Task One

Because of the situations of the pandemic, the first reading makes me think a great deal of life before the pandemic … busy streets, busy people, full life, good times… and the second reading makes me think of the conditions many of us are living through in this winter …

BUT, the feeling of the first reading is to me not unlike this day in the room where I write, with the sunshine pouring through and it therefore being quite warm … a ton of possibilities, unlimited by circumstances. The second reminds me of the feeling I get when observing winter-bare trees … bleak, but with an amazing fractal geometry which beauty can be observed at no other time of the year.

Mr. Hemingway is achieving his effects through the use of colorful details – visual subtly supported by taste and smell. Soufflot and brioche suggest the same thing … a soft, tasty experience of things well-made and browned by heat, with coffee actually being a darker, hotter, and more bracing analog. Chestnuts we all know roast over open fires … again, richly colored taste well made by strong heat ,,, but the horse chestnut trees now add the possibility of sweet floral scent to the fine odor of coffee and brioche, as do the flower-women, and of course they add visual beauty to the scene.

Ms. Tartt starts by giving us terms of excess in an effort to find warmth in the isolation her character is in, and proceeds by contrast to show just how cold the character's experience is, though not without beauty. The character is in Amsterdam, but has seen nothing but a bleak room, and on this day, it is raining and even sleeting – not a day to go out and see the best of things. Yet there are these amazing paintings to focus on with all their colorful details … but again, that draws the mind to the difference between them and the actual room – drafty and sunscrubbed for beauty, yet on this day, without the sun.

Task Two

The winter had been long, and cold, and brutal – to know that would be to understand what it was for me to see a warm ray of sun upon that old apple tree, and specifically on one huge bud, just about to burst into bloom.

It is a gnarly old thing, this tree, whipped by many storms, its trunk bifurcated by its colossal effort to outgrow a split in the trunk that would have killed it while still young. There are many dead branches, and not many fresh leaves on the branches that are still alive, for the tree was slow to wake and scarcely made it through the winter. Old age is tough, even for trees.

I know. I had to live 60 years to see that bud. The tree was planted 200 years before me, by the great-great-great-grandfather of the man who dared to say, before the war, that he owned me.

I forced myself to return to Appomattox, caring for what I could for the needs of the Federal army all along the way with my still-strong back, in order to see that tree again, and to see that it, like me, had done what it had to do to get to that day and put forth that one colossal bud.

It was April 9, 1865, and that apple tree was the first to bloom in a time in which fresh bone meal would no longer be plowed into the ground, year by year for four years, in order that the bones, and lives, and families of Black bodies remain enslaved upon that ground.

The old tree and I both made it into the spring of freedom, after all.

By the time June 19, 1865 came and the word of freedom had gone from sea to shining sea, the old tree had popped all the blossoms it possibly could and set forth a bumper crop of small but honey-sweet apples, since fireworks are a bit too much for an old and flammable piece of living wood to manage.

I understand it. I'm too old too. But I eat plenty of apples, nowadays, and spread the seeds of the old tree that first greeted freedom with its bloom.

Task Two-Point-Five

Three words to describe my writing style: detailed, dense, and subtle.