From where you are right now take three left turns. Go past the firewood stand. Youıll see a little market. Then a schoolhouse. Service station. Take the first right after that. It may be said that desperation does things to a person. Turn again at Cobalt Run and you will come to where a left-hand road leads up. It winds. Be careful. And we all have heard that when a person has committed one atrocity, that person has an appetite for more. You may or may not know, this is the snowy mountain that you saw from down near Whipple Lake. An appetite that might be likened to the need to smell a rose again. That lofty vision shaped by curves of snow and streaked with bending ski runs, blue-white turning purple-pink at dusk. To eat a peach again. Keep driving up (itıs steep, the snowpack growing and the cold increasing as you climb) until you see the lovely alpine spruces on your left. Thatıs us. To look into the red-hot sun again. Just park it near the center where itıs plowed. Inside, youıll smell the coffee and youıll feel at home in our high-timbered warm and cozy atmosphere. Some say they feel the time stacked up in layers in this lodge. Youıll smell vanilla, holly berry, cinnamon and coffee. Sign the register and let us take an imprint of your card. Weıll send the bellhop out to get your luggage and your skis. For now, though, look around at wildlife-decorated rugs upon some walls. Most walls are paneled, and thereıs art by local nature painters up, along with needle-worked renditions of the mountain and the lodge, one downhill trophy case and one cross-country case, our woodblock print of Schillerıs Pond. Step past reception‹careful: ramp‹and take the hallway past the dining room to see where guests relax around a golden fire in leather chairs and sofas. Morning coffee and our famous apple muffins or perhaps a late-night brandy or an Irish cream. Conditions being optimal today, our guests are out. There is one leather chair pulled right up to the windows looking out on Schillerıs Pond. Most common are assertions that a kinky sense of meanness and revenge will lead a person to perform such heinous actions. In the snow the skis leave shallow grooves that intersect, run parallel and sometimes disappear into the unforgiving look of forest greenery. Perhaps the sense that one is nothing in this world contributes too. From Schillerıs Pond ice skaters look about them and they see a blanketing of snow, the alpine spruces and the lodge. The sense that one looks forward in this life to nothing. Thinnest lines and tiny trenches printed black on white, an extra tint of palest blue washed over top. Its title? Summertime at Schillerıs Pond. The sense that one will leave behind no legacy. In other words, the skaters do not think about an atmosphere of evil, shadows flitting, faces lacking any outward sign of madness or contempt; they simply skate and listen to the music coming from the speakers strung on wires around the pond. The chair lift carries skiers turning in their seats to look behind them on the valley stretching all the way from Whipple Lake to where the valley dissipates into a distant violet blur. Throats slit from ear to ear. Cut ears and noses. Wrists. A likeness formed on boxwood more than likely, horizontal image carved with pointed tools and knives and gouges. Blood and gore: up here we do not even think about them. Inked and printed onto paper, tint washed over, framed. Up here the ground is buried under snow and decorated lovingly with trees that tower over holly bushes. Knee-high castles in the snow. Snow angels. Lodge, from bottom step to final chimney stone, all windows double-glazed. White lights strung high around a frozen-over pond.

happiness/sadness
patterns



jane
unrue