dual personalities

Winter finally arrived. We have had some interesting weather — ice, snow, rain,  then more ice, snow and rain, followed by cold, cold temps. Walking around is really quite a challenge. In the midst of all that and after years of procrastination, I was seized with the impulse to have a couple of pictures framed. So I did, and they turned out beautifully. I haven’t even fallen down yet (touch wood).

First, is a self-portrait that boy #2 painted in high school (I think), and which I’ve always loved because it really captures some elusive quality — and maybe it’s a little melancholy (and you know what a sucker I am for melancholy).

As you can see, I have not hung it up yet. Nor am I capable of taking a photo that isn’t blurry or ill-lit. But you get the idea. Didn’t it turn out nicely?

The other picture I got framed is a watercolor of Dartmoor that I bought years ago in an antique shop in Okehampton, England. It’s not an antique — not even close, but I like it a lot. Once again, you have to use your imagination as my photographic skills  are on the weak side (to say the least) and the colors a tad washed out. Here it is leaning crookedly and blurrily against a chair in my family room.

The prospect of spring’s arrival always makes me start planning home improvements. Certainly, new wall art is an easy way to improve a room. The portrait is going in the family room. I’m not sure about the watercolor. The green would go nicely in my downstairs bathroom, but that seems a bit of a waste. I’ll probably end up moving things around — spring improvements here we come!

Once I hang the pictures, I’m going to continue my big project, which is cleaning out  #1 son’s large bedroom closet so that I can use it to store family heirlooms that need more temperature control than the attic offers. It would also make an excellent linen closet. Onward and upward!

Enjoy your weekend!

Umberto Eco once wrote, “We have a limit, a very discouraging and humiliating limit; death.” Alas, the great author and semiotician has met his limit. Aside from his most popular novel, The Name of the Rose, which I read way back when the movie came out in 1986,

I haven’t read a great deal of his work. However, I am a huge fan of Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan all about the places he has visited. Here’s my favorite.

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this  would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fishnet and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other  for the hundredth time the Story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past.