It’s the time of year to be quite grateful for coats. And red ones at that — in case you get buried by snow.

It’s dumping buckets of snow right now outside — the big sticky kind that gums up your feet when you try to puddle around in it!

I am caught in the miry deep of much work this week and last — and so here I am, trying to escape, only to get blogged down.

(That is not entirely my clever pun… You’ll have to visit my mother’s blog at cynthiagustavson.modblog.com and read her first entry to understand that pun’s history!)

I am not disheartened this week. I really thought I would be — because I have often been the last several months.

I read the New York Times every day, and rather amusingly dissect it with my dullened scissors, searching for articles that I need to process… and my blog is the place that I process most of that, while (hopefully!) at the same time, somehow communicating with folks about my fears, angers, hopes and loves…

I wasn’t disheartened this week also because of a blog I read at my good friend Jeshua’s site — jeshuaerickson.com/blog — He talks about hope… And I feel like I have the right to be hopeful. And I am hopeful…

This was the week of the Bono-Bill Gates-Bill Clinton symposium on Africa’s poverty. This was the week of Iraq’s election. This was the week of true possibilities for reconciliation between Palestine and Israel.

Here’s to hope.
G’night.

I guess I don’t understand what happened in the Holocaust. I don’t understand how people could either survive the way so many did, through the hell of those times, or how folks on the other side could get on with their ‘everyday’ lives while knowing about the horrors, or even working in the camps. (Though I do understand how the Germans felt who didn’t necessarily know or realize the horrors or details of the concentration camps, because my government also keeps me in the dark about the atrocities for which we are responsible.)

I just heard on NPR the story of a woman who was in Auschwitz. She talked in a way that only survivors of the Holocaust can speak. I have only met three survivors personally, but they all shared a kindness that I can’t quite describe, but that you probably understand if you, too, have met a survivor.

I will tell the positive message she gave in her story to me, and the message I was given by another Holocaust survivor — a woman in Nahariya, Israel, about 6 years ago My telling these stories is meant to be a testament to the courage of the survivors and of those who died in the camps, so I hope you are able to read it as such:

I had so much going around in my head today that I felt like one of those snow-glass-ball little villages that you shake up… but now it’s all settled down — but I think I’ve sprung a leak, and if you’ve ever seen those little glass balls after they’ve started leaking water, they aren’t so pretty anymore…

I am quite proud that my car is still running — through the great blizzard that buried us in our homes (not quite) — every morning I have to give the engine a good kick, and spend about 15 minutes begging with it to warm up… But I try to find a midpoint — it’s a 1987 Plymouth minivan — if I get too sassy with it, I feel like it will just decide to drive its own way one day without me like an upset spouse after a bad couple of decades.

And it has been gorgeous here, the sides of the streets piled up with mountains of snow — the pride of the little bobcats and their drivers… But for some reason, our safety comes first, and the beauty of it all second — so there are huge piles of salt and sand muck everywhere –

I figure that it is a ‘blog’ thing to title your blog creatively and mysteriously. So I have gone for the creative title, and decided to opt for less mystery: here is where “Three Sumach-Red Dogs I Run With” comes from:

Valley Song by Carl Sandburg

Your eyes and the valley are memories.
Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl.
It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline.
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.
And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

I will see you again to-morrow.
I will see you again in a million years.
I will never know your dark eyes again.
These are three ghosts I keep.
These are three sumach-red dogs I run with.

All of it wraps and knots to a riddle:
I have the moon, the timberline, and you.
All three are gone–and I keep all three.
—
(1918 - from Cornhuskers)

I have been astonished for years about the depth of this poem. It is about the entirety of our existence, past and future and present, so incredibly nostalgic…
And then he throws in that phrase… “These are three sumach-red dogs I run with”

Such an incredibly vivid image, and yet, I’m not sure what he means — I just feel what he means. I know the depth of color of sumach, and I know what it is like to run with dogs… What a vivid and powerful image…

This is the way our life goes — we run with sumach-red dogs.

So this blog will be a description of what I see, the dogs I run with, the coffee cups turned upside down.

And everything wraps and knots to a riddle…

Do you know the way snow squeaks when it’s really cold outside?

I love that sound…

That’s the kind of snow we have here at the moment, and it makes me exceedingly happy. The kind of snow that is warm and sticky and thick is what most folks like, but I really have to say I like the squeaky kind.

Maybe it’s the fact that the snow maintains so much of its own integrity… the flakes don’t just give in — they don’t just mold to the earth’s idea of what they should land, melt and congeal like.

Maybe I should learn those hundreds of words that Eskimos have for snow — maybe that would change the way I think about the stuff — it’s like water — there’s so many kinds of water — high mountain water that looks green because of the glacier mineral content — tap water that looks brown from the iron in it — the water that comes squeezed out of your socks when you take a new pair of black or brown boots off that you just went sledding in and hadn’t ever worn in the snow before (kind of nasty brackish black)…

Wouldn’t it be cool if we knew how to use our vocabularies better — (that was a sort of subtle joke — I seem to say cool as often as R-rated movies say *&%$) — and spoke of panoplies and jiggersycthabbits?

Stay warm (and for goodness sake, squeeze that nasty black brackish goop out of your socks!)…