Well, silliness provoked by my getting, yesterday, this excellent fortune cookie fortune:
You will be awarded
some great honor
Which I was then able to combine with a postcard from Ann Burlingham (sent on 3/4/24), showing, of course, a volcano — Frederic Church’s 1862 painting of Cotopaxi in Ecuador — adding the requisite woolly mammoths (on a US postage stamp), flanking the fortune, to complete the composition:
For which I have supplied some verse, filched from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), with its famously jogging trochaic tetrameter:
As the fire from off the crater,
As the smoke from off the lava.
With a smile of joy and triumph,
With a look of exultation,
As of one who in a vision
Sees what is to be, but is not,
Stood the honored Woolly Mammoth.
And now the work is complete.
Background: Cotopaxi the volcano. From Wikipedia:
Cotopaxi is an active stratovolcano in the Andes Mountains, located near Latacunga city of Cotopaxi Province, about 50 km (31 mi) south of Quito, and 31 km (19 mi) northeast of the city of Latacunga, Ecuador. It is the second highest summit in Ecuador (after Chimborazo), reaching a height of 5,897 m (19,347 ft). Cotopaxi is among the highest active volcanoes in the world.
Cotopaxi is known to have erupted 87 times, resulting in the creation of numerous valleys formed by lahars (mudflows) around the volcano. An ongoing eruption began on 21 October 2022.
At the end of February 2023, the Geophysical Institute of Ecuador reported that Cotopaxi had produced around 8,000 earthquakes since October 21, 2022, amounting to 1,600 events per month.
… The mountain was honored as a sacred mountain by local Andean people, even before the Inca invasion in the 15th century. It was worshiped as rain sender, which served as the guarantor of the land’s fertility, and at the same time its summit was revered as a place where gods lived.
Background: Cotopaxi the painting. From Wikipedia:
Cotopaxi is an 1862 oil painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church, a member of the Hudson River School. The painting depicts Cotopaxi, an active volcano that is also the second highest peak in modern-day Ecuador, spewing smoke and ash across a colorful sunrise. The work was commissioned by well-known philanthropist and collector James Lenox and was first exhibited in New York City in 1863. Cotopaxi was met with great acclaim, seen by some as a “parable” of the Civil War, then raging in the American South, with its casting of light against darkness in a vast tropical landscape. Church first depicted Cotopaxi beginning in 1853 during his first of several travels to South America, forming a series of at least 10 paintings on the subject during his lifetime.
As you see above, the painting can be interpreted in many ways.
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