Friday, December 07, 2007

Travel plans


The cover of a book on Claude Monet is tacked to the bulletin board on the wall in front of my desk. It is, specifically, a reproduction of one of Monet’s paintings of the Garden at Giverny. I’m caught in butter yellow water lilies and the water itself, a shimmery reflection of surrounding greenery.

I’m dressed in jeans, a sweater, socks, boots, my winter coat and a scarf. My hands are icy.

The new heating system for the college is having one of its frequent unreliable days and outside, it’s -14C.

I’m imagining strolling the garden at Giverny, eating in Monet’s blue and yellow dining room, drinking coffee in his studio, talking a little about the work, the light…

Later, I plan to visit Frieda Khalo’s blue house.

Mostly, I plan not to be here – where the Atlantic Ocean spits wind cold and damp enough to split your bones. To leave this place where, for 8 months of most years, listless grays and shriveled browns give way only to the dingy white of exhaust-stained snow. This place of shoulder-hunch and salt-stained boots and February weather bombs. Soul shrinking. Bleak.

I will take myself to Frieda’s, where tropical flowers bloom year-round – fiery reds and flaming oranges, exotic pinks and purples…the scent of heaven in the air.

Frieda waits in this alternate dimension. A pet monkey on her shoulder, flowers in her hair, the jungle breathing green behind her. We will walk to the blue house together, holding hands and laughing.

6 comments:

herhimnbryn said...

Travel well and hopefully always, dear lj.

Dale said...

(o)

Zhoen said...

Bon Voyage.

Personally, I like the bracing weather, but I am odd.

LJ said...

As a Canadian, it amounts to my duty to hate cold. And freezing rain. And gale force winds. And snow. And weather bombs that shut down the city. And once I saw a seagull flying backwards outside my window - the wind was that strong. I'm trapped by it. Me and the cat. The weather on this coast is particularly severe and unpredictable...and I am without a car. Sometimes (the rare lovely snowfall, the rare clear winter day)I find it lovely (and bracing)but mostly it's like having a slushy driven into your face by a wind machine. Grinning.
Ah. Frieda's blue house. Monet's garden. Colors by the thousands.

beadbabe49 said...

oh yes...I've been doing some virtual traveling to mexico too...maybe some day we can really meet there!

LJ said...

BB - We beam there. Why not? it's virtual. We can imagine anything we like. Frieda's place, then?