On Winter's Coming Touch and Unwritten Futures

I can feel Winter coming. I suppose I should say I can feel Autumn coming and that knowledge means Winter isn't far off. Autumn seems almost as short as our Summers. The dark of night creeps in earlier and earlier each day and my sleep has become increasingly restless to the point that I seem to wake up four or five times a night now. This is an ongoing cycle and generally happens this time of year. The other day I was complaining to a friend of mine about not being able to sleep much and she said, ' Hmm, this is about the same time last year that you said the same exact thing.'

I remember enjoying Winter as a child. To some degree I can still see the beauty of it when the trees are dressed in their white gowns and I look out over Dad's fields of ice like some albino ocean. The short days eat away at me, though. The cold. The ever-hanging blanket of gray in the sky. I remember last spring actually cheering when I realized it was six o' clock and sunlight could still be seen.

I try to stay living in the now and enjoy what is left of a rapidly declining summer. Perhaps I should try and make one final trip to the coast and breath in some salty air before the shops all close up and begin their hibernation.

Nevertheless, here is a brief continuation of my last excerpt. The conclusion is unwritten in my mind, a future I'm still trying to ascertain. I'm sure an epiphany will strike at some point. Until then....

A Text Untold (continued. The first paragraph is a re-write of the last paragraph in the previous entry.)

Not tonight, however. Despite the little voice in the back of my mind telling me I could use a puff, tonight there was far too much work to be done. Atop my desk was a small package, bound with brown paper and tied with twine. It was addressed to me with a return address to a Mister Jonathan R. Irewood of Lennox, some five hundred miles away. I pulled the twine off gently then unwrapped the article within. It was a leather bound book and by the incredibly dry feeling of the cover, I knew it must have been old. Old and not overly well preserved, unfortunately. Mister Irewood had sent me the text- along with a hundred royal notes- to translate. I knew that if I tried to use the book in it's current state, the leather would crack and break. The pages inside were most likely dry and brittle, meaning they would crumble in my hands if I wasn't careful. Before I could proceed, I'd need to do some simple repair work.

I put a few pieces of wood in the fire and poked at the remaining embers until the flames began to creep up and darken the wood. While my recipe for paper hydration slowly cooked on the stove, I pulled a small bottle of oil from my desk as well as another glass container which held a lump of beeswax in it. I put a few drops of the oil on the lump of wax and began to slowly and gently massage the oil into the leather. The oil would revitalize while the wax created a seal to keep the moisture in. I would have to remember to send back with the translation strict instructions on the care of such books, as this process would not always work. Once leather and paper degraded, there was a great deal of integrity that could not be restored. This process would allow me to use the book for translation, but I would have to encourage Mister Irewood not to use the book for anything other than display.

I allowed the oil to set while I tended to the tonic on the stove. The next few hours were spent agonizingly pouring over each page and, using the quill of a feather, applying the tonic around the text. As I did so, I glanced at some of the writing and determined it was a form of Latin, though not the classical style so many scholars were used to. This was a more vulgar form, which would date the text to sometime before the 9th century, though most likely closer to the 4th or 5th at the fall of Rome. It must have been a copy of sorts, as there were very few actual books written in that time period. However, if it had indeed been copied, it was done so by hand. I could see the slight variances between letters. No type setter had done this.

The pages had regained some of their bend and I found I was less anxious about manipulating the pages. I pulled from my library - a couple of shelves nailed crookedly to one wall - a pair of manuscripts which offered some insight into the translation of Vulgar Latin and set to work.