YUKIGUNI

It’s such fun living up here on the edge of yukiguni because, among so many other reasons you get sudden big snowfalls like we did yesterday, after a splendid but way extended autumn.

The moody sky let loose all day with the conviction of ten trillion snowflakes while I was working in the same-old big city where it was snowless as usual and otherwise uninteresting, so when I got home I couldn’t even drive up to the house, had to park in the tunnel under the lakeside road and walk up the rest of the even steeper part of our local roadway through half-meter deep snow to the house in the dark.

It was dark because that's the way the night gets up here where there are no streetlights - another fun thing because of the astonishment of stars in summer - but in the winter, when you walk your way here after the early end of day, going step by step upward into the hush of a mountainwide snowfall in the dark as night ever gets, wearing your mountain shoes - this is no place for tasseled loafers - you get to share the power of the snow and its silence, and the night and its dark, like nowhere in any city.

This just the first snow of the year, so before we get to see the flowers sing in color again there are few more meters of white yet to come down and rise high on the ground for their turn at being, because when it finally snows up here in yukiguni, it gives you all it’s got.