Alex Pretti Is My New Dashboard Jesus!

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.