An Exercise in Observation

photo credit: Leni Thalin

In my New Year efforts to allow stillness and encourage observation, I stood at the kitchen sink staring out the window. Snow had blanketed everything, but January snow has no magic in it. And now fog wrapped me up and kept me at arm’s length from the rest of the world. This was my observation:

Thursday, January 23, 2020

This fog is so dense I feel as If someone has dropped a white blanket over the whole place. The black pencil lines of trees stick upright in the snow looking almost as if they’re suspended in gauzy nothingness. Shriveled, black rose hips on the rugosa bush all wear frosty, white caps. They remind me of an elderly gathering. . .

Wrinkled, old women with salon-set curls and their crusty counterparts, whose hair stands ruffled after they’ve removed their seed corn caps, settle into cold folding chairs. The coffee is a new moon ringed by white styrofoam–black and strong. Crumbly sugar cookies are offered up from yellowed Tupperware. Heads nod and fingers tap in agreement over the local farm news and neighborhood updates. Not gossip, mind you, just a sharing of births and deaths and all the minutia in between. When talk thins, they drain the last cold, dark drops from their cups, sweep up sugary crumbs with a leathery palm, and push in the chairs. The women wrap their meringue curls in nylon scarves, and the men stomp out to warm the cars. Someone remembers to unplug the coffeepot.

To look at the mundane and see the beautiful, to find art in the scope of my every day, and then to choose from the vast palette of words and write a painting–that is my most desperate goal.

“You can make anything by writing.”            ~C.S. Lewis