Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

I remember it was mid-January and on into what appear culturally to us most as long bleak days lost in winter. The holiday season was over. Color was gone from front porches and no one felt like getting together for dinner. Why everyone needs a break mid-January remains an odd quantum equation. But nonetheless, looking around one evening I saw the day stretching. Dozens and dozens and dozens of crows heading across the sky flew off above the windows like a single crazed motion. A black winged rodeo. A folk lore anthology refers to multiplies or crows as: a murder of crows.  But who or what was riding that stirrup? Not that I saw where they came from. Or even where they were going. Suddenly they filled the sky in the window. What to do but  step outdoors... be closer to what was happening above as though I were somehow kin to it all along. Snow began falling. Falling in mists at first and then heavy flurries and soon after there was a storm whirling around. And it was below zero cold which made it seem so easy. This was the time - to have one foot outside in the snow like weary mammals looking into the cold and dark and the other indoors in the pipe line heat of our urbanite hermitage - for vegetables cooked in a stew like winter demands - dark bread with sweet butter fat - alcohol spirits that chase troubles out the door but never solve them - but no one was around. But looking it up later on the weather channel what intuition said was a gimme was confirmed with information from satellites. The days were growing longer, if only by seconds. Why count? Ah, but that's the thing. Time - the life long habit we make - being in the drift of forever - starts taking an express. What to do then? The calender day may be longer. But the further out we go the more that calender day runs out! I remember walking on the frozen lake one evening and you said I don't know if I'll be coming home soon. The crunch of snow underfoot - clean sounding - direct - and the more you walked the more you needed to hear that sound - as though snow underfoot spoke for the world and was not simply another silence in winter. The sunlight had long settled beyond the white nests of the high Adirondack peaks. A fishing shanty began to glow behind a dirty plastic window in a gas lantern but otherwise the other ice holes were vacated for the night. Yea there were stars that formed. But that's all. Way out light in the distance. But today - like a fulcrum - remembrance springs eternal - one self as its called though we should constantly doubt it - is impossible - without today and the reverie - they both have to be somewhere in the same place for us to exist - so forgetting about the present today I painted over an old painting. And I had a sudden feeling or maybe an exchange of feelings that I was erasing some part of the past. In a way that was probably so. But was it the painting - or the times - that is memory - associated with the painting? Again what? A sort of perky melancholy in the abstract that held a breath of life to itself? Or was it literally something I would never see again? Frankly what I needed were the materials more - the physical fact that was the canvas and the already built up surface with layers of paint - than I required the image on the canvas despite the sentiment or even the technical value involved. And outside the snow was falling. A fine light snow covering up the old crust. And maybe what I was doing was also snowing. Covering up a storm of record with something different. Maybe the new painting will be called the snow of attraction. But that sounds too stupid to do. But anyway I was relived. Like I was no longer someplace else but present. In the studio. With music on. A pot of soup cooking in the house. Watching the snow fantastic falling in pressures and twilight lost in the build up.