PLUM CAKE

Early Monday morning as I was waiting for the train I saw that the top of the highest mountain was dusted with a little bit of snow, like a holiday plum cake during sugar rationing, but today I notice that there is no plum cake at all, it's just a mountain again. Such are the vagaries of weather these days at the foot of Pure Land Mountain, which should all have been snowed under by now at least once or twice, but it's more like we're heading into Spring, which is unsettling since the body and the spirit are all prepared for what keeps on not coming.

It's like a constant disappointment you're not really aware of but can't spend much time thinking about, because after all there's living to be gotten on with, work to be done, errands to be run, folks stop by. But something isn't quite right, then you're standing there paused in some activity when the non-plum cakeness of the scene suddenly catches your eye and it all comes back, it's December again and you stand there just staring at the big fact hanging there in the air.

But such pauses don't last too long, because in some ways it's quite nice, this December springtime in snow country, where folks now get to do a lot more stuff than just shoveling snow the way they're usually doing about this time, or clearing roofs, hacking at the ice and walking gingerly when not indoors; instead, you see them out harrowing their land, cleaning up the brush, inoculating some mushroom logs, cleaning the rain gutters, trimming the shrubbery, small woodfires at home.

The made-up, blow-dried heads on tv point at the big red suns all over the country on their weather maps and talk about global warming, carbon footprints and suchlike terms they seem so fond of, and they may well be right, the world may be heading for a warm ending in a few years, decades, centuries, millennia, the terms are vague, but it's happened before, we all know about the ice ages and the weather cycles, the highs and lows that went on before history got going, and there very likely are more of those coming down the big pike, but folks around here aren't fretting too much; they're close to the land and the weather, they have a big sense of such things and are used to adapting, though it is a bit disappointing not to have a sky-high sugared plum cake for the holidays.