We gather, leap off a prompt, and fall down, down the rabbit hole, seeing what happens… on Free Fall Fridays.
“There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” —Celia Thaxter
prompt-ice sculptures
If you go to the city of Edmonton, in the middle of January, there they are: ice sculptures. In Churchill square, overlooked by a statue of Sir Winnie, is a number of statues, set in beautiful randomness, glistening and glittering, elves and gnomes, wolves and foxes, and what ever else the local artisans can come up with.
There are lots of artists in this town on the Yellow Head Highway, atop the Queen Elizabeth the Second Highway, straddling the Canadian Pacific Railway, surrounded in summer by gorgeous yellow canola fields, where the land dips and sways to wheat fields and cattle grass far away. But here in town the sons of the soil have a talent for art. Some are born left handed, and some are born artistic, here under the northern lights.
Artists can be seen cheerfully crafting their ice blocks with chisels and chain saws, sandpaper and squirts of coloured dye. Artists can be very creative. Not purists but artists.
The artists are watched by passers by, by grad students with beards, children with light sabers in their mittens, and strolling parents. The weather is sub-zero, but no one notices.
At one corner is the ticket centre and gift shop. Enter here for an idea of how folks endure the cold: a set of stairs leads the ground hogs down and under the street to a mall, or, the other way, to a subway that will soon emerge to run along tracks to the fair grounds and beyond. Enjoy winter, enjoy sculpture, and art your heart away.
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Prompt- go away
When the rain slashes from the sky and branches whip their sap over the windows and you can’t hear anything—that is when my wife turns to me and says, “The spirits are restless.” I always smile, without a word. Sometimes I am reminded that my wife grew up around these parts, here in the land of old mines, old town and old spirits.
The good news is that when it’s stormy outside there are no storms inside. My wife never argues with me on these nights. No point it trying to watch football on net flicks, now when you can’t hear the score. For football and comedy, I like to be able to hear the crowd.
One night, early on, the wind had subsided, the rain was a soft continual patter, and I was dozing on my big boy easy chair. I heard a spooky voice, a lady’s voice, old, saying, “Go-o-o awayyyyy.” That was chill, as if water had gotten in and gone down my neck. “Go-o-o awayyyy” Believe me, it did not sound like my wife at all. But I went to the bedroom and there she was. Sound asleep. With a little drool. No, no way could she be talking in her sleep: The presence of drool was as tell-tale of nothing disturbed as a an old cob web. Now I started to shiver.
I lifted my gaze. There in the window was a spirit. Pale, unfriendly, angry even. “Go-o- awayyy!” it said. There was only one thing to do.
I shook my wife back and forth. “honey, one of your relatives is back from the dead. You talk to her.”
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Sean Crawford
Landing with a thump, reflecting that a grateful heart can make a home exotic,
South of Edmonton,
down the QE II highway,
March 2021
Weather note: In the next week, two of the nights will stay above freezing, and all of the days will be in double digits above freezing—hurray!
