La Grenouille dans le Fauteuil

My thoughts, explorations and opinions about Music, Philosophy, Science, Family life; whatever happens. Shorter items than on my web site. The name of the blog? My two favorite French words. I just love those modulating vowels.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

April in Vermont

My wife told me decades ago that it had sometimes snowed even as late as her birthday, April 16th, but I had of course, as a rational human being, never believed her. But here we were yesterday, completely blocked in and unable to get out from our house, not just because of the blizzard-like conditions, but also because the furious winds, strong enough to be quite scary, blew down two trees across our driveway. We have a 1/10th of a mile driveway, fully forested, and a medium pine tree fell across it.

Foolish self, I had always hated the boy scouts from an early age, and not enjoyed even the ethos of such heartiness, and consequently I had not followed the wise dictum: be prepared. To be relevant, I had not sharpened the chain on my chain saw, even though I knew that this was a chore that needed to be done. We had to call in a neighbor - a neighbor who whilst legally blind had once steered a sailing boat across the Atlantic using a sextant, to wade through the mud and untimely mire, to trudge over to our foolish abode, and cut through the tree for us so that we could dispatch the limbs, branches, twigs and needles into the ditch, and get out.

Later that day, Sabra, my wife, was driving up and down the driveway to create ruts so that our daughter could get her car out to go to class and contemplate "Wuthering Heights" - surely one of the most utterly bizarre novels ever written; it seems to me to have the strongest claim in literature to being the true source, the fountainhead, the ultimate precursor, of Monty Python's Flying Circus, since it has that same combination of gratuitous cruelty and utterly ludicrous nonsense, while at the same time behaving as if it takes itself completely seriously, which it could not possibly do. Or to de-reify it, and deconstruct it to the artifice of a creating human being that it is, it is impossible to think that a person could be simultaneously focussed and clever enough to write it, but not perceptive enough to roar with laughter at the whole thing. A clever feint. - -

Anyway, no sooner had Sabra passed under a yet-larger tree than KER-THWUNK! A triple trunk Pine fell just feet behind where she had been, mere moments before, located. (Though, it has to be admitted, the relative length of moments compared to all the possible moments when the collapse could have occurred is elastic. We might think it was a narrow escape, but if one were to reconstruct the situation and, equipped with a dummy and disposable car, attempt to bring about a more dramatically percussive outcome, it would have been difficult and unlikely of success.) This one was too big for our friend and so we called in the professionals - the arboricidal foresters who love nothing better than to reduce a giant pine to chips and brush. He told us he would be back later in the week with hot dogs and marshmallows to supervise the burning of the twigs.

Fortunately, this all took too long for Robin to get off our micro-climated reserve and make it to her RomanticLitClass, so she had to join us as we passed through our newly passable driveway (thinking, inevitably, of the Red Sea in Biblical times, even though the forester hardly reminds me of Moses. He is less concerned with engraved commandments than discussing where in the woods people are growing "whacky-tabacky") on the way to our chainsaw- and sextant-wielding neighbor's house, and that of his wife (the self-same place) where we were all able to celebrate Sabra's birthday, as the winds blew, and the snow melted off the roof, and the rain dripped, and the general absence of spring made itself palpable, except for the protection afforded by glass.

Pat, (the sextantic chain sawer) wants me to pop over with recording equipment once the frog-fucking season starts (if you will forgive my Anglo-Saxon) since he has a large pond near his house, and the noise once the frog fornication festivities first fulminate is something else again, he tells me. I had my equipment handy - for recording - but the pond is still frozen and covered with ice and snow, and so the frogs, presumably, are having to dwell in patience and chastity. We drank champagne and blew those things that you blow at birthday parties.

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