Making puddings and knitting stockings

In the latest film version of "Jane Eyre" there's just one real character: Jane herself. No one else is on the screen long enough to give us a sense of who they are, not even Mr. Rochester. In the movie Jane is often alone – on the moor, pacing the corridors of Thornfield Hall, staring by the fire in that drafty barn of a house; when other people appear, they behave cruelly towards her (in this film even the Rivers sisters are inadvertently cruel), and then disappear. She is always being left. Jane is sent away; Jane runs away; Jane's only friend dies in her arms. The one time that Jane returns, she finds Thornfield Hall burnt, its occupants scattered. When she finally says "I am come back," she's speaking to a broken, silent, weeping Mr. Rochester sitting alone in a field; they embrace, and poof: the film ends.

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In the movie Jane stands by a big picture window in Thornfield Hall on a quiet winter day, looking out at its grounds and the hills beyond the grounds, and she says she wishes she were a man so that she might go out into the world. Mrs. Fairfax (who does understand) tells her she just needs exercise and asks her to mail a letter. It's on the walk to the post office that Jane first meets Mr. Rochester.

This is like the book but also not like. In the book Jane does rant about the lot of women, saying, "Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings." But she also explains that it's not so much action that she wants as passion and intellectual challenge. She doesn't want to be wrapped in cotton, safe and dull. "Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to ... open my inward ear to a tale ... my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence."

In the book Jane says over and over how madly she loves Mr. Rochester but the movie is more ambiguous. He loves her; that's obvious; but she's so wary and stoic and young, and he's the first man she's ever met! Who can say how she feels? Maybe he's just her first crush. Maybe she loves that he loves her. Maybe she just doesn't want to leave Thornfield Hall because it's the only place she's ever been safe from abuse. In the book one would never think that but the movie dwells more on the horror in her life. – And then Rochester, like everyone else, breaks her heart. The cad.

When in the movie St. John Rivers offered to take Jane to India as a missionary, my heart leapt for her. India! Finally, Jane, your chance! Your chance to act, to move in the world as you've been longing to do! It's perplexing that she tells him no. It's perplexing that she runs back to Mr. Rochester. Without all the scenes of the two lovers together, without the funny scenes in which she insists Mr. Rochester save his ardor for after the wedding, what St. John offers seems superior. St. John saved her life. He respects her. He's nice to her. Why not take the safe route, free from abuse? Travel, Jane! Adventure! Why run back into the arms of a man already married? For goodness sake.

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Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy the movie. I especially loved the scenes of Jane on the moor. The cinematography was spectacular. (Some day I'm visiting northern England and Scotland. You can have London; I want to see the moor!) It's been bothering me, though, the way the tone of the movie is so different from the tone of the book; I had to write it down to understand how I felt.

That said...

Updated 4/19.

I do love the iPad. I like to curl up in bed and watch movies on it, just like I'd read a book; or else, curled up all cosy-like, I look at items for sale on Etsy. (I've never bought anything from etsy sellers, but oh, I do love to look at the things people make. Bend is a small town still; it's hard to find anything like what's available in Etsy, especially for clothes. I'd buy this if I could figure out a place to wear it.)

I use the iPad almost exclusively for internet browsing: searches for recipes or summer camps or edible native plants, for example, or reading all y'all's blogs. I check email on it. I check the weather. I check Mt. Bachelor's current conditions. I read the news. I stream podcasts through it when my work gets tedious; I prop it on the windowsill and watch movies while I'm washing dishes. The WebEx app for iPad is better than WebEx on my company-provided laptop, so when I'm not hosting, I often "attend" meetings that way. Sometimes – don't tell! – when I'm on a conference call that turns irrelevant (or, more often, when I'm tempted to say too much and need to hold my tongue) I play Solitaire on it.

I find it miserable to type on, though. Cutting and pasting and backspacing is just painful, and it turns out that even when I compose emails, I do a lot of cutting and pasting and backspacing; so I never compose anything on the iPad. The problem is not really the iPad in itself, but the fact that I'm trained to a keyboard. I'm almost 40. I type 80 words/minute. Using a touchscreen to compose is as slow as ... as ... as writing!

Also, I dislike reading books on it. I think again it's a matter of mental models. The Kindle app is intended for reading books, so when I hold the iPad I think: book. But it's not a book. It's a computer. It doesn't provide the same satisfying tactile experience as a book, and it does poorly the few things I need a book to do (which, essentially, provide comforting familiarity. When I read fiction I channel my 12-year-old self). And I don't yet know what it does better than a book.

Movies, on the other hand, I find vastly improved by the iPad. I never have liked going to the movies, not ever in my life; and I don't like TV either. Movies have struck me as loud and obnoxious and too obviously manipulative with that music and faces as big as a house: gah. Watching them on the iPad, though – curled up in my bed, alone, quiet, in control – it's so intimate. It is, actually, just as intimate as reading a great novel. Also I like being able to (as it were) re-read sections that puzzle or intrigue me. It has been a great pleasure to discover movies – in my late 30s!

I still prefer books.

For Maggie.

My son finished books 4 & 5 of the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series in a week so I promised him I'd get 6 & 7 from the library; but when we visited the library, it was closed. Oh, the disappointment! So we walked to the nearest bookstore which, alas, did not have books 6 & 7.

So I did something for him that I'd never have done for myself: I got the Kindle app for iPad and I bought the e-book.

Verdict? Bah.

It's nice that the book only cost $5 and it's nice that I was able to indulge my son's reading habit, which I understand is an unusual one for a 9-year-old boy, but we won't be buying an e-book again soon. It's too annoying. You can't tell where you are. The e-book has no page numbers and no chapter headings and no dog-ears, of course, and no places where the book naturally falls because you bent back the binding. If you touch the wrong part of the screen, going back a chapter or back to the beginning, for example, and you're a certain 9-year-old, you're going to have to yell, "Moooooo-ooom!" and she's going to have to speak in that come-away-from-the-window-ledge voice to keep your fury in check.

I imagine as a reference tool the Kindle for iPad would be useful – with a reference book one would find the search function necessary – but for casual reading, I (we) prefer a printed book.

I'm not wearin' no trousers rolled

The problems which seemed so intractable before I left now seem

really

really

really

small.



That's the main thing.

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More pics at Tom's blog.

Swoop

Baldface Lodge is primarily known for its excellent tree skiing, but a few glades are wide open. In these open glades we made long, lazy, easy turns: ssswoooooop, sssssswooooop, ssssssswoooooop.

Once in such a glade the snow was so light I couldn't feel my board beneath my feet. No vibration, no hiccup, no pressure on an edge: just a smooth glide through the air.

Like a dolphin leaping into the sunlight.

View through the snowcat window.
We made two runs here, which explains the number of tracks.

Thanks, Mom and Dad

My parents stayed with the children while my husband and I were away. It went brilliantly. Every time I called home I heard laughter, both from my children and my parents; and when I returned, my dad was glowing and the children, they confessed that although they were glad to see me, they'd miss their grandparents.

The kids got to school on time. They did their homework every night. They remembered their library books and they remembered when to wear sneakers.

Also: my parents fixed my toilet. They replaced a broken toilet paper holder. They bought new shoes for Sasha. They cleaned the house, raked the yard and restocked the larder. They washed my car. And then – as Sasha said – "Grandpa couldn't get the TV to work so he bought a new one."

They didn't tell me about any of the work they did; I've been discovering it as I settle back into our routine. Five days later I'm still finding little treats around the house: a bag of white chocolate chips, a book about the fur trade, notes on spice packets saying "the kids liked this." It's like an Easter egg hunt!

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Lower left corner

Me.

Baldface-English Dictionary

Powder / Pow / Pow Pow: Any depth or quality of snow which has recently fallen and hasn't yet been "tracked," or compressed, either by the weight of a snowcat or a skier/snowboarder.

Snowcat: A truck-like vehicle with tracks instead of tires, like a tank. The cabs of the snowcats at Baldface Lodge sit twelve comfortably.

Fresh tracks / First tracks: Being the first person to lay a track in powder; that is, being the first to ski through an area of newfallen snow. Everyone wants fresh tracks. Riding through powder is so easy and smooth it's like flying.

Duff: Very cold, light powder – too cold to pack into a snowball – which flies up into a snowboarder's face as she rides through it.

The white room: When a snowboarder slashes through duff in such a way that the spray encloses her completely and she can't see in front of her, she's said to be "in the white room."

Shred it / Slay it / Rip it up / Kill it: To make turns in powder on a snowboard. The terms sound aggressive and are usually said with aggression but they really just refer to the tracks a snowboarder leaves behind her in the snow: like a long, lazy "S" traced in butter.

Moving sidewalk: An easy run.

Snowboarder pile-up: In the trees when the terrain flattens out, snowboarders wary of tree wells tend to follow each other's lines. If one person falls and the way is too tight or it happens too suddenly, the others will pile up behind him.

Tree well: When snow falls in a forest it catches on the trees' limbs. This creates a depression, or well, around the trunk of a tree. Tree wells can be five feet deep or more.

SFD: Straight fuckin' down. An answer to the question, "Which way from here?"

Chinese downhill: Usually we dropped in one at a time or in pairs, which means we had to negotiate the order of descent; but when the run was wide open and the avalanche danger low, the guide would declare a Chinese downhill (c.f. Hot Dog): everyone dropping in at the same time in a glorious mess.

A good husband raises your game

On a ridge of wind-rippled snow the lead guide asked the skiers to follow him in breaking trail for us snowboarders (ski poles being a useful invention after all). My husband, who had stayed by my side all day, glanced at me. I waved him on. "Go ahead," I said. "Just remember: if I fall off this ridge, tell the kids I love them!"

The second guide, who stood nearby nonchalantly checking the air temperature with this odd red thermometer – the second guide called to my husband, "Tell them mommy died doing something she loves!"

And everybody laughed, even me, perched light-hearted and exuberant on a snowy ridge in the sunlight.

The view from our chalet, 3/31