The Meadow Quotes

“The Meadow... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“When we think of our lives as what we have done, memory becomes a museum with one long shelf on which we arrange a bric-a-brac of deeds, each to his own liking.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow’s widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky’s blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun. Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie is scorched yellow. But Lyle’s meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up to the sky in its ring of ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too. The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“Those of us who’d known Lyle longer knew he didn’t have moods, he had weather. Not some inner weather that could have been a mood—Lyle had the weather. Inside him he had going on exactly what was going on in the sky, or some combination of recent weather and what was likely to develop. Old friends were perfectly happy to sit down and get snowed on for a couple of hours over coffee, though anyone would have preferred the happy emanations of cloudless sky and sun, even if the sun was shining on a snowdrift ten feet deep.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“As he lights up, the sun is setting, turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout. The reddest clouds are the fish cut open. Aspen trees are peaking with yellow. A wind comes up the draw, announced in advance by clapping aspen leaves, and then he can hear it take the pines around the house and he feels it on his cheek and it makes the end of his cigarette glow brighter. He takes a deep drag and looks down past the springhouse nested in orange willow branches. Up over the opposing hill he sees the snow on mountains west of Laramie. Another breath of wind comes up and starts the aspens chattering like nervous girls, and they catch the last low-angling rays of sun and flare. The dark tops of evergreens are red, almost bloody, and for a good thirty seconds he knows that the world is something altogether other than what it appears to be.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“According to scientists who study avalanches for a living, snow has the widest range of physical properties of any known substance. What’s amazing is that the Eskimo language doesn’t have more words for it. Powder snow, corn snow, sugar snow, windpack. Neve, slab, spring powder, spit, and fluff. Thawing and freezing it changes with every degree of temperature, every passing second. Goose down, ball bearings, broken styrofoam. Then there are the properties of snow that are not physical, or not exactly physical: its lethal whims, its harmlessness, its delicacy, its power, its relentlessness, its flirtatious disregard, its sublime beauty.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“The problem is there is no one to blame for this. It’s just so much snow you can’t see. It’s just a blizzard like white ants moving in mild waves and stopping, covering, moving on, covering everything, moving on, uncovering and covering everything again, getting deeper, the wind ordering and disordering and ordering them to advance, stop, advance, wait; or like an invasion of angels. Advance, stop, advance, wait, so that they all move forward like a wave, but they are never all moving together like a wave, claiming, reaching, deepening, and you can’t see. If you could rise above and look down on this blindness you might see that the whole storm is a kind of silence.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“Each year the snow tries to memorize, blindly, the landscape, as if it were the landscape that was going to melt in spring.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow