Kelly McCullough likes my dogs. I think he likes me too, but it's the dogs he comes over to see, late in the afternoon most days, as his reward for making his daily word count. (Kelly is a writer, and he knows how important it is to make your word count.) Sometimes he puts on snowshoes, sometimes he doesn't. But either way, he takes the dogs and goes for a wander though my woods.
Sometimes Kelly's wife Laura comes with.
This means that ever since I put it in, Kelly has walked past my lamppost. It's a solar-powered Victorian-style lamppost which I put in the woods because they looked so very Narnian in the winter (and it was Christmas present from my children and their mother, for those of you who have forgotten).
A couple of days ago, Kelly was over, having walked around the woods with the dogs, and over tea he commented on the lamppost, and how it made him, you know, want to be a faun. And have his photo taken.
"You'd need horns," I pointed out.
He agreed that yes, he'd need horns, and I said that if he ever wanted to be a faun, he was welcome to hang around my lamppost...
I thought this was something that might be happening one day. But the weather today was perfect, for winter -- warm enough for a vague mist to scumble the world and make it feel like there wasn't anything but what you were seeing, and what you were seeing was trees and snow, mostly.
I took the dogs for a walk and reflected on how very imaginary everything felt. The world seemed like a huge strange stage-set or studio.
I pulled out my Nexus S and took some photos of the dogs and the snow.
I got home to find Kelly waiting, with Matt Kuchta, a photographer friend of his, Matt's wife ("We've heard a lot about you," she said. "Well, mostly it was about the dogs...") who was helping and Laura, who was getting changed into her white queen costume.
And then they went off into the cold. I'd just come back from walking through the woods, and was ready to be inside and warm up, so I waved them on their way. Kelly said something as he left about taking his top off, which I thought was rather unlikely because, well, it was cold...
How wrong I was.
I'm so glad I have a lamppost.
The dogs are wonderfully wolf-like in shape, but they really don't have the whole menace thing down, do they?
You can see the whole set as posted so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuchtam/sets/72157625860481709/with/5419998319/
Labels: Always winter and never Christmas, dogs, lamppost?