"And anything that happened me after, I never felt the same about again."

Suddenly it's cold.  33 degrees this morning on the way to school. 

I'm getting itchy for the semester to be over.  Can't imagine how the students feel!  Although today we covered one of my favorite short stories, and one of the most haunting:  Frank O'Conner's "Guests of the Nation."  In the short story two English prisoners of two Irish guards become treated as guests as a friendship develops and the hosts face the anguish of killing their guests in the name of a higher national purpose. (Friendship and strife in Frank O''Connor''s Guests of the Nation.) The last paragraph of the story particularly gets me:

Bonaparte, one of the young Irish soldiers, says this after he and his comrade, Noble, return to the old woman's house. The old woman knows they have killed the British hostages:
 "So then by God, she fell on her two knees by the door, and began telling her beads, and after a minute or two Noble went on his knees by the fireplace, so I pushed my way out past her, and stood at the door, watching the stars and listening to the damned shrieking of the birds.  Is is so strange what you feel at such moments, and not to be written afterwards. Noble says he felt he seen everything ten times as big, perceiving nothing around him but the little patch of black bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it; but with me it was the other way, as though the patch of bog where the two Englishmen were  was a thousand miles away from me, and even Noble mumbling just behind me and the old woman and the birds and the bloody starts were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lonely.  And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again."

I have begun to listen to Christmas music, too. 

Right now I'm listening to a very old tape that became a CD and is now on my ipod.  Part of it is a version of St. Basil's Christmas Hymn that's done on a harp.  I associate this music with snow and ice on a brittle winter night.