There's a name for them - Chionophiles. Beings that thrive best in winter and crave the cold, dry days that crisp the lungs after hours of musty, fusty interiors. Seeking out Alpine treks or hooked by the lure of ski towns. All those slate clean white-outs, slippery slopes, well-heeled for high speed whilst the temperate townspeople trudge through sludgy streets or loiter sluggishly indoors like dusty, tropical plants in the hothouses of winter homes.  You can see them looking out through steamy windows, forever keeping watch for signs of thaw.

The summer before last she'd abandoned her skis for that most final of times. He followed on after, within a year or so. His hiking boots stand forever idle, with a dusting of Welsh mountains and Austria embedded in the soles. 

6 thoughts on “Fenestration à la fenêtre”

1. I was having a dream. Then I woke. There, only a little past my nose, another dream wide awake in the middle of the night. So that’s what a dream looks like.

   As well your language given Light, nothing less than what the image says. All of it beautiful Laura.

   Thank you.

   1. thank you for the waking dream Neil – am trying out some brief prose writings to run almost parallel to a photo illustration – have you read Teju Cole’s ‘blind spot’? He is master of this and inspired me to give it a go as here. This one is an epitaph of sorts to a very ‘significant other’ (a saying that is loaded in its seeming neutrality) as tangential can sometimes speak volumes!

2. Your prose to image wedding worked just fine I felt. (I wanna say “think”, but no, it’s feeling I trust.) Took me a while to see the image twice. Once as I imagined, once as more commonly named. But then, so early we’re taught “how to see the naming of things” while maybe our own impression is valid as well. So too your prose, slow, insistent, gather momentum, their big story. Then the second stanza lifts its head, swift taking the reins, going another way. The phrasing, the timing, eloquent. It is how your work feels to me. That is what I love.

   And Teju Cole, unfamiliar. Ordered his book. Wish me luck. Difficult to focus attention on reading these days. Will have to tell you sometime about the few real “masters” I’ve known. (sleep)

   1. I like to be inspired but like you, go my own way – It’s how the dragonfly flits and dips across the water
      p.s. I too find reading hard these days -?attention span ? interest – Cole’s prose is short enough to grasp and savour

      1. Yes.

3. Wonderful layers in both image and words.
   I can’t seem to read anything these days either….(K)

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