Spring, And the Farm Takes to the Air
I reached into the ash at our feet, picked up a stone, and juggled it in my hands like a hot potato. Magnus said,"Dig two inches into the ash, you can bake hot-spring bread. Some housewives do it. It takes four hours."
John McPhee
Cooling the Lava, 1989
Now came the dust, though still thinly. I look back: a dense cloud looms behind us, following us like a flood poured across the land ...We had scarcely sat down when a darkness came that was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but more like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.
Pliny the Younger AD79
It smelt strongly like rotten eggs. Initially, I thought maybe it's something to do with my young daughter, or the animals in the field.
Iceland resident Jane Matthews
quoted in The Guardian
Recent events in Europe remind us that Nature will do as it pleases, sometimes regularly, cyclically, and sometimes randomly and unexpectedly. Air travel is shut down over an entire continent, and all due to activity so old it predates continents themselves. It reminds us that even our highest technological achievements - Stratoliners and the like - are no escape and are unable to master the ground we live on. We live, forever, as children of the world that begat us.
The unexpected and the random in Iceland is coupled by the predictability of springtime in the Appalachians, and all the appropriate harbingers are checked off. Daffodils. Dandelions. Fruit trees. Honeybee brood. Equinox. Maple blooms. Peepers. Poplar leaves. The final symbol of Spring, the winged frenzy of insects, had been building slowly and recently reached its high fervor. A clump of dandelions just outside the house this afternoon were host to more species of flying insects than I could name - honeybees and tiny little wasps and the most welcome of all: little bee flies. Carpenter bees have been squabbling around me for more than a week now. Swarms of gnats make little funnel clouds above the lawn. Mason bees are peeking out of their nests. Saw a dragonfly up by the pond. And the butterflies - swallowtails mostly - are floating over the road and lighting where they please.
John McPhee
Cooling the Lava, 1989
Now came the dust, though still thinly. I look back: a dense cloud looms behind us, following us like a flood poured across the land ...We had scarcely sat down when a darkness came that was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but more like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.
Pliny the Younger AD79
It smelt strongly like rotten eggs. Initially, I thought maybe it's something to do with my young daughter, or the animals in the field.
Iceland resident Jane Matthews
quoted in The Guardian
Recent events in Europe remind us that Nature will do as it pleases, sometimes regularly, cyclically, and sometimes randomly and unexpectedly. Air travel is shut down over an entire continent, and all due to activity so old it predates continents themselves. It reminds us that even our highest technological achievements - Stratoliners and the like - are no escape and are unable to master the ground we live on. We live, forever, as children of the world that begat us.
The unexpected and the random in Iceland is coupled by the predictability of springtime in the Appalachians, and all the appropriate harbingers are checked off. Daffodils. Dandelions. Fruit trees. Honeybee brood. Equinox. Maple blooms. Peepers. Poplar leaves. The final symbol of Spring, the winged frenzy of insects, had been building slowly and recently reached its high fervor. A clump of dandelions just outside the house this afternoon were host to more species of flying insects than I could name - honeybees and tiny little wasps and the most welcome of all: little bee flies. Carpenter bees have been squabbling around me for more than a week now. Swarms of gnats make little funnel clouds above the lawn. Mason bees are peeking out of their nests. Saw a dragonfly up by the pond. And the butterflies - swallowtails mostly - are floating over the road and lighting where they please.
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