wind and snow

[asakiyume]

My attempt to influence the wind's snow sculpting didn't work super well, but I do have a few photos to share.

Here are a couple of before shots. One was of a mound of snow from shoveling...



You can see behind it a piece of wood and a lawn sign. Those were my other ventures. The piece of wood didn't do much of anything, but the lawn sign worked a little. Here's a close-up before shot of the lawn sign:



And here's an after shot, taken this morning, of the same sign.



If you click through and enlarge, you can see a little ridge on the right side of the sign, and two hollows on the left side ... although I think that bigger hollow is maybe just one of my footprints, all smoothed and shaped, and not caused by the sign at all...

Here's an after shot of the mound. The high-contrast sun-and-shadow situation makes it a little hard to see how it's been smoothed over, but...



And lastly, even though I didn't take a before shot of this, here's another case where you can see a lot better how a sign interfered with how the wind shaped the snow:

Comments

[anna_wing]

Fascinating! Many artistic possibilities!

[asakiyume]

Winter does have the consolation of many opportunities for artistic play!

[sovay]

And here's an after shot, taken this morning, of the same sign.

It's a lovely after shot.

[asakiyume]

You could have cut yourself on the sharp shadows yesterday morning!

[cmcmck]

Snow isn't as easy to photograph as people think!

[asakiyume]

I didn't realize people thought it was easy!

[amaebi]

It often takes time to learn how to create with a partner, not less when the partner is extremely powerful and used to having its way.

[asakiyume]

What a beautiful--and fun--way of putting it!

[mallorys_camera]

Check out these spontaneous snow-and-ice sculptures here:

https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/ice-figure-in-the-form-of-grim-reaper-haunts-canadian-home/

[asakiyume]

Oh man, that's amazing!

[mallorys_camera]

i thought you might like those! 😀

[sartorias]

It's so smooth and pretty, like whipped cream!

[asakiyume]

Consistency-wise, this stuff is like when you pour sugar into a mixing bowl!

[sartorias]

*trying to picture that*

[wayfaringwordhack]

Experiments for the win! I love that you finally tried it out. So often we ask ourselves what-if? and think I should... and then don't.

[amaebi]

As a matter of curiosity, have you read George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind?

[asakiyume]

I have not! But I've enjoyed illustrations that I've seen from it.

[amaebi]

I was curious because MacDonald's wind describes her work very poetically.

It's very much a period piece, of course, and incorporates a fantasy-translated Christian viewpoint, though not as allegorically as, say, Lewis's Narnia.

I first ran into a reference to it in Ruth Sawyer's Roller Skates, and read it repeatedly in old editions before I acquired my own copy, which was a reprint introduced by Clifton Fadiman, who wrote something like, "Don't you hate this? Isn't it old and preachy?" But as one who enters into the worlds she reads-- at that time, somewhat in excess*-- it hadn't ever bothered me. And I think that a lot of children used, at least, to rather enjoy convincing and possible preachiness. We are, after, struggling to be acceptable enough to be permitted to survive.

* I had a wonderful turning point when I was about fourteen. I adored Lewis Carroll, and was reading an essay by him arguing that girls *should* be permitted to read Shakespeare-- but bowdlerized, Of Course, and felt myself labouring to agree with him. And then I realized that of course I was permitted to enjoy his work without being required to agree with his every view, and that I, hungry for scurrilous material, certainly didn't want young women to be Tenderly Sheltered in our Delicacy.

[asakiyume]

What you say about convincing and preachiness makes me think of one of the things I'm reading now, Marda Quincesinger: Postulant, which very explicitly deals with those sorts of matters. Here's a typical excerpt: the main character is talking to a teacher about a friend's having gotten a temporary reprieve from doing a disliked task:

“One of my friends won’t do her chores properly. And instead of getting in trouble, she was allowed to put them off. That doesn’t feel right to me.” Was that it? That was a big part of it, she thought. “I’m angry about that. It’s like she got a holiday for misbehaving.”

“How long did she get to put them off?” Mister Isidore asked, chewing on a snap pea himself. Without holding it in his hands, so it drooped from his mouth in a very ridiculous way.

“I… until later in the day,” Marda said, staring. “Then she has to come back after dinner.”

“Would you want to do your chores after dinner, instead of having free period?”

“No!” Marda said. “By the end of the day, I’m glad to have time to myself!”

“So you wouldn’t want your friend’s reprieve,” he said. “That is to say… if you were given the chance to put off your chores the way she has, you wouldn’t take it.”

“No.” Marda pondered, then shook her head. “No, definitely not. Especially since that’s the time I get to spend with my friends.”

“Maybe it’s more of a punishment than a holiday, then, wouldn’t you say?”

--so that's part of it, and it goes on from there. Marda's not persuaded by this discussion; she has more things she needs to think about before she can work her way to an understanding. It's just very *real* and very compassionate and interesting. ... Long story long, I agree with your point about "preachiness"!

[amaebi]

Now you've got me thinking about (a) preachiness about virtuous behaviour, versus (b) preachiness about the correctness and reliability of authorities and/or their structures, and how children are faced with learning to make a distinction. Remembering, as much as anything.

[asakiyume]

Yeah; "preachiness" is a pretty casual word that I feel is generally used to mean "exhortations to do what the speaker finds good or right." The "exhortation" element doesn't allow for much careful thought; it's more along the lines of a directive without much reasoning attached. And then the "what the speaker finds good or right" is a whole other can of worms. And in the two cases you're contrasting here, what the speaker finds good or right in the first case is a way of living, and in the second case is just one element: obedience to authority.

It seems like in the books we're talking about, although there are themes of living correctly/morally, there's also discussion, there's thinking about what that *means*--so it's not mere exhortation or directives.