Dec 22, 2010: Making a Life in Music, Vol. 7: "The Unexpected Renaissance"
I’m up in the mountains. High up. There is snow lying a foot and a half
deep on the ground. It weighs down the boughs of the pine trees and
sits on the steeply-gabled rooftops. Cloud fronts creep in and creep
out, seeping around the bare, jagged peaks, and although the world up
there in the rocks looks cold and ragged, I am impressed again and
again as I crunch through the snow by the quiet. It is so quiet
here. There is, of course, the creek. You can hear that for a ways as
what little water thaws on the slopes makes its way down the river to
the valley far below me. And there is also the occasional whoosh
as some heavy bank of snow slips off the branch it has piled up on and
whumps to the ground below. It is a sound that seems magnified in the
stillness, like the sound of a girl pulling her heavy hair away from
her sweatered shoulders and letting it fall back...
