Enchantment under the Tree

It is a pretty cold night even with the wind dying down some.  We were prompted to start a fire, make some espresso and just enjoy the indoors...even the cat, who makes a run for outside at first stirring, decided this was not a fit middle-night for man nor beast nor feline.  Well that was banal enough writing, but fires in the fireplace with a grey dawn pending, the room to ourselves and music does that to you - well does it to us.  We are often surprised that composers wanted silence around them as we think it is very difficult to work or thing great things without some background - not that we think great things - but unless we are incredibly into something difficult that takes every synapse - well some background makes us think more interesting things.

This little bonbon (down at the bottom) went by on the Internet radio just a bit ago and we was struck by what it is we hear other than the natural sounds and what others say or cause to happen.  Classical music - and hearing a piece, an unusual one - is an almost lifetime event; there being so much of it and only so many listening hours in the day.  It seems that last fall  (Sept. 7, 2010 in fact) someone must have heard this piece.  It is the Magical Snuff Box by the Russian composer Anatoli Liadov.  It is a miniature - and think about those Russian artists who write the Lord's Prayer on the side of a grain of rice. 

We all had those snowflake in a bottle things growing up - you know - the winter scene and you shook up this liquid filled container and it looked like snow inside. We had one for the longest time that had a little battery light in the log cabin and when you shook it and hit the switch light came out the windows and shown on the snow falling and the trees glued to the base. We can remember it clear as a bell and smell the cold in a Michigan winter night and hear my bedroom radiator click-clink as it cooled;  listening to WBCM when it switched over to classical music after 11p instead of simply going off the air.  The moonlight always is bright-on in these remembrances and I, depending on the music played, thought it out about the little cabin in my snowbubble thing - Geppetto probably lived there or some wood carver in the Black Forest - someone alone, practicing a craft where things were actually made and maybe sold but mostly made for the pure enjoyment of staying up late and doing something you could admire in the morning.

This little bonbon snuff box is like that snowball glass thing perhaps.  If my granddaughters lived 100+ years ago and had it they would have dreamed so many dreams and put themselves in the scene within - whirling to the music in a brightly lit salon, talking good talk and laughing innocent laughs.

We should be showing grand kids the snuffbox every tonight.  It doesn't move or whirl of clink-clank.  We are going to, instead, ask them to open the door to it and go inside while the music plays.  They will be too young to really be part of the party but will find a place, perhaps peeking out from behind the drapes or crawling under the sofa in the corner, and watching as the others swooped and swayed in the light, the music playing, the sounds of laughing and light talk; the smiles radiant.

For kids it is a time of making a spot in the world; the real one or the one that has much more in it, is never silent, and always finds something the leads to something more.