Silhouettes

I drive past this tree every day, and it catches my eye almost every time. Curling, intricate, lacy, the branches etch a beautiful and complex pattern against the sky.

Cave drawings may have been the earliest silhouettes created by people, but the word itself wasn't coined until the 18th century. There is general agreement that Étienne de Silhouette gave his name to the stark outline art form, originally thought of as a cut-out representation of people's heads and now given the broader sense of a black shape against a light background. Silhouette was a French finance minister who, to cope with a budget imbalance, implemented austerity measures that history records as "unpopular" (which means that the people who wrote history didn't like these measures): he taxed the rich to pay for the government's debt. It is unclear if the silhouette was named after Étienne because it was an austere or inexpensive portrait, or if he was in fact a practitioner of the art form.

There is something eye-catching about silhouettes. I took the picture above of Amy and Rebecca through a tent at the Guilford Fair a couple years ago.

Words, too, are a kind of silhouette. The letters are dark marks on a light surface, and they quite literally "speak to us." And the words they form provide us an outline of the writer's thoughts, leaving it up to us, the readers, to fill in the meaning.

Ice

After a lot of snow, we have had a lot of ice in Connecticut. The driving has been, periodically, rather alarming, in part because as it rained and froze it was often hard to know if the road was wet or covered in black ice. The thawing and freezing forced ice up under our eaves, which became water dripping into our living room. It made me think of Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

But our fear of icy roads and Frost's analogies don't account for the incredibly beauty of the layers of thick ice covering the bushes and trees, and glazing the tops of the rounded piles of snow.

Day after day, everything glistened. Our normally beautiful neighborhood was transformed into an alien and magical place.

In time, even I became a little tired of the extra scraping and sanding and chiseling involved in trying to take the ice off driveway and roof. The cold nagged at us. But always, beneath the layer of ice, we know that there is the promise of a spring that approaches, day by day.