In keeping with our Big Blizzard, I read Snow (while wrapped in a white down robe), Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Prize winner. It illuminates fundamentalist Islam, and how Turkey can deal with it, and further, how artists can deal with it. The author lives in Istanbul, so he should know. He wrote about his city in a novel aptly titled Istanbul. The questions in Snow are particularly apt at this moment in history, a moment when most of us watched the events in Cairo and elsewhere unfold.
“The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.” (Chapter one, page 3).
Recently, I’ve noticed just a bit more slant of sun on the scene seventeen floors below me, and to the west where most of the white stuff has melted from the rooftops of buildings surrounding Brady St. At our entryway, we were treated to a steady drip drip drip of a very welcome meltdown. By the time you read this, we may be buried again. After all, this is Wisconsin where few wash their cars in the winter, but today, I even thought about washing mine. (Later: I was right, it’s been snowing for two days now).
In our underground parking garage is an area for washing the many automobiles that reside here. It’s really just a hose bib and hose, but recently a wall-mounted vac was added. Someone requested that the car washing water should be heated! How odd, but then again, early on, someone in the building complained that in the summer, the roses on the back terrace don’t match. However, generally speaking, we are a reasonable lot. There have been rumbles about the escalating amount of the building’s water bill, but is it any wonder what with all these units fitted out with oversized bathtubs and dishwashers? We take so much for granted. Turn on a tap and why worry about water! There’s plenty for everyone. I don’t think so.
I’ve never used my dishwasher, instead, I use it to stash plastic bags from the grocery. They’re handy for wrapping trash. My washing machine is always set at the “cold water” mode, and as for the giant bathtub, I save it for a once-a-month luxury dip. Nor do I use detergents to wash my clothing, for my duds are never dirty and a quick rinse and spin is all they require. Call me crazy, but for many years I’ve been aware of how we trash our environment. It kills me to see pesticides strewn on the lawn, and in the building, on the day that the “kill bugs” man come, the old hippie in me moans and sighs.
Perhaps this comes from living for a decade in a late 70s commune-style development of seven little homes, built in a farm field off hwy. 83, between Hartford and Hartland. Designed to hug the land, the modest dwellings were a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, and yes, the roofs leaked and there were problems galore, but it was worth it to not have to mow the lawns. Everything grew wild and wooly, sometimes perhaps too much so. During my first summer on the land known as “Sconfinato” my five acres of heaven burst with blooms from Wild Rose bushes, hundreds of them. While the houses were being built, the Department of Natural Resources was on a Wild Rose kick, which meant all comers got free bushes. Let me tell you, they looked lovely, but as they grew, they took over every square inch of soil. I ended up having to stage a burn-off to get rid of most of them.
Alas, I miss my Sconfinato home and the utopian artists who settled there, but all has changed. The original owners who banded together to help each other perform feats of deering-do, have either died or sold off their homes to city folks seeking solitude, the result being that it now looks like any old boring suburb anywhere. The no-nonsense concepts have disappeared entirely, thanks to the “new” owners who don’t really want beauty. What they desire is to ride around on a mower and strew pesticides hither and yon on their groomed acres. The Sconfinato signage that marked the entry to our place in time is gone too. “Sconfinato” means “boundless.” It turned out to be otherwise.
Those were the days my friend. We thought they’d never end. But they did.
