Saturday, May 25, 2013

Notes from a North Shore trip where I did not go to any libraries

1. Has anyone looked into the possibility that the tops of pine trees are actually little communication towers that allow the trees to chat back and forth amongst themselves? You could scoff "What could pine trees possibly have to say to one another." but I don't think anyone reading my blog would say anything like that. Nevertheless I answer our fictional scoffer with this: On an average day at my library I spend at least an hour (cumulatively) discussing the weather with people and yet none of us are even outside! We hardly even go outside! Pine trees are outside all the time. It stands to reason that they discuss the weather. They do it with the little towers they grow at their tops, and they would love to discuss other things too, but they simply do not have the time. There is too much weather to discuss!

2. Driving, I crossed what seemed to be at least two exits for the "Soo Moose Trail". It led me to this aphorism: You can soo moose, but they never show up in court.

3. I am sitting in a beautiful, wide, and wedge shaped room that points out at  Lake Superior. Twenty-two large windows comprise the whole of this wedge and I sit up near the prow with a view of a scattering of pines (who are chatting about the weather) and of so much wild, fresh water that my brain keeps having to struggle to believe it. It turns out I really like this feeling of my brain struggling to believe something because it is too obviously and too greatly true. And all I need to do is look at the lake, and there it is.

4. As I walked in and toured through what surely must be the most beautiful house I have ever stayed in what I mostly noticed were the books. "Oooh!" I thought to myself "He (referring to some former, hypothetical, deceased (?) owner) had a whole set of Trollope!" I have never read a single line of Trollope, but in my mind's eye I was settling down to read, over the course of the next two nights, all 14,000 pages of Trollope. That's no doubt what I'd be doing now too if I hadn't been suddenly seized with the terrible need to tell you about it, and the moose, and the pine trees, and all that water, which cannot be, but is.

2 comments:

  1. There is something deliberately cruel about you stepping outside of this Clerk Cage you've so well described. (Or am I just aping Blanch Du Bois again in an effort to cloak my envy?) Fine, drive away from it all and loose it all for the moment while taking in that vast, cold, fresh water.
    Me?, I'll be boorish. Yes, pine trees do communicate with each other but they do so by emitting diverse chemicals that have to do with stresses like various pests and such and I imagine weather and sex and other pleasures as well. ;>P

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    Replies
    1. A cage? I hope I haven't given that impression. Actually all the people who come to the library are much like lake superior, um, er, don't know why I made that analogy... because they are full of water?

      Anyway, thanks for the botanical information. Don't you think maybe those chemicals come mainly from their cute tops though? And maybe all those discussion points that you mentioned for pine trees are, for pine trees, just various forms of weather? But perhaps it isn't entirely scientific to decide the theory and then justify it afterwards, but then, it's poetry science, not science science.

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