Snowy, Snowy Day

I love the book by Ezra Jack Keats about the little boy on the snowy, snowy day. Seeing his peaked hood and silent grey footprints brings back my childhood. And today is indeed snowy. I finally tackled the debacle that is our back porch today (precoffee, too): left Martin clattering about making eggs for the girls and ventured into the cold to sweep up spilled precomposting coffee grounds. The back porch felt absolutely freezing--indeed the coffee grounds in our compost bowl were frozen solid--but when I stepped out to our balcony (a romantic sounding name for what is a basic, dirty platform), balmy winds greeted me.

What to say? How baffling! Turns out I enjoyed being witness to the three minutes or so of balmy winds as two weather storms collided. And now the creek, the bare arms of the trees, the bright orange splash of our neighbor's playplace, covers quickly with snow.

Yesterday, I finally whipped out my blunt scissors and wire cutters and harvested all the dried herbs in our sunroom. A large basket overflows with roses, lavender, feverfew, thyme: echoes from the hot summer. . .I crumbled huge bunches of genovese and lemon basil into Ziplocks, gently eased crisp spearmint leaves into bags. The scent was so overwhelming it made me almost dizzy and a little nauseous.

I finished the evening of what had turned into an exhausting but lovely day (morning at IKEA with two children!) with a late-night chapter of my current escape book, Under the Tuscan Sun, where the owners of an idyllic villa eat immoral quantities of cheese and build stone walls and find hidden aqueducts. Well, I may have a runny-nosed child and a snowy sky, but I glean what I can: a sudden flight of blackbirds outside my window, the harvesting of basil in January.