Alex Pretti Is My New Dashboard Jesus!

[mallorys_camera]

The snow is so high it's drifting like ocean beach dunes.



The drifts were so daunting I almost bailed on checking in on the chickens yesterday. I certainly wasn't gonna shovel a path through that, & tromping through knee-deep snow did not appeal.

What would Alex Pretti do? I asked myself.

Yes, I actually did ask myself that!

Alex Pretti is my new dashboard Jesus! Alex Pretti has metamorphosed in my mind into a kind of living saint, the repository of all the human virtues I truly admire, like kindness, helpfulness, compassion, the urge to protect those weaker than ourselves.

I suppose this is how naiads, dryads, & other animating spirits evolved in ancient times: Someone wonderful dies tragically, unfairly; people hear the echoes of his/her voice around them. Those echoes spin a sense of magical connection; that sense of connection crystallizes into myth.

In ancient times, very often, those myths coalesced around the physical circumstances of the venerated person's death. Take Arethusa, the huntress, who metamorphosed into a sacred spring at Ortygia in Siricusa. (I visited that spring in 1984 when I bicycled around Italy with my first husband, Ichabod's father. It was filled with floating garbage.)

The myth goes that Arethusa was pursued by the river god Alpheus. She prayed to Artemis, Save me! Artemis saved Arethusa by transforming her into a body of water.

I suspect the original Arethusa was a girl who was raped near that spring. This being 30 centuries before Law & Order: Sexual Victims Unit was to become a ratings juggernaut, those who grieved her spun a myth.

And I suppose Catholicism's great contribution to mythology was to strip geolocators from the apotheosis process, thereby allowing people across the globe to feel mystical kinship with saints who were martyred in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire.

Anyway, Alex Pretti most certainly would have checked on the chickens!

So, I did too.

The chickens made it through the storm unscathed! I fed them delicious tortilla bits. They squawked for more. "Maybe tomorrow," I told them.

Though I'm not sure that even Alex Pretti would have felt the compunction to tromp through those knee-high drifts every day.

Comments

[halfmoon_mollie1]

I admire you for that - finding the chickens AND feeding them delicious tortilla bits. I admire folks who have dogs, in this kinds of weather, as well. Dogs have to be walked, and unless you live someplace with your own fenced in area, that means going OUTSIDE.

[mallorys_camera]

It was a terrible slog, tromping out to them through knee-high snow without a path. I suppose I will need to do it again today—they are little living creatures; they must be checked on. But I don't really want to.

[suzannareads]

❤️

[fuzzilla]

We adopted a new cat, brought him home Monday. You’d think I’d be all over social media about that with a million pictures. Sweet cat, warm and inside, but terrified of everything and everyone, including the other cat. Not even eating. Hopefully a phase that will pass. I do have lots of cat rescue experience but not much in my actual home (versus the shelter).

[fuzzilla]

Okay, just checked and he ate some food and used his box.

[mallorys_camera]

Awwww. A new kitty! Name? Description?

[fuzzilla]

They named Pretty Boi and I’m calling him Mr. peanut Butter (from BoJack Horseman). Gray tabby with white bits, 4 years old. Just pet him and gave him breakfast and he came out from behind the bookshelf and accepted pets and purred up a storm. ☺️. Does not get along with other cat (hopefully a phase? They’re separated now).

[adoptedwriter]

I love your take on Alex! My nurse daughter said her coworkers were all thinking about it on Sunday.

[mallorys_camera]

Yah. I suppose part of the reason his murder hit me so hard was because I used to be a nurse.

[smokingboot]

Looking after the chickens and feeding them delicious tortilla bits is a very Patrizia thing to do. You're my dashboard icon!

[mallorys_camera]

Awwwwwww. Thanks, my friend! ❤️