"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."
~Henry David Thoreau
Friable vermillion, mocha and pumpkin scraped into piles and bagged. Grass crew cut for the cold that would set in. Silver shears buzzed the holly and fire bush. Wood piled in a hollow. The little brown bat tightened in the soffit. Soil turned to clunch.
All readied for winter's diet.
But the season failed to season. It was as bland as young bananas and white rice.
Then. The shaker's salt clotted. Scraped peppercorn clogged in the blades. The frother jammed. The iron grew tired of steaming--just as the milky billows above rebuked soft and airy deliverance. The humidifier clattered. Alarms screeched randomly.
Except for the ransacked house. Inside, they took what they could fit in their duffle bags. Outside, silence. Police notified neighbors. The immediate ward abuzz with concern.
Footprints cannot be detected in clunch.
A little girl backed up a chair under the doorknob.
Had the odds changed?
Have a piece of chocolate cake, her mother said. We are as safe today as we were yesterday. No more, no less.
In the distance, a dog barked. Geese honked overhead.
They're back. You know where they're headed, right?
Every year, same spot, the girl said.
Actually, I'm not so sure they ever left.
The girl smiled. Mama, that cake's the best I've ever had. I'm gonna run out and see if I can find them.
She watched her round the corner, up to Ryan's plat where the pond water swept over the fall and the birds gathered at the edge of the brook, daring each other to jump in. This is the way it was. Clouds giving or not. Clunch. Seasons lapsing.
Look up and you'll see me.You know you can hear me.
The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.
~Kate Bush, Snowflake
It is probably never wise to start a post off with at the risk of..., but, while we're talking about authenticity and, to some degree, baring soul (and as a follow up to this post), I'll risk baring this: I finally—this week, in good ole Beantown—took part in one of the dreaded "oscopies." Not fishing for congratulatory remarks, I'm a big girl (oh, am I?), yes, I am, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Especially those things I don't like. And fear. Such as balancing my checkbook, cleaning out the refrigerator, and, well, getting poked and prodded.
Wednesday, in Boston, it was a grey morning and a balmy 52 degrees. Dr. Bliss dropped by the holding area to say hello, review my records and recite a litany of complications. I read the paperwork! I wanted to tell him. But I didn't. I let him go on. After all, he is Dr. Bliss. Oh, Dr. Bliss, you're so very kind and attentive. (She thinks, and he is) I'm sure this procedure will be like having a cupcake for breakfast.What, shouldn't everyone start their day with a cupcake? There are certainly no complications with cupcakes. Cupcakes are not complicated. They are sweet and harmless (like you, Dr. Bliss). Lest one chokes on one, of course. But really, how would one choke on a cupcake?
There was a moment, a look between us, I felt for sure he'd read my mind. Look, how could I not be thinking about food? And choking? I hadn't eaten in days (alright, hours), and I was about to be wheeled into the tricked out room for an endoscopy.
After Dr. Bliss fluttered away the nurse returned to check my IV and seize my book. A book, you brought a book to your endoscopic procedure? (She said, in not so many words, after I had refused her magazine offering.) She smiled smugly, and I knew that she had heard my meditation on cupcakes. Moments later I was trundled toward the surgical room, where the hard stuff was administered and where all my worries fell away...
Yesterday, yet another mild day in New England, I spent the better (or worse) part of the day in bed, and then, late afternoon at my desk trying to compose a Frolic. But in my still loopy and confused state, not having altogether shaken off the previous day's midazolam and fentanyl cocktail, all I managed to do was watch video loops of snow falling and winterscape screen savers on YouTube while shaking my daughter's snow globe. Something was wrong.
Maybe it was the narcotics.
Or an obscure compulsion (fueled by narcotics?) to expunge all thoughts of Wednesday's stressful scoping by way of alternate, yet still dreamy, optics.
We have no snow. And in the winter months, it is not the waning sunlight that disturbs my circadian rhythm. It is snow deficiency. This winter, in this bend of Rhode Island, we've seen a total accumulation of a mere half foot of snow, which came to us in a weekend whirl and remained only long enough for my daughter and I to leave a pair of skinny ski tracks along our whitened streets during one afternoon. But it was a glorious afternoon. Outside, everything sang. The snow-covered woodpile, the twisting brittle grape vine (which, no matter how invasive, I will not cut—its summer canopy is simply gorgeous), the birdhouse, the stream beyond, and the shallow woods beyond the stream. It was an avalanche of song, it was shimmerglisten harmony, stellatundra chorus, a sorbet deluge of melody, terrablizza, spangladasha!* The next day, as temperatures rose and the dang sun blistered, frost began to pool and trickle down storm drains.
How does one find oneself in the wintertime without a snowy foil shading earth's face? (This is not how New England works!) The starkness of undressed trees and woodland and field, at times, seems unbearable. Where are the tracks laid? There is a crevasse in my soul that longs to be filled, as it rightly should this time of year, with the song of snow.
So what I did, at day's end, at wits end, at the edge of pharmaceutical fuliginousness, was what any decent New England girl would do, I sought the highest counsel: I went to mystical royalty. I went to Kate.
Her eminence, Kate Bush. With her 2011 concept album, 50 Words for Snow—which has been described as "elegantly loony"—she proffers an opulent and moody compilation that conjures what, this season, has become a winter phantom.
[...] Bush grounds her songs in the permafrost of winter, with her piano work sounding like the first stirrings after a cold snap. “Among Angels” could be the soundtrack for plants stretching toward the new spring sun, but as much as it’s connected to the natural world, the song twinkles with something more ethereal. “I can see angels standing around you,” Bush sings in her windblown soprano, “they shimmer like mirrors in summer.”
Bush's inspiration for the album is rooted in Eskimo lexicon myth: Eskimos have fifty words for snow. But they don't. Bush, nevertheless, brilliantly bangs out her own neologisms de neige in the same seductive voice of yesteryear—her misty highs and lows blanketing the soul with icy wonder dust.
The opening and closing cuts invoke a chill as they dwell on the ephemeral nature of the life cycle. "Snowflake," which features the choirboy pipes of Bush's 12-year-old son Bertie, gives voice to the melting consciousness of the natural world itself; "Among Angels" reads like the sweetest kind of suicide note. In between there are imagined couplings – with a gender-bending snowman in "Misty," and with a lover found and lost through many reincarnations (and played with brio by Elton John) in "Snowed In At Wheeler Street." The bounding "Wild Man" chases a yeti.
50 Words is an enchanting (if, at times, creepy) collection where each song builds on the other. It contains seven songs only, but their depth and breadth (the longest song is 11:08 minutes, the shortest, 6:48) are stunning. Listen. Worries fall away...
And then, there will be cupcakes, iced, this evening. And tomorrow, for breakfast—should there be any leftovers.
His lower abdomen is punctured with tiny holes for the trocars, blown up with CO2
and the wall is illuminated. She walks the city streets in Boston. Back Bay and Beacon Hill. He is in able hands.
There is nothing else to be done.
Three hours in the OR and three more in recovery. A stroll in the Public Garden.
The Swan Boats have been stored for the season. Still, the city's oasis sings botanic.
A poke in Shreve, Crump and Low. Too sparkly.
Lunch at Figs. Crinkled spinach, bacon and Parmesan salad. She eats
the very last dark leaf.
A massage. Soft tissue, she says. Stares from the headrest at the mossy green carpet.
What are they cutting now?
Isabelle's Curly Cakes on Charles Street: They make a
damn good cupcake.
It is, after all, owned by renowned chef Todd English. (As is Figs.) At four bucks
a pop every morsel is savored.
The surgeon calls and says he'd been looking for her in the family
waiting area, expected her to be there.
I'm around the corner, she says. Oh, well, says the surgeon, he's going to be fine.
She repeats it. Collapses, shutters inward relief.
She goes to the waiting room. The attendant says the surgeon was looking
for her. He seemed disappointed, she says.
Thanks, she thinks, I'm the bad wife.
No one misses the Chief.
They let her run up to recovery—only on Ellison do they allow that, the attendant says.
She sees him on the gurney.
Bloated and wired with input and output, says he's happy to see her. Boy, am Ihappy to see you.
She collapses again. Smiles and says, the surgeon says you won't remember anything in
recovery. You remember the surgeon seeing you in recovery?
I do, he says.
Her hair is greasy with healing oils. She hopes he doesn't notice.
His head is wrapped in a cream colored blanket and he looks like an old Babushka.
She leaves him, again, to rest.
There is nothing else to be done.
Has dinner at PF Chang's—no Todd English at PF Chang's. Returns to the hospital.
Tubes and drains and Foley catheter. Instructions and prescriptions and precautions.
Call if this. Don't worry if that. He'll go home tomorrow.
The whole damn summer into fall. This'd better be the end of it, she thinks.
It's fall. Fall is not decay. Fall is renewal. Renewal.
There is nothing else to be done.
She drives him home the next day. Box of cupcakes on the backseat.
Kate Fenner, the Canadian musician with the rich and sultry voice, began her singer/songwriter career in the 1980's with the alternative rock band Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. Since the disbanding of BTC in the mid 1990's she has recorded two solo albums and several others with Chris Brown, with whom she founded BTC.
Fenner's last solo recording (January, 2007), Magnet, produced by Brown, includes this beautiful duet with Brown:
According to her website, Fenner and Brown are currently working on their own renewed collaboration—an album with an unscheduled release date. One never knows what's around the corner.
When my son dressed in costume, for school, as "Mustache Man" last Friday—fashioning a mustache from duct tape and paper—I knew it was time to write about CAKE. And not the kind you eat. Not the chocolate variety that I love to whip up from time to time. Or that cake-like Whoopie Pie... oh, my. Speaking of... it's cold out there, maybe it is time for a little baking.
CAKE. Upon the release of their breakthrough album (do we still say "album"?) Fashion Nugget in 1996, I became an immediate fan. Their most recent album, Showroom of Compassion—which includes the song Mustache Man—is slated for a 2011 release, but available now for pre-sale via Cake's website or at Amazon.
CAKE. Imagine Devo, Was (Not Was), and the Talking Heads getting together in one room. Imagine what the three of these bands might spawn. Yes, lots of silliness. Much fun.
Here's a little CAKE (warning—this may leave you a little hungry, send you straight for the kitchen—take notes!):
What do you know, a band that cannot only make some very cool music, but can also cook up a gastronomic feast! Well, with a name like CAKE, you'd better have some culinary craft.
Yes, that's right, there is a bit of a monotone vocal delivery (intentionally?), but it only adds to CAKE's layering.
To wit:
CAKE. Fairly measured stuff. A recipe for lots of smiles.
