Edward Gorey Visits Sewanee

The spookily spiked Queen Anne's lace
announces winter is apace.

Weather on the Way

A friend described our weather in this notwinter/notspring time as "fickle." 

Indeed.

A beautiful, clear, sunny morning I spent at my desk on the computer turned into disappointment: a canceled Shakerag walk and a dip in temperature and graying of sky.

Another friend tells me that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder because I pine and whine when a day (or a week or a month) passes without bright sun. Of the symptoms listed by the NIH, I admit to these: "increased appetite with weight gain" (like a bear before hibernation, I eat) and "unhappiness." 

A better term for the disorder I suffer is Seasonal Photography Disorder: the bugs are hard to find and without sun I cannot lose myself in the sensory pleasures of color and form.

So today, lost to the only direct sun some in Sewanee enjoyed, I tinkered with an afternoon snapshot of the campus, silvery light slipping between horizontal clouds. I couldn't just live with the Gorey-esque tableau, though.

I sweetend it with the amber light I so miss.

Soon, I say to myself, soon, and then spoon another healthy heap of carb-drenched food on my plate.

A Trio of American Crows

sat on a skeletal tree, at times nervously glancing in different directions, at others bobbing and rocking like a silent barbershop trio, until suddenly and for no reason I could determine, they cawed, as if at the cold wind scudding clouds across the sky.

I could not help thinking of a Gorey illustration or of a scherenschnitte silhouette or of a poem:

The Crow
by Kaelum Poulson

So beautiful
but often unseen
a maid of nature
the street cleaner that's everywhere
never thanked
never liked
always ignored
so elegant in a way no one sees
but without it we would
be in trash up to our knees
with the heart of a lion
the mind of a fox
the color of the night fox
a crow
the unpaid workman
that helps in every way
each and every day