I was waiting down at the ancient gate

The blizzard never showed up yesterday — a couple of inches of snow, nothing more. It was so cold, so light and powdery that we wondered if we’d all stood in the driveway and blown really hard for a long time, if we could have cleared it. But because we lacked sufficient follow-through on our imagination — or perhaps because our lips were blue with cold — a shovel was put to use instead.

It has become habit to check the computer for weather information as soon as I get out of bed, sometimes even before I bother to twitch aside the bedroom curtains and peer out. This morning the computer told me it was 15 degrees. I resolved to walk to school with AJ. But within a half an hour, a fierce wind was blowing back the clouds. I checked again. Now it was only 7. No, 6. 5. 4. And now it is 2 and I am moving to Miami where I can bury my toes in the sand and read undisturbed by noisy snowblowers and scraping plows.

And I am writing. A lot, actually. And mostly not here, which is, on the whole, a good thing. I am also distracting myself with the hours of tunes Lass sent me. It is typical of her that she promised me one CD and instead 4 show up in my mailbox, every one a gem. This week’s haul: Bon Iver’s To Emma, Forever Ago, which, both Lass and I agree, is up there with Fleet Foxes’ eponymous album as best of the year in our respective books on the subject; Okkervil River’s The Stand Ins, which feels like an album I have owned forever even though I’ve had it for less than 24 hours; The Band of Heathens (another eponymous album), the only CD I have not yet listened to, and a really interesting compilation disk from Uncut magazine, with many of my favorite artists on it mostly singing songs I’ve never heard. A terrific package, in other words, suitable for keeping me away from the bar on a cold winter’s night. They were also accompanied by a postcard which is likely to be framed in my office sometime soon:

So thank you again, Lass, for making winter a less dreary place to be and for dreaming me back to spring, at least inside my own head. And now I’m back to figuring out the mysteries of 19th-century American culture.