(first post)
I was having a conversation similar to this (about homes and being cosy and content) just this afternoon with a good friend of mine. And your quote conjured images of snow days or major winter holidays when it was toasty warm (as we were home to run the woodstove) and there were people around and good food and nobody was really going to go anywhere. Days that just sort of existed outside of time and all that mattered was being home and warm and with people who mattered to you.
I love that I can still have that on the major holidays but I miss it the rest of the time. I get glimpses of it when I have friends over for gaming or other events but I'm always so sad when they go away again.
You forgot the exclamation point after first post!
Mm, snowdays as a kid... Watch some of that weird, not-very-good TV you usually didn't get to see as a kid, hang out by a heat register playing legos... maybe go sledding or at least clomping around.
I'd change "imaginary" to "remembered". After all, it once was, and in my memory, still is.
Fourth post!
I should say that as an adult I still find them every bit as joyful and amazing. And I love to choose a winter project that I get to work on as a treat on snow days (like a stained glass project or this year it will probably be my dragon puppet).
However I miss the company. There’s something so wonderful and warming about staring out the window at the falling snow and knowing your safe and warm inside but it always feels a tiny but hollow by myself.
MELM...
well--
this reflects some of the reading about consciousness I've been doing lately, Hofstadters speculation that the pattern of consciousness lives in multiple brains, mostly our own but as validly (if with less fidelity) in other folks' model of us, so that living on in others after we die is more than just poetic...
on the one hand, the "imaginary" designation might refer to the idealization and rose colored glasses of nostalgia the family would share.
On the other hand, if imaginary in this sense isn't quite "fictional", but rather "as constructed in human minds" -- which I think you can believe in without falling into blatant solipsism -- then imaginary might be a deeper term, because it refers to the joint vision the group shared.
(On the other hand, does that mean the "missing" is optional to the thrust of the quote. I think not, that there might be some element that exists more in retrospect than when you're busy doing it.)
One day my parents moved out of the house where I came of age. They moved from a small three-bedroom house built in the 50s, to a four-bedroom McMansion out in the exurbs. And they had to buy new furniture for all that extra space. But there was one room, upstairs, where they had a lot of furniture from the old house, and I called that "the old house". Then they built a bar up there instead.
From me as writer geek (possible anachronistic one, if I'm just not keeping up with the linguistic drift): Your use of "that Youtube" under the Pointless Video is a little confusing. Sounds like you never knew about Youtube before this entry by using the word "that"!
One of the many reasons I went into teaching is to still have a better chance of a snow day than the average worker.
Lex:
exactly right. It was kind of a small joke, sort of underhanded way of projecting that sarcastic "gee, if only there were some publicly available website that allowed someone to post brief videoclips for other people to come and see! Maybe they would let people embed those videos on their own websites!" -- especially since it took me about 3 or 4 years to notice and "rectify" the not-having-posted this video.