get ink, shed tears.

I took these pictures of myself out on a walk a few nights ago. It was getting colder but I desperately needed to feel like I was breathing, I've been feeling a bit strange like that lately. I ended up swinging on the swings at the playground a few blocks south of my house for quite some time, gently gliding back & forth with quite a bit of glee. It was a very comforting motion, to swing in the dark, unnoticed by passing cars & raucous hockey players under the loud fluorescence of the rink nearby. Only a stray snowshoe hare watched me as it rummaged under the icy snowbanks. After swinging left me a little dizzy & much colder, I wandered by the elementary school, & took these pictures on the basketball court, having much fun playing with the one glimmering ambery light on the side of the building.

There's a Regina Spektor song, Après Moi (mp3 here), that contains a few lyrics from Boris Pasternak that I really love, that are somehow a summation of my feelings, & of February:

февраль достать чернил и плакать
писать о феврале навзрыд
пока грохочущая слякоть
весною чёрною горит

February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

And these words, in turn, reminds me so much of a book I just read, by Marusya Bociurkiw, a writer I am really, really enjoying right now. First through her poems (especially those about her baba) in Halfway to the East, and then through her novel, The Children of Mary... about three generations of Ukrainian-Canadian women, about how the past is inherited & resolved within a family, how the haunting of that river is inescapable. Really lovely & achy, especially in the imagery of water, the image of the rusalka... I highly, highly recommend it.

"Who was it that said, you can't cross the same river twice? The river I step in is not the river I stand in. Stuff rises up, you never know when. Sewage, overflow, effluent, the ebb and flow of time. We want to think we control things, we're only human that way. But what was it Baba used to say? Nature so-o-o-o stubborn, always have its way. And the rusalky, those haughty demanding sirens, lurking even in these buried rivers, pretending to call me home. Your sister, your mother...

Rusalka die only because people make her, my Baba once said in her gruff, cryptic way. People having to live better, then rusalka can rest.

The river is always there. The river is letting go."

-- p.205, Marusya Bociurkiw, The Children of Mary (Inanna Publications, 2006)

It will make you weep, but it's definitely worth it. Definitely definitely. & if you need some comfort & nourishment after the book, Bociurkiw also has a food blog with some very succulent-looking recipes on it. She also has a food memoir appearing soon, called Comfort Food for Break-ups, which intrigues me & entices me, based on the very small excerpt posted on the link above. Very sumptuous indeed. Meanwhile, I need to try her Jamaican soup...