March comes in

March has come in, grey and cool,wet snow and melting. Dreary. I've dropped shopping and am now seeking escape through books, specifically Annie Proulx's. She is one of the authors who will be at the writers' festival that we plan to attend in Newfoundland when we are there for the last two weeks of August.

As I couldn't convince Miriam to ski after Tai Chi this morning and as the weather report for Sovereign was gloomy, I went home, organized some stuff with the Okanagan Restoration guys and went to the library to pick up Brokeback Mountain. It was originally a short story and consequently is such a small book that I signed it out, took it upstairs and read it in about an hour.  I can't remember the details of the movie; I think many differ from the short story, but the earthy atmosphere and the intensity of passion are in both. I allowed my memory of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger to override Annie Proulx's descriptions of the characters as I read because I'm a sucker for a handsome man. Annie Proulx doesn't write much about beautiful people and high times.  I've just finished Postcards and am now reading That Old Ace in the Hole.  I'm glad I haven't seen movies of them because I can let my imagination run with her words through landscapes that I've only driven by and into the lives of people who are as rugged and briefly beautiful and widely ranging as the land they are part of.  Her books don't cheer me up in this time of unsettled weather and house restoration, but while I'm reading one of them I am far from here in a strange land with people whose lives are very different from mine in all but the essential struggles, passions and unpredictability that make us all human.

Crocuses in the front yard, March 6, 2016

The same part of the front yard this year