PopWars

Peggi once told me that winter is her favorite season. She was born in February and she suspected that might have something to do it. I love winter too especially when it is what hearty people call “a real winter,” long periods of below freezing temperatures with plenty of snow. I feel especially fortunate that we are able to share our enthusiasm for the season with each other.

I like shoveling snow and when they are calling for a significant amount I get out there a few times to reduce the load and just because it is fun. I shovel in my slippers when I grab the papers. We had a neighbor, last name “Painting” (which I thought was pretty cool), who would keep his driveway spotless in winter and we assumed he was obsessive. The neighbors surely think that of me now.

Winter naturally is a time to hunker down. We go out to ski in the woods and then come back to hunker (I assmue hunkering includes projects). Winter during a pandemic has been deep and rewarding. We miss going to to galleries but have found a bounty of beauty in the woods. The art pieces there are all three dimensional. Photos do not do them justice. The form of each tree is unique especially in decay.

This morning we found this big snow roll at the bottom of a hill near our ski path.

I don’t usually plan these these posts until I sit down but the lake was so dramatic this morning I knew I would use a photo of the beach. And if a person was in that photo it surely would have been Peggi, my valentine. But I didn’t take a photo of Peggi this morning, she took this one of me and it captures the wonder.

We skied through the woods, across the golf course (where there were so many people out it looked like a ski resort) and then out onto Eastman Lake. We spotted ski tracks out there and followed them, past a dozen or so ice fishing holes, all the way up to the big lake, the Great Lake, Ontario.

I am out on the big lake here, skiing between the two sand bars closest to shore. This was the twenty-fourth day in a row skiing. We are counting! The days are getting longer. It is 5:30 EST as I type this and it is still light out. I am already missing winter.

We skied along the lake and on the lake this morning. We traveled east to west between the small mound in the center of this photo and the line of bigger mounds nearer the open water. I’m guessing the ice mounds form where the sand bars are and if this winter continues, we’ll soon have bigger mounds on the next sand bar. Tomorrow will make twenty days in a row of perfect conditions.

This is the earliest picture of Steve that I have. He was my assigned roommate in the dorm my freshman year at Indiana University. This was our crew. I’m thinking the photo was by Rich or Kim since both them were missing. Steve was from New Castle, a small town outside of Indianapolis. His father owned a jewelry store on the town square and there was a Chrysler factory outside of town. Steve was already a junior and he drove a white Baracuda with Led Zeppelin’s first album in the 8-track player.

Steve called us yesterday to report in. He was excited to have an appointment this Wednesday for the first dose of the vaccine. He had bought GameStop stock, sold some, made fifty bucks a share and he was hanging on to some options. He works part time at a car dealer in Charleston and had to drive a new vehicle to the other side of Atlanta, a 600 mile round trip. He was upset because he missed his grandson’s basketball game that day where he scored five points.

Steve asked if he had told us that he was being sued. He hadn’t. He was driving a company car, about to make a left hand turn and And the bicyclist ran into each other. The guy (Steve called him a wino) was riding the wrong way down a one way street. He fell off his bike and he is claiming he has headaches and soft tissue damage.

Steve owns some rental property and the tenant says the water pressure is too weak. She is threatening to move out. Steve says he can’t work on the place because the woman is a hoarder and she has stuff all over the place.

Steve said his next door neighbor told him that Biden would not be inaugurated. Steve bet him one hundred dollars that he would be inaugurated. The neighbor has not paid.

There is a glimpse of the lake in the center of the photo above. We were on what we call the “Ridge Trail.” We predate the color-coded trails though the park.

I shoveled the driveway and Peggi cleaned off the fire-pit seating and then we strapped on our skis. Avoiding the horseshoe stakes the horseshoe stakes we go downhill to Jared’s and around his pond, then across the street and into the woods. We zig zag down the big hill, skiing into the bank from side to side to slow our descent. Ten years ago we would take that thing head-on.

We’ve skied five days in a row now and last night’s snowfall freshened the trails for us. The log bridge over the creek is tricky. Sometimes we take our skis off to cross. Today we walked it on our skis. The woods to the park is often prettier than the park and today with the sun and snow it was gorgeous. After a mile we come out at the golf course. Today we went to the left and up the steep hill where we picked another trail, one that leads to the top of Marilyn’s Hill so called because we watched her ski straight down it. And there we picked up the Ridge Trail (above) that takes us all the way to the lake.

We took a few pictures of the turquoise water and followed the trail on the western side of Eastman Lake back. This is a birder’s haven and sure enough we saw birds along the shore. Eastman Lake ends with a marsh and there are usually a couple of swans in here but the lake has frozen over. We skied across the golf course again and around to the left where we picked up the trail back through the woods to house.

One of my biggest worries is that this pandemic will end before I have finished all the projects I’ve lined up around the house. I recently checked off one though, sorting my holy card collection. I already had them in glassine envelopes, alphabetically with seperate categories for Virgin and Child, Black Virgin and Child, Virgen Del Pilar, Virgen Dolorosa, Vergen Del Rocio ( all big in Spain) and Christ Crucified. But I still hadn’t filed away the ones I brought back from our last trip.

We have gotten pretty good at sniffing out estampas (holy cards) in “Artículos Religiosos” shops in big cities but they are a dwindling phenomena. Sometimes we’ll strike gold in a priests’ supply store but the best experiences are in small towns where the cards are kept in wooden drawers and the shopkeeper shares details about the saints.

I hung on to some cards from childhood. They were given to us on special occasions and stuffed in our missiles as bookmarks. I bought some at Trant’s Catholic Supply Store on Clinton Avenue South. Most of them were printed in Italy. Every town in Spain has a patron saint and holy cards are pinned to the wall behind the counter in coffee shops and bars. You can still find them in the vestibule of churches, old women sell them out front but everything is changing. Gift shops sell cards on rotating spindles. They’re sealed in plastic, often with a medal attached and they’re expensive. I like the paper cards. You used to be able to buy four or five of them for a Euro. The very best ones were made by C. Mariana in Barcelona.

I found a Mary Magdalene card in Madrid on our last trip, my first one, and I got intrigued with her legend. A prostitute, possessed by seven demons, rumored to have been Jesus’s wife, she was there at the the crucifixion and then the resurrection. She is typically pictured with a skull. I did search on eBay and found an “antigua estampa religiosa” listing for Mary Magdalene for a couple Euros. I went for it and it arrived today from Granada in an envelope with two beautiful stamps.