cab

fridays i walk home. getting on a bus on friday afternoon is nearly impossible as they tend to be crammed to the top with some of the most appalling middle school children ever to walk the earth. so there's the issue of being able to squeeze just one more body on a city bus, but there's also the idea of being smashed into eight or nine reeking, shrieking children for more than an hour that just won't let me do it. it's not like this other days. just fridays. but today i am in a hurry and am carrying a heavy load of student work. it's not something i could drag four miles without doing damage to myself. so i treat myself to what i expect will be a quick trip home. i go to the car service.

it's a few blocks from school on bay parkway and i step into a cubicle that smells like a bowling alley or like my grandparents' house when i was very small. three men stand around in a space scarcely larger than a coffin, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. the smoke is thick enough to form curling wisps of blue. i tell the man behind the bulletproof glass where i want to go. he speaks past me using sounds i don't know and one of the smokers nods.

the man by the door opens it and motions me out. the one who nodded follows me and walks down the street. he doesn't say a word, just walks, sips his coffee, smokes. i follow him. we turn a corner and i can see three car service cars across the street. he stops at the curb and holds out his arm in front of me the way my mom used to in the car when there were only lap belts. i nearly run into his arm. when he's sure the street is clear, he motions me to follow. he opens the door for me. inside, there are white stickers on the back of each front seat head rest. "no smoking by order of nyc dept. of health". my skin and hair smell like they did when people still smoked in bars and pool halls. it is not an altogether awful smell.

he begins the drive the same way i walk home, a street over from the main one. the road less travelled. he asks about cross streets and says a wonderful vampiry thank you when i tell him. are the languages that close? i write a while and when i look up i have no idea where we are. bay ridge, maybe. this is the way of brooklyn, crooked, senseless, cobbled together of too many little villages. nothing connects up or runs straight. nowhere stays anywhere very long.

we go over the abandoned railroad cut and i know if i got out right there and followed it right i'd end up a few blocks from home eventually. there are signs in hebrew in the windows and on school busses. there is a catholic church complete with manger scene but the few people i see walking around are jewish. orthodox. we are hours from sundown and shabbas/shabbat. we turn a corner and zip under the elevated f train. my neighborhood. in the first block i see people from six different cultures. there is a police car with lights flashing on cortelyou, about a block from where that guy got stabbed earlier in the year. cortelyou, at least from coney island avenue to flatbush avenue, is more like a dirt bike track or some sort of off road obstacle course than a city street. we are close to my own street where we will turn left. as the delivery trucks and vans part i see it in front of us. right there in the intersection. the brittle carcass of a five foot christmas tree. it is unadorned, lying on its side. unapologetic and belligerent.

s'mores

i should have seen it coming. the original supernatural nephew did, of course, because he is, well, supernatural. he has spent the last seven years in the middle of a huge pile of adoration. the only grandchild to one grandparent set, the only nephew to two sets of aunts and uncles. and then there's the supernatural part. that adds on a bit. so life has been all gravy until this year. when the new supernatural nephew made his debut the original didn't fret. the new child had nearly strangled himself in utero. he was born looking like a spider monkey or some sort of aquatic alien. he slept most of the time. and who knew whether he had any powers or not. so the original just sat back and watched.

he was a doting big cousin. he knew had much to teach the new creature who mostly squirmed and squeaked. the adults certainly weren't supernatural so he knew he'd end up doing it all. he could mold the baby into his own sidekick. the new child adored him. but as the holidays approached he could feel it in the air. the baby's first christmas. he did not remember his own first chrismas and couldn't see what all he fuss was about, but still. christmas would be at the baby's house. fine. the new york aunt and uncle would be staying at the baby's house. fine. they could stay there a few days and... nope. all the days. all the days? whatever. it would be fine. it would be christmas.

christmas came and went and he was good. as far as he could tell, nobody knew this, of course, because they were all drooling over that baby. saying words that weren't real words. he knew real words, big words other kids his age had never met. and he used them for real, the way they were meant to be used. he was starting to get a sense of the baby's powers. the adults made faces at the new kid. the kind of faces he got in trouble for making on certain occasions. people actually picked up the child, sniffed his butt- yes, they really did- and were all sorts of joyous when the child pooped in his pants. the original supernatural pooped in a toilet like normal people. only animals and babies don't use toilets. gross.

but the original supernatural had a plan. he'd won a half pound chocolate bar at school nearly a year ago and had been saving it. he intended to have something to contribute. an event. he planned for an evening of telescope assisted stargazing at his house capped off by roasting s'mores over a campfire in his yard. all this was to take place with the brooklyn aunt and uncle the night after christmas. this, of course, means that he night after christmas started out as a tornado watch early in the morning and stayed blustery and cloudy right up until night, when it was painfully evident the stars and any nearby planets had abandoned the horrible night sky for something better. it was too windy for a bonfire. his aunt and uncle, not used to quite so many events in one day, were exhausted and figured the weather would encourage him to postpone. he was undaunted. he had a half pound chocolate bar.

so we got in the car, the uncle and i, bearing christmas peeps for the s'mores. he had graham crackers, marshmallows. he had the chocolate bar. he had a gas grill, metal skewers. he wanted to know what to do. so we set to work. he broke up the graham crackers into squares while i broke the chocolate. he put the chocolate squares on the graham crackers while i skewered a few peeps. we headed to the grill. we put the chocolate capped grahams on the top rack for slow and even chocolate melting. we each took a skewer and held our peeps to the flames. it felt the way andy and opie look when they're walking to the fishing hole. he wanted very much to use his own marshmallows for some of the s'mores and brought out the bag. mini marhsmallows, barely bigger than the skewers. but we speared the tiny things and they roasted up perfectly. pearls of flame.

we sat around the big dining room table- his dad, his mom who is also my sister, the original supernatural nephew himself, the sweetie and me. we ate s'mores and drank milk and talked about nothing in particular. if i've had better s'mores, i can't remember the time.

third baby

first, let me say i have never attempted to kill the baby of the family. but if you are dad, you may want to skip this one.

the baby was born while the middle sister and i were at home playing with a new set of blocks santa brought us a few weeks before. brightly colored plastic blocks with a hinge on one end that opened the blocks diagonally like pointy pac-men. each had a tiny rubber-plastic figure in it- animals, mostly, but i loved the blocks themselves. they could be snapped together to form diamondy snakes with scoop heads that slithered about the house. so when she came home we were impressed, but there was a house full of christmas presents and i already had this other baby who could talk.

there wasn't much to the third child as a baby. she slept and ate but because she was an easy baby mom kept taking her to the doctor, sure she was dying of quietness or stillness. she cut her teeth on the tail of an old dachshund named heidi who had gone through an imaginary pregnancy of her own while the baby was resting in our mom. all our vacation photos from her early childhood show two sisters alone on the rocky beach of lake shasta or two sisters with dad at christmas or two sisters at the ocean. we told her we left her home on these trips. she may have believed this a while. however, once when the middle child and i refused to let her follow us around, she bit her own hand and blamed it on us. she was small, four or five. after that she was asking for it.

she was born unusual, with a port-wine stain birthmark starting at one hand and spreading up into her neck, back and chest. she was red on those parts of her and when she got cold or angry, those red parts at her edges, especially her thumb, turned purple. we used this as an indicator of when to go inside during winter. we'd pull off her mitten and hold up her thumb, discussing between the two of us whether it was purple enough to call it a day. i don't recall much discussion about this but always in stories we read, a mark of some kind meant someone was a princess or was magic, so the middle sister and i focused on what was more obvious about the baby- her overwhelming desire to please others.

we could get her to do anything. the middle child and i had an ever changing "club" with the only requirement for membership being that one was not our baby sister. we poured sugar and water into old soda bottles, pretended to get drunk as we swigged down bottle after bottle. when she asked for some, we bellowed, "you're not old enough!" while waving the sugary bottles in her face. but one spring we nearly killed her. well, i nearly killed her. i say we because i know the middle child was there, as were several other neighbor kids. i was eleven or so, old enough to know better. her five or six year old self wanted to do whatever we were doing. so she had to pass a test. in our town there's a creek that splits the local baseball park from the city park and there's a cement bridge poured around a large drain pipe set down into this little creek that connects paths on one side to paths on the other. we would walk down past the fence post and its coating of blackberry bushes, through the high grass, across the little bridge and over into the park full of swings and a swimming pool.

so i stood with her on the little cement bridge which dips down over the creek and is the lowest part on both sides of the trails. other children stood there, too. and i told her to swim through the bridge pipe. it was warm enough, probably summer, and the water wasn't moving too fast, but the upstream section flowed through what was probably an eight foot section of pipe just big enough around for a five or six year old to swim through. and she did. or at least she went in. from all our past experience throwing twigs and leaves in upstream we figured she'd float out the other side in seconds. she did not. we had been cheering, but now we looked at each other without sound. we looked in the upstream end of the pipe. it was dark and we could not see her small feet. we walked to the other end, downstream, and after what seemed like years, a small blond head popped into view, covered with leaves and twigs. she seemed completely unfazed by her own near death but i made her promise she wouldn't tell our parents. a few years ago, when all three of us were living on our own and she figured it wasn't a big deal, she brought it up. our dad still has not recovered. "she's clearly not dead!" i kept telling him. this did not help at all.

yesterday she called to tell me about her own firstborn and how he had excitedly grabbed for a huge grasshopper she was holding up for him and had squished it senseless. i wanted to tell her that's the least of it. i wanted to say wait until he's five and he's got a new baby to drag around. or any time before five, really. but there's no sense worrying her. besides, if her own children are anything like her, she won't find out about most of it.

third day

let's say you forget to go on your new year's day hike up into the fine, snowy mountains. don't worry. you can choose a day, for instance the third of january, and go then. it's okay. you choose a short hike along water.

you know later there will be arkville festival. it will be cold. you trek down the block or so to the corner and walk up toward the bonfire. ten or twelve people you don't know stand around it in the 25 degree weather. you slosh through the snow over to casey joe's. there is the promise of live music, guys older than you stand around with a guitar, a bass. drums. people are milling around in bulky coats and the air is warm. you get a hot chocolate that would be free by the bonfire. you hear from the guy who runs the place that the firehouse is almost out of chicken. they had a hundred more dinners than last year he says and you remember you could only get a half chicken with no sides last year so you hurry out. lynyrd skynyrd is blasting out of speakers attached to the bike shop across from the firehouse. you get your chicken and six raffle tickets and bring your chicken back home to the howls of jim morrison.

the fireworks won't start until seven so you walk back down again and stand around a bit. joe walsh has replaced skynyrd and the doors and you are singing along even though you don't intend to. you decide to walk through town. when you get to the bridge the sky is spitting snow and you hold your camera over dry brook to see what a flash will get you from so far up. you go on to the corner and stand for a bit across from an old abandoned house you've wanted a photo of for quite some time. you pass it nearly every time you leave your own house and the camera is always with you but it is now, in the night, in the snow, waiting for fireworks that you decide to get it. you convince the sweetie to take the photo because you know it will be better than yours and it is. he snaps a few pictures of a house you've convinced yourself was central to the pakatakan artists' colony that settled here and you fully expect to see lost painters in the windows. thomas cole having tea.

you turn back and hear the first explosion. it goes down inside your bones and you can feel them spark. the sky is dark and there are little flecks of snow hovering around the orangy streetlights and then up and above the railroad tracks fire blooms all over. you stand right there on the sidewalk under the railroad crossing sign. you can see down the tracks a bit there are rail traveling vehicles but they are too snowy to recognize. the exploding keeps happening. you breathe it in. there is no other sound. happy third day of the new year! says the sweetie.

handshake

i always figured if i ever met johnny cash i would cry so hard i'd probably fall down. i grew up with that man's voice in my ears as early and as constant as anyone in my family. you get that way sometimes about things, where you know enough about someone, where you feel the prsence of someone in your life so intensely you feel like you know them and they are somehow yours, even if you've never met them. there's always a danger that someone like that, someone famous, will be less than what we think and we'll be disappointed, heartbroken. i felt like that when i saw jimmy smith at a show in syracuse years back. he was a complete jerk on stage and i felt like i knew why his baby done left him by the end of the show.

but there are some folks who are as wonderful as you imagine. i spent some time years back going to see old blues musicians with a friend who always went up to shake hands with and thank the band as they were packing up. at first i teased him about trying to get to meet famous folks but he was too serious about it to notice. he was genuinely grateful to see these old guys he had grown up with and was raised to say thank you when given a gift. when this same friend took me to see maceo parker at the haunt in ithaca, i was surprised when, after the show, a man in the parking lot reached for my hand and thanked me for stopping by. he was wearing the nicest suit i'd ever seen up close and he smelled of sweat and electricity. it took me several steps toward the car to realize maceo parker had thanked me. he thanked us all, stood out there in the parking lot in the dark shaking hands with everyone who came out of that place.

when i worked at a bookstore i met plenty of famous folks coming in to sign books or do little shows. sara weddington came to sign her book and when she asked my name i was unable to tell her. i didn't know. she looked like my high school home ec teacher. she called me honey. she patted my hand and signed my book. you hope everyone will be so gracious, but it's hard to know for sure.

so i was a little nervous about meeting the newest supernatural nephew for the first time. partly because he's a baby and babies are just weird. also because everyone in my family has been throwing around the word "perfect" a little too freely in conjunction with this particular child. it's suspicious. i have spent plenty of time around small children and frankly, they are far from perfect. they are tiny hurricanes, always spewing something and flailing and sending things flying. they are scary. he's a good baby, they kept saying. what on earth does that mean? good baby.

we arrive christmas eve at the house of the good baby. he is teething, we hear. i wait. i know what teething babies do. their heads spin around and the room is bathed in an ominous red glow as they howl at pitches that can shatter eyeballs and do damage to spinal nerves. but the room is not red and the sound that comes out of him is more like the sound of a small stream on a hillside. but he is teething, his parents say, feigning frustration at what appears to them to be cranky behavior. there is no evidence of this crankiness. cranky for a child just under one involves a face the color of a beet and wailing that sounds like strangulation. i look for the cranky. they hand me the child to hold. he has never seen me so i know he'll cry. he does not cry. he smiles. this is what he does. he smiles all the time. they had been telling me this for months and i just figured they had that hypnotic baby idiocy that happens to parents, grandparents and some aunts and uncles.

he does not cry ever. this is unsettling. we stayed in his house five days and i am absolutely certain we never heard more than a total of 73 seconds of anything that sounded like disgruntlement. in five days. he sleeps at night. he takes naps without a fuss. he eats whatever his parents feed him and eats all of it. he is not afraid of dogs or cats. he laughs a lot. and he loves any sort of interactive play. he's a good baby, his mother says, smiling. good? is she kidding? he's ridiculous. he's not even real. he really is all those things i said over the last few months- supernatural. he really can fly and email and use the phone. he can speak seventeen languages and can read twelve. it will wear off as he gets older. not the talent, but the fascination with it. with supernatural powers come difficult choices and overwhelming responsibilities. he will find perfection tedious in his teen years and will shrug it off without even noticing. but right now, today, he is unsettlingly perfect.

the rest

it is important to start by saying we arrived on time. this is important because by the end you won't think it was possible. but it was. at least, as far as i can tell. we left early tuesday morning. the road was clear and the pennsylvania part of the trip and most of the ohio part flew by, just tunnels and bridges blurring into one another. kittatinny. tuscarora. allegheny. muskingum. mountains shrouded in fog. rest stops with tall trees. and then we got to dayton. dayton is an ohio town maybe 25 or so miles from the border with indiana. dayton evidently has no police force, no support from highway patrol, no foul weather plan and no sense at all, collectively speaking. dayton also has ice. or at least on 23rd december there was ice to be had all over the dayton sections of highway 70. our trip through dayton took about three hours. here's what we think may have happened.

a. a semi spun out of control on the treacherous ice, flipped over, skidded across all three lanes, burst into flames and also spilled its entire contents (probably lima beans or kale) all over the highway.

b. traffic was slowed by a flock of crossing ducks. the unmoving tires slowly froze to the accumulating ice on the highway. everyone ended up frozen in place.

c. every semi ever made was on the road attempting to deliver whatever wherever before the holiday. tired drivers simply pulled over on the side of the road to sleep. the process of pulling a vehicle that large to the side of the road and parking can seriously delay traffic. multiply the single truck by hundreds and you have a two lane parking lot stretching about a hundred miles.

in the end, we're pretty sure it was c.

we continued unimpeded until we hit the the western outskirts of indianapolis where the rain/sleet/ice began to get serious. it started gentle and stayed gentle, but ice is ice and even a tiny little whisper of it can send a whole bunch of people spinning and skidding through the late afternoon, so think drama. think off in a ditch the day before christmas eve. i get nervous in this sort of weather, which means i abandon my navigating duties for the great responsibility of pointing out in the most unhelpful way any small motion i think might cause us harm. it turns out i am wrong about most of them but the sweetie takes them all as seriously as he can, considering he's already driving very slowly among very large vehicles on a smooth sheet of ice.

only a few minutes into the drama of the western indiana ice debacle, just south of plainfield, i panic about a giant milk tanker in our lane, two cars ahead of us. it is swerving. no, it is trying to get from the left to the middle of three lanes. the cab does exactly what the driver wants. traffic crawls along at about fifteen and the driver edges over into a space just larger than his truck. but the tanker part keeps going. it swings out like a pendulum into the miraculously empty right lane and as quickly as it does this, it swings neatly back into place behind the cab in the middle lane. it is so impressive i have to stop worrying and work on being awed. we now know exactly how slick the roads are, but i am not thinking about this. i am thinking about the driver of the milk truck and how it must have felt to see that tanker slip neatly into place in his rearview mirror.

several hours later we are about four or five miles from the site of the milk truck show and it is dark. i know i exaggerate from time to time, but this time i'm not. we left indianapolis around five and at nine, we were about twenty five miles down the road near a tiny place called joppa. the ice continued. trucks began pulling over. people got out of cars and stood on the icy road. others shut off engines and lights, conserving fuel. at around 12:30 or one, we managed to creep up to the cloverdale exit and highway 231. we convince ourselves there must be an accident of some sort and if we could just take a local road around it, we could get as far as terre haute. this is a small town nowhere near our st. louis destination, but large enough to have a hotel or two. so we drove slowly up the few miles of icy local road to the intersection with 40, a road that parallels the highway for quite some time. we stopped at the gas station where the sweetie bought a moldy breakfast burrito and we found out our beloved only hope was closed. shut down. iced up. so we drove back down to the cloverleaf and headed toward the cluster of hotels and motels on the other side. we couldn't get up to two of them because semis were parked in the entrance several deep, blocking everything. logjam. we decided to stop at mcdonald's for coffee and it took us some time to realize that mcdonald's was closed. all the cars and trucks in the lot were full of people sleeping, blanketless, shivering. we drove to the other hotels. there was a woman in a santa hat outside one hotel waving people on. no room at the inn. she cheerfully promised that terre haute, only 40 miles away, would be brimming with sleeping opportunities.

back to the cloverleaf and then toward the highway and this is when we saw them. the trucks. parked all along the on and off ramps, all along both sides of the westbound highway. sleeping. stopped. none of this looked very safe, especially those on the slick and curving ramps, and my worrying kicked in. they were mostly trucks, but people in cars, too, sat perched on the edges of embankments. we kept driving. we couldn't have pulled over if we'd wanted. there wasn't any room so we drove down a corridor of darkened hulks. fedex. midwest express. j.b. hunt. england. knight. but as we continued west the traffic thinned. all trucks seemed to be off the road. the ice turned to something slushy and the sweetie pushed the car up to 30mph, then 40. we'd set ourselves on the road sometime around 5am and as we saw our first signs for terre haute, i looked at the clock. nearing 2am.

we pulled into terre haute just before three and found a hotel in the parking lot of the local mall. that's right. my first sight later that morning as i drew back the curtain was sears, then toys r us. i sat in the car with the dogs while the sweetie negotiated with the night clerk. only a few rooms left. smoking. fine. we hauled shivering dogs and a bag or two through cold rainish stuff up to a room that was not just inhabited by a smoker, but a chainsmoker with cheap taste in cigarettes and a shaky hand. there was something black splashed in the sink and smeared, fingerprinty, on the white bathroom door. there were burn holes in everything. the blankets were the texture of old shower curtains. still, we slept. from three to just about dawn, which is in the neighborhood of seven am. we did not shower because there were no towels and because we didn't want to be barefoot anywhere in the room. the dogs weren't allowed off the bed. on the way out i recognized the black goo in the sink. hair dye. curious. unsettling. mysterious. the room of a criminal.

but we were back out on the road with the sun which we promptly lost in a very aggressive fog. because ice by itself isn't enough. as we continued west through illinois shapes materialized in the mist. broken cars scattered all along the roadside and median. a truck or two folded in, hordes of tiny cars with huge trailers, one or the other upturned but never both. soggy clothes and torn luggage whizzed past us on the ground. people's holidays smeared all over the half-frozen filth on the roadside. the further we went, the more there were of all these. farm after farm passed us. barns and silos and blond fields behind barbed wire.

the fog softened enough that we could see the top of the arch long before st. louis rolled into view. we crossed the biggest river in the whole country and followed a highway that snaked past old brick factories and stout brick houses, out into the hills of missouri. christmas eve. nearly lunchtime. billboards promising fireworks, adult books, the wrath of god.

storm

word problem: if a northbound subaru leaves bensonhurst, brooklyn at 12:30pm driving 20 mph and an eastbound snowstorm leaves pennsylvania at 8am at an undetermined speed, where will the inhabitants of the subaru spend the night?

a. snuggled up by the fire with the small dogs in their very own home in arkville.
b. eating burger king food that was accidentally doused with an entire coke in a motel six just off the highway in new paltz, ny.
c. sitting backward along the side of the snowy road with a few dozen other folks who don't understand that antilock brakes don't make a person impervious to ice.

the answer is b.

we headed up to be sure the pipes weren't frozen (they weren't) and to pick up a christmas gift for someone we'd had shipped to our p.o. box. the nearly five hours it took us to get 88 miles, max cried even more loudly than usual. the only thing he hates more than a car speeding down the highway is a car inching down the highway. you can imagine what his piercing wail added to the icy roads, blinding snow and drivers who seemed unaware of the limits of their precious vehicles. the further north we got, the more we saw folks off in the ditches, stranded on medians, spun around. we never saw it happen once, but the conditions of the cars and of the occupants inside suggested that the slowness of the traffic and deepness of the snow around the highways made for a very bumper car like experience, a soft, slow spinning so that the car would come to rest with a slight tap against snow. we saw nobody slammed into trees or guardrails. just nestled into the piles of snow their cars plowed up as they ran off.

we stopped when it got dark, which on the next to shortest day of the year is some time after four and some time before five. turns out new paltz is hosting some sort of college graduation and there's not much room at the inn. the sweetie managed to snag the last nonsmoking room in the place. for those of you who don't know, nonsmoking in a chain hotel means nobody has smoked there this week except mabye the staff. in addition to nonsmoking, the room turned out to be nondog. fortunately, other patrons, stranded folks like ourselves or the happy parents of graduating college students, found our two small beasts charming.

we hit the road again early saturday morning, expecting it to be clear. expecting often brings disappointment. the 40 mile trip from the highway to the house is a scenic "highway" of two lanes that skirts the northern edge of the ashokan reservoir and then meanders through a valley carved by the esopus creek and then, near big indian, the highway follows birch creek northish through places like giggle hollow and cathedral glen. it climbs up over a mountain and then catches the trail of emory brook and bush kill. you only have to follow it as far as where dry brook, binnekill and the east branch delaware all snarl around together and carve out a little spot for the tiny towns of arkville and margaretville. and this is all a very pretty trip when the roads are clear, but on saturday morning after a friday afternoon snow hurricane, the roads look just like the surrounding countryside. silent. lovely. impassible. we did stop briefly at the beginning of this leg of the trip to get gas and fluid for the wipers. in the just before light part of the morning two guys in a truck pulled up next to us. they had hunter-type stickers affixed to the vehicle and when the driver, a man in his late fifties, got out, some sort of vampire keyboard opera seeped out behind him. i could see the other guy inside, poring over images on his laptop, rocking out to this stuff. the driver began to pump gas but opened the door again to talk to laptop guy. this time we were hit with strains of innagaddadavida. but live and not by iron butterfly. this, i think, is how deerslayers get themselves ready for the contest, at least up here. we get our gas and head back to the road.

we are encouraged by the snow plow we see in front of us and we trudge on. turns out we saw maybe fifty or so snow plows on 28 during our 40 miles, but only in the last ten or so of those miles did we see any of them plowing. the others tooled along cheerfully enough. some seemed to be spilling cinders or sand or salt, whatever folks use up here. but the plows seemed purely ornamental. this had us worried. we have a fairly long driveway with a bit of an uphill slope and everyone was imagining different versions of us getting stuck at the foot of the driveway, the hatchback end of the car jutting out into traffic, visible but unavoidable in this sort of weather. but as we neared the house we could see the driveway was the clearest part of our trip. sometime before our own arrival at 7am, someone had plowed it for us. and we drove right up to the garage uneventfully.

our time here yesterday and today has consisted mostly of lying around, reading, knitting, drinking hot chocolate and being snuggled by dogs. so you can only begin to imagine our horror when we woke up this morning to even more snow. that's right. trapped. not trapped in the house. every vehicle larger than ours has a plow on the front of it and town is accessible. town being the mile of highway 28 that holds two pizza places, an antiques place, a grocery store, three liquor stores, two laundromats and a fitness center. so we've got all that. but we're cut off from the larger world. blowing snow. drifting snow. travel advisories.

what to do? we'll try leaving monday. but today i am making myself a new hat with ear flaps. the sweetie is reading and napping with max. guthrie spends much of his time on the hearth, right in front of the fire, gently licking the logs waiting to go in. we will have hot chocolate in many forms. sometimes there will be cinnamon. sometimes there will be peeps floating on top. maybe there will even be a little bourbon in the chocolate. there are hot foods of all sorts in the pantry. soups. chili. oatmeal. twenty opportunities for tea. coffee in decaf and not. we stopped by to see the parrot in the auto parts store and didn't even mind that they didn't have our windshield wipers. i have sent off lesson plans for my classes tomorrow. nobody will use them, but as long as i send them, nobody will yell at me, either. we will listen to johnny cash. the sweetie will work on some top secret project that involves tools i never use. the snow will snow some more tomorrow but it will be clear in brookln and we will head back to where snow is gray and brown and has sharp things in it. i will wear my new hat. the roads will be clear. but for now we are in the middle of a snowstorm and there are few things more satisfying than being warm and dry and near to good food and company when the weather outside is warning-worthy.