Finally Winter

"Why do you flee so soon, sir, to the theaters, lecture-rooms, and museums of the city? If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals . . . and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor." ~~Henry David Thoreau

It finally snows, the irony of a snow-less winter after purchasing a snowplow. I am glad for the color that snow adds to a landscape of gloominess that seemed bleached of all vitality. For snow holds within that whiteness the rainbow of all color. It makes the sky bluer and the browns stronger. Winter is not winter without snow. We have had suffocating haze and rain that freezes at night into sheets of ice covering all the fields around us so we seem to float, our house, on a little island in a sea of ice.

Our Corolla dies, a sad death on the highway into town. Transportation is where all our money goes. You pay for those miles in more than gasoline. It makes me think about urban sprawl and suburbs, about how there use to be small independent cities. We found out we are living on land that use to be a town called Square Town. Greg has been spending time researching this town that no longer exists and by the strangest of serendipity found that his great-great-great Grandpa Abbot settled in Square Town. Talk about unknowingly returning to your roots! He can't find much information and nothing about why the town disappeared. We need to break out of our introversion and talk to the old locals before they die and take all that knowledge with them.