snow day

It's the kind of morning you hope for when you're ten--snow so thick it puts a soft haze on everything punctuated by black city birds swooping from trees to rooftops to telephone wires. Snow softens everything, cleans up the city, takes us back a hundred years or more. These are flakes the way they should be, fluffy, random, persistent. It's been snowing long enough that the trucks have been by once already: plow, salt, sand...but not so long that we feel overwhelmed. This is sledding weather, or skiing weather if you live close enough to the park to walk or ski over. This is cup of tea by the fire and all-day project in the house weather; this is the time to make crock-pot soup and bake things all day for dinner and make pancakes for breakfast and time to move your car so the plows can get under and around it. This is the time to remember why soft and slow and easy is important...to indulge in mindfulness-and in life-with gentle gusto.