Calendars on the wall; twelve unique posters to cycle through the year, one for each month, each picture bringing with it a different kind of mood and setting the tone for the next thirty days; enough time for you to imprint meaning into those innocuous scenes but not long enough for them to become stale.
I bought a new calendar this year. I usually don’t: they get sent to every home for free by the waste disposal service. The calendars come with tips on recycling and schedules for when they go around collecting electronics or hazardous or some other kind of special trash.
About this new calendar that I brought home. I picked it up in the book store in lieu of actually buying anything to read. That is how my visits to the bookshop usually go.
It has an old-timey feel; the art is soft and delicate, perhaps prints of watercolor originals or pastels, I’m not sure, the visual arts have never been my forte so the technicalities are obscure. They have sloppy handdrawn outlines which add a sense of rusticity to the already laid-back atmosphere depicted.
Often young children are drawn playing with yarn and kittens or building a snowman in the winter. In the warmer months it is their mother that is shown in the kitchen baking loaves or outside with sleeves rolled up putting clothes on the clothesline to dry in the sun; ankles and bare feet showing from under their modest skirts, with a handkerchief tucked in or wrapped around their heads.
A little girl or two standing on the shore in red dresses, one in white polka dots while the other is not. They all get along even the boys, though sometimes they get rowdy and start throwing rocks or waving around sticks they picked up in the forest while the girls were out in the long grass looking for bugs or butterflies.
Sometimes people are going left and sometimes right, but they never seem to be showing any sense of willingly doing wrong to each other or getting into fights with one another.
The older children must have a lot on their minds. Looking after those rascals and living up to the expectations of their parents, while still yearning themselves to play in the grasses and hold hands secretly with their lovers behind birches in the hidden parts of the forest. What mirth to be young.
But time waits for no one and there is work to be done: the loom doesn’t weave cloth by itself, and the boys are eager to help the men with their hunting and logging, to prove themselves and impress their peers and parents and to make them proud.
Yes, even the little ones have work to be done. The summer dances are danced and as autumn winds start to blow it is time for younglings to return to school.
That leaves the elders alone to tend to their hearths to keep them warm, but sometimes the wind turns bitter cold even if their wrinkled faces seem happy, mouths upturned into a smile.
In March a dark figure comes through the snowy storm to knock on an isolated cabin’s door. The frozen lake is peeking behind the roof, desolate, and mourning to see his friend the fisherman has to part with him today.
Soon a new generation will be born and there will again be time for singing and dancing.
But for him, no more.
>> Home