wreathe

Even if it’s just you and your television set, you might make yourself comfortable with a mug of cocoa and a plate of cookies; you might wreathe the screen in holly for a fun holiday effect.

Viewing Severodonetsk from across the river that separates it from its sister city Lysychansk, one witnesses the spasms in real time: Almost a dozen columns of smoke wreathe the skyline where tons of Russian ordnance smash through a building and start a fire, the flames twinkling in the distance like a votive candle.

Over time, this process cuts strange etchings into the canvas of the sand: black, forbidding trees with gnarled branches and spreading roots; elsewhere, crowns of dark thorns wreathe the ground around pebbles and strands of seaweed, like fateful auras.

Faced with a daunting path to reelection, he used his convention-capping speech to wreathe his presidency in superlatives and paint his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden as not exactly the personification of evil but something close to it.

“But at least you shall be my tree. With your leaves my victors shall wreathe their brows. You shall have your part in all my triumphs. Apollo and his laurel shall be joined together wherever songs are sung and stories told.”