When I was a girl in school, in the country we used to live in,
I loved Wednesdays because our classes lasted only until noon.
You and I ignored the playground and spent those afternoons at
play in green forests along the river. Years passed and then we
played in bedrooms in our own white worlds of linen sheets.
Now you live oceans away on the other side of the world. Is every
day there in your country warm and green? Here the days are
white, and the only river, miles away, has flowed under ice since
December. Months disappear and petals from a Christmas plant
wrinkle and fall in silence, like snow on Wednesday afternoons.
Mixed emotions. Nostalgia is a two-sided, intrinsically mixed emotion. One feels the attraction, even elation of the past and at the same time one senses the sadness at now being distant from the joy of the past. The fading poinsettia captures its own past: joyous red in support of holiday celebrations. But time has passed, and the winter winds have faded those joys. This is all very inevitable, as well we know, but sometimes someone captures it in memorable ways. Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-1536) observes in the final tercet of his well known Soneto XXIII:
Marchitará la rosa el viento helado,
todo lo mudará la edad ligera,
por no hacer mudanza en su costumbre.
The icy wind will cause the rose to wilt,
and all things will be changed by fickle time,
so as to never change its own routine.
This painting (A World of Wednesdays) stops time, though the artist as well we observers recognize the passing of time in this captured moment.