Where rivers meet - Pop go the Greetings

Pop go the greetings
Pop go the bloblets

Since this is the first day of the rest
of my life I might as well depict what
I experienced years earlier up north.

It is awfully cold up there and winter
temperatures go to extremes. One of the worries,
and they had many ranging from fish to bears,

of my in-laws was the damages inflicted
upon the trees that they owned in their mountains.
Part of their businesses was furniture making

and for that they had to have high quality
timbers. However, under these extreme conditions
trees do succum to nature's preoccupation.

Water contents in their trunks get frozen and as
they do so they invariably expand, exerting
enormous pressures within the trees,

with the net result that they actually push
apart the trunks from within. When these happen
the forests reverberate with echoes of the big bang.

This process is commonly known as freeze bursting
(coined).

The energy that previously bonded the tissues
together is now released into the atmosphere
in terms of explosions that could be heard
throughout the northern nights in winter times.

My in-laws' worry, quite predictably, was that
priceless trees are rendered literally pricesless in
these natural processes.

Now, you might think that that is the end of
my story, but you are wrong. These extreme
cold temperatures affect all aspects of life
in the north.

Sure, you have road accidents, avalanches, and
hundred of other things arising from extreme
cold temperatures . You just name them and
you would be damn right in all of them.

However, there is one phenomenon that might be
of inrerest to many. Greetings are, of course,
not forgotten even in these extreme conditions.

People do exchange greetings day and night. The
problem is that as it is so damn cold greetings
get frozen the moment they are uttered.

They get frozen and fall to the ground. In fact,
that process takes only a millionth of a second
and consequently you get enormous temperature

gradients across the surface of the frozen
greetings, which form these tiny bloblets. Yes,
they are therefore amorphous in their structure.

An electron micrograph will bear that out
very cleary. They are also very unstable.
They contain all the phonetic energies

normally associated with greetings. Any
disturbances, no matter how tiny they are,
could bring in the onset of system
failure and mulfunction

and release the energies back into the universe
that we live in. How and when would that be?
Well, it is the arrival of

the very early spring. Of course, the atmospherics
will not be experiencing anything that might remotely
resemble that of the spring in full swing.

However, subzero temperatures do the tricks.
Bloblets lying on the ground are instantly
activated from their unstable states.

In fact, they rapture and pop.

Pop go the greetings.
Pop go the bloblets.

The phonetic energies thus released
push air molecures in the vicinity
and the waves so created propagate through

large distances and reach our ear drums. We hear
the echoes of past greetings, not perfect, of
course. No doubt that there have been
distortions and losses.

Collectively, they go something like this and
there are lots and lots of them to pop.

"Goo", "ood mor", "...ing", "ow you?..." and the towns
and villages suddenly reverberate with lively
echoes of the past greetings.

Pop go the greetings.
Pop go the bloblets.