“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs…”

In the dream, when I step outside and encounter the tracks in the snow, it’s as if  all the aggravations simply fall away. They are paw prints – wolf or dog, I’m not sure – but made by an artful canine indeed, as the animal has used his paw to make shapes  – circular patterns of crisp prints. I walk a bit further and discover a human has used a piece of fern to do the same thing on a snow embankment. I look up. There’s the sound of a helicopter but I can’t see it through the clouds. I know I’m in Dorval and I am five years old.  But just as with the aggravations that come before, that knowledge doesn’t matter – all that counts are the paw and fern prints in the snow.

The dream works well as a parable for the joys and the aggravations encountered yesterday – the joyful part being the writing. Aggravations lose their power as soon as you can make something out  of  them. Seeing how lazing around is the more attractive option, maybe aggravations  are what made Homo faber – man the maker.

It snowed here. Nothing like the snow in the dream or that of my childhood. But sufficient to force all the plants back into the house. The puny stick of a palm adopted by me after  someone had thrown it out  in Capestang is now pretending to be a tropical garden below one of the only objects left from the Florida Period – a photograph of pelicans under a pier. The photo is crooked on the wall, and I’m itching to straighten it. But if I re-shoot this, I won’t have the snowflakes in the window, so that’s no good.

The title, of course is from Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill, in honor of the fern frond in my dream.