even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: freeze and thaw

imaginary outfit: freeze and thaw

Yesterday, the ice in the creek broke up. After a few warm(er) days, it went from a solid, snow-covered sheet to a damp, semi-translucent slab laced with rills of water. I was hoping to be nearby when the ice finally broke, but I missed it. When I came home from work yesterday, the big ice was gone and the little eddies and whorls of creek water had become a fast-moving mass studded with blocky ice chunks like mini icebergs. For a sudden half hour, it turned into a giant slushy machine, and soccer ball-sized pieces of ice and slush filled the creek from bank to bank, rushing away downstream. Now it is running relatively clear and high, and it's nice to have creek sounds back in the valley.

Otherwise:
Things I have read and enjoyed: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.
Things I have read and not enjoyed: pregnancy books. The tone see-saws between the apocalyptic and patronizing, and they don't seem to offer much beyond a catalog of everything that can go wrong. We checked a tall stack out of the library and didn't find a winner in the bunch. We'll just have to go the old-fashioned route and trust the doctor.
Things I have seen and liked: musical drawings and prints at the Cleveland Museum of Art; turquoise pebble earrings; patched jeans; recipes for beautiful and intimidatingly healthy food.

I am also laying plans to increase the number of overalls and rompers in my collection. They are very kind to expanding midsections.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: freeze and thaw

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