Friday, February 23, 2007

winter storms

So they say it will snow this weekend. I am attuned to the weather! My camera sits waiting.

A preshot: before the storm.

february 07 367

But is it really before? I have been storming around Madison all week long, looking through voluminous listings of a glutted real estate market. Glutted with awful awful structures (yes, I am now broadening my span: condos and houses, but cheap. I’m into cheap. Bottom of the heap).

All these unsold houses: let’s make a deal and start all over. They were never meant to last, I’m sure. Antibiotics or fertilizers artificially kept them alive. Pufff! Out they go. Yes?

Or, if that is too costly a solution, let me suggest this: let’s get rid of the large ugly garages and let’s put in big windows into structures that seem to have way too few to allow for any sensible light. Weird in a cold state such as ours that we should keep the sun out.

Late in the evening I go to a Dar Williams concert. It will surprise no one that I cry right through half the songs.

At the end of one, she tells how she used to ask people to flash their lighters during the last bars. Gimmick? No, with Dar, it's not that. But she has been around for a decade or more and so lighters, she has come to realize, are not that everpresent. Instead, out come the cell phones – our concession to light in dark places. And so we wave our cell phones and sing Iowa and go home.

But that turns out to be not so easy. The blizzard that was supposed to come tomorrow is here. It is pouring down by the baleful! I’m giddy with the early pile up of wet wet snow. The drive home isn’t long. No, not long. I live downtown after all. This year, this month, I live downtown.

february 07 370

Toward th end, Dar sings “February" and so I think of house keys (handing house keys is an idea much tossed around in that song; the keys are tossed around as well. I believe a set lands in a pond which freezes over -- such a WIsconsin story) – who holds the keys to my house?