I had forgotten...

that momentary start of seeing the world change, of waking toward the window and having it all be the dim white of an early morning snow that has lined all the trees and erased all other detail. One morning at Vassar, when I lived in the townhouses with Rachel and Hilary, I woke to this and went out for a three hour walk along the edge of the farm and through neighborhoods I hadn't walked before, in the quiet and no one else was there until I came home and they were bustling about breakfast, Rachel having made something warm as she usually did. One morning some years later -- the first of Thanksgiving break after we had driven up late at night into the Sierras from the previous day of classes at Berkeley, a day that had been frustrating for some one of the reasons grad school can be frustrating -- we woke to several inches of snow and I headed out into it with our friend's dog, out and down toward the Stanislaus River through the big trees, several hours of sloughing off pissed-off-ness into the delight and beauty of it and the effort of it, too, the snow in some places knee-high. When we got back to the cabin, the dog passed out in front of the wood stove and I was back in the world of living with others.

I won't go out into this morning's snow, yet. Instead, I have printed our boarding passes for flying away tomorrow, off to Seattle to visit with Dennis's brother and Buni for two weeks. (Is there a way to type so that the letters sparkle with the gladdening they bring?) In the meantime, though, I am looking out into this snow for some consolation for the frustrations and bad-decisions-of-others of this past week.

Not counted in that list, however, is that my father put our Christmas package that we'd sent them on the stove. I heard this happening while on the phone with my mother, checking that the package had arrived. In the middle of talking about what is happening Christmas Day there, she said, an aside, her hand over the receiver, "Walter, that's probably not a good place to put that," but I could picture him standing in the kitchen with the package and no other place to put it because my mother is in cooking mode (hence, all the counter space is full). She and I talked a few minutes more, plotting various niece-and-nephew fun, and we finished and hung up. Several minutes later the phone rang, and Dennis picked it up and what I heard was, "But it's okay? Only the bottom was singed?"