nefna

There's a chatter in the background, the sound of a breeze rustling though memory, and these days I hear names it in I haven't heard for a very long time. But no one comes when I call them, which is a pity.

dreams of you all through my head

On the second day he lay half-curled on a new cushion in a new house and dreamed while we watched. His brow twitched, his toes clenched, his lips curled, and his eyes flicked under their lids after something that frightened him -- his hackles bristled.

If the despairing among us are haunted by a black dog, what anxious dreams plague the black dog in turn?

skjarr

Tap tap tap twice now through my dreams, a low black form, tail held humbly aft and down. Someone should clip your toenails soon. Someone kind who waits for you to get a little less shy.

*sneigʷʰ-

It is still coming down here and elsewhere. A friend new-settled far from home sends satellite images of Britain alhvítt, the hilly west buried under drifts of nyf. Elsewhere: snjór, Schnee, sneg. Apparently it is an old word, derived only from itself and not from some root meaning "white" or "cold" or "winter." Elemental. Basic.

People who like to theorize such things like to place cold and heavy clouds over the original homeland of the original speakers, and then work out where it lay with the weather report in hand. I don't think I believe in that country anymore. I'm not sure I believe in the language of original speakers.

Let the kinship of tongues be enough without elevating their originals above the now. We can all be equally at home (or abroad) in our different snowy places.

bjalla

Still remembering an image from the holiday rush from (how strange, still!) last year:

This one from the 3/4-size faux town square that increasingly serves as the hub of all retail activity hereabouts. You drive there and then you stroll about, pretending that you strolled all the way there -- after all, it couldn't be far in this quaint and obviously old little brick-built settlement. Older places are so nice that way. Forget your troubles, your exurban ennui, and above all the massive parking lots extending in all directions, just past the Potemkin village facades of the Limited and Ann Taylor.

Now add the further pleasure of hearing the lazy hooves of bored and be-jingled horses on the pavement (someone's oversight not to put in cobbles -- but overlook this) pulling carriages of shoppers. Ring in the season, urge their lackadaisical drivers, whether you like it or not, and chew not the bit. Surely, one of them has a poetic bent and, as he swings his furry hocks in time, is mulling on the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.

hringja inn

Ears still ringing with a decade's worth of recollection, though not this last one's. Instead, echoes of that more distant era of even more regrettable fashions. (Lucky I was so unfashionable at the time -- it cuts down my quotient of regrets.) I remember tweaking the dial of a cheap clock radio infinitesimally leftward in search of the weak signal of a distant college station (calculus abandoned on the desk), hoping to hear minor keys and dissonances sputtering though between the Classic Rock and the Top Forty.

Nice to visit, just now, much later and having escaped the pains peculiar to then, all in order to mark the present sliding into the past and the numbers ticking over into the future, all in a reliable and familiar time signature. Step to it and wave your hands, now, and step again.