frequently sitting at to eat.
Near the dining room table is the sectional that wraps around from the wall to Claudia’s bedroom to extend beside the table.
This creates a living room space. If you took everything out, you’d have a big open rectangle with a kitchen in the corner.
The kitchen is a countertop, a stove, a fridge. It’s about five steps from the dining room table, which is about five steps from Claudia’s bedroom door.
Down the “hall” (a smaller rectangular space behind the dining room table) is her mom and dad’s room.
That’s all. It’s a simple apartment, but the furniture is arranged to create distinct spaces and make it feel lived in.
I only describe it to the extent that is needed, because we know what a dingy little apartment looks like in our heads.
To me, the real work is the interchange between the characters.
After all, you can’t go sledding without any people.
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for groundhog thoughts…