~:: Inversion pt 3 – and the punchline ::~

Okay, so I’m making my way through all this by making a story out of it. What a surprise.

Several weeks ago, on our way to church one very foggy morning, we came out the front door and found these stars utterly feathered with hoar frost. By the time we got home, all the charm had melted. I’ve been watching for the same thing to happen, but it hasn’t – till this particular morning, when we got a severely truncated version, which I show you here.

If you look at the very bottom of the bottom star, you’ll see a string of hoar frost clinging to the points.

Early morning after a good fogging: even the air is tinged with frost, blue with cold.

I meet the sun as I go out to the car on the way to the barn—the light just beginning to pour over the lip of the mountains’ ridge. Pine tree light from behind.

This is what was coating the stars, every edge of them, furry with these feathers of ice.

All the trees are made ghostly with it. Here, you see the honey-gold of mountain morning warming the buildings next door to us.

This is the infamous trough, covered still with ice. What is difficult to see is that steam is rising from the ice – if you know how to see it, it’s there, ephemeral and against all sense—that this tiny bit of sun could already have turned the surface of the ice into vapor, a sort of languid cauldron—water frozen but still warmer than the air around it.

And the air is suddenly full of diamonds. Wherever I look – fairy dust, for want of any other explanation.  I can only see the stuff when the sun was behind it—but the glitter is everywhere, and I know I am breathing it in with every breath. Another little insight into how our ideas about magic began. Another little detail someone, when this whole system was designed, got a kick out of inventing.

I keep trying to get a decent picture of it. Again, ephemeral. But you can sorta see it, can’t you?  All those tiny bits of jewels flashing against the snow?

One more try. Prosaic background for such a shower of light.

I open the barn door, surprising a family of cheeky house sparrows who have decided to winter with me.

When I hauled my camera along this morning, I never thought I’d catch this.

Horses are all lightly frosted, every hair delicately coated.

Why this doesn’t bother them, I don’t know.  What I didn’t think to shoot was the tips of their ears – perfect little triangles of dark fuzz lined with frost.

On the way home. My timing couldn’t be better; another fifteen minutes and all this will  fade to a dogged gray-and-brown.

Lynn’s house.

Our fish.

Not stipple-backed but frost finned.

And back home again. This moment of brilliant blue and white: brought to you by Those Who Wait on Spring –

Okay, so I put this together last night and forgot the most important part: the punchline.  I wanted to write about this show I sometimes watch when I’m on the treadmill – Undercover Boss. It’s one of those not-so-expensive-to-shoot reality things that puts the CEO of some company (most of which are service oriented companies you’ve heard of) in disguise and out in the field, pretending to be a ground-level worker.  You get to watch the CEO struggling to do the jobs his minimum wage workers do every day – one part of the job in, say, Miami, another part of the job in another town.

On the way, the CEO meets the people he depends on but has no personal experience with – most of the people on the corporate payroll. Sometimes he is angry at the lousy work, but most often, he finds people who are real and trying to make ends meet – who do hard things for little money and have families they love.

The payoff for watching all this is the end, when the CEO is revealed as his or her real self, and in a new appreciation of his own blessed and rare state of power and resource, tries to make up to the workers for the tough conditions of their lives. Often, this is a gift of money – or education – he can pay for the entire tuition for a young person without batting an eye, or fix something that is the grossest of challenges someone is facing, just by throwing money at it – money that is small change to him, but deliverance to the receiver.

There are lots of things to be said here – it’s a complex situation, and doesn’t always turn out to have been the wisest way to handle things. But always, at the end, I find myself wishing that I were the boss – that I had the power to deliver and to fix. The last time I watched it – weeks ago – I was once again yearning to be that person, when suddenly, the whole thing turned over in my head, and instead I had this minor epiphany: I saw myself as the person is in the middle of circumstances that are, in many ways, far out of my ability to deal with, to control, to deliver myself from. And realized how much deliverance I have been given, over and over – starting with the gift of my life, from God, from my parents, and the atonement of Christ, and coming down to the tiniest relief given by a stranger – but mostly, by the love of the people who are my family, both by blood and by choice.

It was just a funny moment of clear sight. Overwhelming sight.

And that is the good side of inversion.