Companion Piece for No.225
The morning of January 20th I wake, roll up the blinds on the west and south sides of the house, and the snow is gone. It is as if I dreamt it being there at all, and the only evidence of the -9 temperatures is now the frozen-solid bag of ericaceous compost in the garage, and the ice which has managed to survive wrapped up and insulated inside a dark green tarpaulin. Some things simply don’t hold on.
On Thursday we had driven out of the valley, taking the snow-softened mountain route over to a neighbouring small town, where I learned that the refill shop did not, in fact, stock dishwasher powder. Returning from this minor disappointment (though with two Swedish semla1 buns on the backseat) is when you saw the unidentifiable birds—house martin-sized but completely the wrong time of year for those, a white rump and clearly wishing to either hide or eat, or both, on the ground amongst the frozen mazes of heather.
Mountains and their heights beckon at us now, but not so long ago the general population thought them looming, ugly, dark eyesores within a landscape. The romanticism and awe they incite feels obvious, natural, but changes in mass feeling such as this should make a person wonder how many of the things they believe beautiful or otherwise are the result of purely cultural sway. If we had all been told the great, thousands-of-feet lumps of rock and time were to be feared and avoided at all costs, would we have listened?