I'm working on the Friday Miscellanea, collecting little tidbits from here and there, but I have a busy week, so I won't have anything much else for you. A few more haiku have turned up, though, (meaning I wrote a few more), so here are a couple:
Too much weather
From the valley to the peak:
Rain, then hail, then snow.
* * *
Fir trees on the ridge
(We are resting by the stream)
Burst into flame!
* * *
Both of these call for a comment. They both recall my experiences out of high school when I worked in forestry for a couple of years. This was in British Columbia where logging is a large industry. The first haiku recalls a day in early spring when young trees are planted. We were working on a mountainside, going up and down the slope, and at the bottom it was raining (it is usually raining on the coast of BC), in the middle of the slope it turned to hail, and a light snow at the top. So all day long we passed through these three. The second haiku is from a brief experience as a fire-fighter. This was also in the mountains and as we refreshed ourselves with water from a little stream in a ravine, a whole range of fir trees on the ridge above us suddenly burst into flame, from the base to the top. It was very dramatic and quite unexpected. What happens in the summer in BC is that if a fire gets started, it can work its way along the forest floor, slowly consuming the year's-long buildup of bark and pine-needles until it reaches more trees. A fir tree in a dry summer month is like a torch waiting to be lit.
Many years after he wrote it, Sibelius said that the opening of his Symphony No. 6 always reminded him of the scent of new snow. This is Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Orchestra:
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