Rare movie plug

Oskar and Eli

I can't think of any other vampire movie I have really liked until Let the Right One In came in my Netflix queue. It's snowy and has lots of long, still takes of snow and buildings in the snow and the kind of neat, spare apartments that Swedish people put inside of those buildings. And the movie has these two child actors that are good, and one is a vampire, and by the end I was in love with them both.

I am far from the first person to speak up about this movie, but I wonder if there is enough of a buzz about it to turn on Nathan's contrarian instincts. I hope he lets us know.

So here's Eric layin' it down at this year's trip to Yoder's Sugarbush. He and Clare brought in the store-made batter, and it made these perfect circle pancakes. I ate them and they were good.

Mr. Yoder himself. After hearing his spiel about "how they make the syrup" for the last three years, I think I am ready to start my own operation using the various Catalpas and Ash trees in my yard.

A sweet mother and daughter moment in the sugar shack.Me and our more crepe-y batter. I likes the skinny pancakes.
Wes and Cash and Clare on the walk back to the car. You can tell by their faces that they are all about three pancakes happier than they were on the walk out.

now I believe a little

Eno

If there's one show on NPR that has always driven me nuts, it has to be "This I Believe," the weekly five minute segment of smug banality in which ordinary Americans (Hey, like me!) get to share with us all which cliched maxim they organize their lives around and explain it to us like they invented it.

But then they mixed it up a bit by giving time to not an ordinary American but an exceptional Englishman, Brian Eno. And his segment is so good. It's all about singing, together, with other people. And sure, I've heard about singing before, but the way he describes the experience makes it sound like such a new and good idea. Everyone should be singing together, but we won't.

* * *

I can't think about Eno without remembering the time I first listened to his Music for Films. It was the summer after I graduated as an enthusiastic and directionless English major. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, the next year, or the next week, so my friend Bruce and I went car camping on the beach, Whitefish Point up on Lake Superior. All I had to do was read.

We were both fascinated by the Lake Superior Shipwreck Museum just up the road, so most days we went back there, came back to read on the sand, ate something with sand in it, and then read until it got dark, when we listened to Music for Films on this tiny stereo and then out on Lake Superior the freighters sounded their deep horns. The idea of a freighter on Lake Superior still sounds so quaint to me as to be absurd, but there they were, empty for all I know, pushing through the largest freshwater lake on the power of maritime nostalgia. When they rounded the Point, we stopped reading to look up at their lights.

Anyway, that Eno record was perfect for that setting. If you've heard it, you probably know what I mean.

snowstalgia

Usually the point of the whole "street" photography thing is that you don't get caught taking the picture, but sometimes it's fun to just click the camera right in some stranger's face and see what happens. Here, I think I just made someone mad, but oh well. I snapped the picture because of the map, mainly, but her response is kind of funny, too.

But I took this two weekends ago while we were up in Michigan taking the kids skiing for the first time. I thought it would go like this: (1) spend more than you want to for tiny skis; (2) kids fall down on snow; (3) kids want to go home.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to see that it actually went like this: (1) spend more than you want to for tiny skis; (2) have fun falling in snow and skiing and whatever. So, snow, thank you and we will miss you. It is getting warm now, 60's even, though it is the early March kind of warm that simply oozes a cold winter sweat up from the earth and out from your lawn and even the sidewalks, too, somehow.

So I, for one, am that kind of person that could do with another snow. Look how pretty it was to drive around up there--slow and mindful the driving was. It's so democratic, the big snow storms, something we all have in common for a day or two. Then when it is warm outside we all go our separate ways.

So, snow to May, maybe, and then let the azaleas bloom and okay tulips but even better let's get on to the dry, high summer stuff like the bergamot and the cone flower, oh, and that small plot of delphineum that is hanging in there, too.