Hell (and Atlanta) Hath Frozen Over (Mmm… Marginalia #91)

For the second day in a row, I find a two-inch blanket of ice prevents me from getting the car out of the driveway, ((Fun fact: Atlanta is the 33rd largest city in America and spread out over one of the largest metro areas, but† has only 11 snow plows.
† Not that I think they should buy more to cope with the once-a-decade significant snowfall we get, just trying to head off the “oh, poor Southerners can’t deal with a little snow” that’s sure to come my way.)) and it looks like it’ll be that way for at least another few days yet, so I figure with all this enforced downtime I really ought to get on with my weekly marginal image post.

This week’s image is found in an early sixteenth-century Flemish Book of Hours ((British Library MS Egerton 1147)), and it pretty well encapsulates the main reason we waited until after we’d moved to the South to get a dog:

You still have to walk the dog when it snows, no matter how much you’d rather be inside the warm cottage sewing. ((OK, maybe not literally sewing. Metaphorically sewing. (Which is less like sewing and more like getting caught up on True Blood while puttering about on the Internet.) [On further reflection, I don’t think that lady is sewing at all, which may mean that she is metaphorically sewing, and how cool would that be?  An image pre-meta’d!])) But because it’s snowing, the dog would rather happily trot-trot-trot and sniff-sniff-sniff than, you know, take care of business.  OK, so maybe my own personal circumstances are coloring my reading here, but I can literally ((Metaphorically literally, of course, not literally literally.)) think of no other explanation for why the dog seems so happy and the nearby person so full of nervous trepidation.


As this slightly-chilled dog owner can attest, familial duty cannot be shirked, even when it’s the canine part of the family, lest you end up in Cocytus, the frozen lake where Dante tells us are punished all those who sin against their own families:

So if you’ll excuse me, the insistent sound of paw on patio glass informs me that I have a sacred duty to attend to. ((Or if you’d prefer,†† a sacred duty to which I must attend.
††But if you’d really prefer that, you’re going to find yourself disappointed a lot around here. Or worse.))

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