SPIRIT BREAKFAST

This morning I had the huge dawn fortune of going out into snow-cleared air and walking past all the fence posts with their high snow caps and beyond them the views of frosted mountains, the Lake like wet granite glazing off to mountains on the other side, then mountains beyond them, and beyond all the unrisen sun casting pastel glows and purple charcoal shadows out over everything as the mountains allowed, all hanging still in the silence of the air, just hanging all around out there, timeflake by timeflake: Lake, sky, mountain, air, all that spectacularity just being there and doing nothing in particular, just the everything it always does, seen or unseen, praised or unpraised, loved or unloved, the same everything that matters to the seeker who is the living soul within a body that, just risen from the winter of night in deep need of a spirit breakfast, to feast upon such colors and lights, scents and silences, distances and shadings, nearnesses and brilliances, topographies, delineations, and so in snow boots I alone in all that majesty walked, slowly, down, through, white, toward something that had to do with - a matter, I was sure, that in other moments I have deemed important somehow, and when I got to the car, which was mine, I opened the door with the key I happened to have at hand and started the engine as I remembered, shook my head to get back closer to this life of time and moments, having just been for some immeasurable measure among heavenly things...

An Evening's Task

   From out of a sunny day it started snowing late this afternoon, and up here when it snows like this you want to go walking where you can feel the deeper depths of calm at the heart of the snowy forest, the calm we are born from, the calm that you hold in your open hands.

   In the forest quiet the snow goes on with its whispers to itself upon the ground, upon the trees.  As I wade up through the white that is falling everywhere, the way is still untraveled, the snow ahead untrammeled. Along the narrowing road through the snow-laden oaks, the smaller trees lean over from the weight, forming a tunnel toward even more whiteness. Above them rise empty trees with frosted limbs, reaching like their own ghosts into a silvering sky...

  I leave what is now a filling path and turn upon the rougher way upward along the noisy stream that gallops down among the icy rocks at the feet of the trees, and when I reach the source of our water I step with my high boots into the pushing cascade, begin to clear away a week's debris from the mountain above, and the water rises in our watercourse.

   After a few moments in that wild splashing at the heart of the silence, task completed I stand and look around me, listening, breathing the snow-edged air, taking it all in: the darkling sky, the biding trees, the stream, the thickening snow, the disappearing road, these clouds of breath, the passing of time, the season, the rooted stillness, like water being, like forest knowing, trees reaching, all yet to come alive again from the seeming silence, when Spring calls all the voices back to their places...

*

[Wrote this back before we got our deep well and had to take turns tending the mountain stream source of our water, and when there was snow like we used to have...]

ANGELS ALL OVER THE PLACE

When as grownups we fall and rise again, hopefully each time closer to the angels, it is to us a matter of integrity, of struggle and betterment, of progress and growth, the rooted aims of a living life...

And then later down the snows of time on an Asian mountainside, when of a blue winter morning at a certain age we observe our young descendants fall backward into the whiteness and make wings of their arms, laughing and unable to rise because it is so wondrous to lie there, warm and cradled in the soft cold, gazing up at the highest of sky from this perfect point of view, it is heartening to us elders beholding, in the simplest of ways, that true living is, at its heart, a matter of light...

As is so often the case I had different plans for today, but this time it snowed during the night, to my amazement and baffled surprise, this being late January-- or nowadays, early Spring. Until yesterday I had been under the strong impression that the balmy zephyrs would continue until the glaciers melted, inundating coastlines and shifting sea currents, unbalancing the earth and sending us whirling off toward maybe Mars, but some things never turn out the way you think they might.

So the trio and I spent the day not following Work Plan A, but rather shoveling off the deck and sledding for a while, I then leaning on the deck rail watching while the twins made angels in the snow below until there were angels all over the place, with angel faces in between, and we couldn't walk anywhere around the firewood without stepping on an angel.

Never had a better reason for calling it a day.

Snowball Fever

Here at high altitude in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, just over and up the snowcapped mountains from Kyoto - the old and sometimes snowy capital - even as three or more ice breakers are one by one being frozen into the Antarctic pack ice, the precipitation is falling steadily here on the mountainside today, as it has been since morning, the beautiful quieting whiteness delicately laying its soft, thick, ermine blanket over the countryside, festooning the trees and outlining the shapes of all the paddies in its... NOT! 

On January 8 it is NOT snowing, it is raining; it hasn't snowed yet this year, apart from a solo flake I think I saw one evening, which might have been a confused butterfly. But who ever said weather is fair? What’s worse, the pour is coming down as hard as if this were rainy season, which should have ended months ago; it’s even flooding in places, and if this were crisp dry snow it would be deep and way nicer, but noooo, it perverses to be wet, cold, rain and what can we say, we serial weather victims, what can we do about it and don’t give me that carbon footprint spiel if you don’t mind, it makes me want to throw a heavy snowball really hard, which those boat crews are probably doing a lot of in the Antarctic right now.   

Stinkbug Winters

Folks around here kept mentioning the overabundance of kamemushi this autumn - though in my opinion more than one kamemushi is overabundance - and it recalls to me what one of the wives of the fields across the road said to us the summer we first moved into our new house here, how there were a lot of kamemushi this year - there'd been practically none of those bugs in Kyoto - so there would be heavy snows that winter, and so it proved, big time.

The snow out here had been impressive the previous winter, but it was so heavy our first winter in the new house that only a tracked vehicle could have made it all the way up. The first early snowfall was over a meter, and the snowtop stayed up to my waist all winter. There was only a walking path up the mountain road, up and down which the mailman walked each day, the folks up here using sleds to pull their provisions (food, kerosene) up to their houses.

We newbie city slickers had a 2-wheel drive vehicle (for the last time), so we definitely had to park down below the school and walk up too, but we loved it all: the snow, the solitude, the silence, the vistas...  All that snow on the ground throughout the winter was a welcome challenge, and nothing better for a woodstove fire, warming us at the heart of white...    

Since then (almost 20 years now) we haven't had anything like that snow, or anything like those swarms of kamemushi (in the laundry, in your safety glasses, inside your just-laundered sweatshirt, in your salad, in your coffee. Until this year. At the first unfold last week of a firewood tarp that had been in the tool shed I counted 50 kamemushi, in the second unfold, I lost count, third unfold why bother countin, fourth looks like big snow comin.

Now I get to see if kamemushi walk the walk.

SWEET CHARIOT

I guess its time I talk about my most recent - and final - motorcycle accident. No, I’m not communicating from beyond, despite the writing quality; I'm just hyporeflexed, which is almost the same thing, comin' for to carry me home.

Yes, I nearly caught the Sweet Chariot last December, while my body chased its bike a ways down the mountain over ice, roadside and some other stuff. The bike was still as trusty as gravity, but turns out I wasn't. I, who grew up much of the year on ice and snow; sledded, tobogganed, bicycled, drove and hung around on ice like a summer sidewalk with never a single accident - thanks to fine-tuned reflexes - reflexes that I continued to count on throughout life, heedless of the encroaching press of time...

Thus it was that on that crisp sunny winter morning I blithely launched my wheeled self from our driveway onto the pure white snow-powdered road - piece a' cake, been there a million times, successfully too - even up here, for the past 17 winters, without the slightest thought of not being able to remember what happened 10 seconds later...

In the aftermath, it wasn't the residual head, shoulder, knee, thigh pain that hurt the most when I finally regained the ability to hurt; the deepest blow was that my Benedict Arnold reflexes, which for all my life had pirouetted me over football field, up/down mountainside, basketball court, down the streets where you live, had departed my person without saying "Do NOT go riding on the ice today or anymore, Bob; I retired on Saturday."

For retire it did, without notice. As forensically determined from the impact pattern on said body parts, at the moment of greatest preventive need I had no reflexive reaction whatsoever; there was statistically no difference between my decycled body and a 190 lb. sack of bleached white flour. I realized, after the fact, that for all these years I have been counting on my teenage balancing skills when freewheeling over any surface - particularly snow-covered ice - and instantly compensating for any slippage by shifting shoulders, hips or legs, sticking a leg out for 3-point support if needed, and never hitting the ground, except after hitting that pole a few years ago.

I rode that way all my life and was still riding that way at the age of 72, setting myself up for a lesson it's about time I learned. Learning requires survival, though, so I'm truly fortunate to be able to say: I think I'll walk the rest of the way...

WHEN THE QUIET FILLS WITH LIGHT

First snow of winter fell during the night and is still falling. Kind of late, even on the mountaintops; the first white dusting was only a couple of weeks ago. When it's still dark and you're just waking you can tell by the deeper silence that it has snowed; then the quiet fills with light and seems even thicker...

When you hear that silence, peep out the window and behold that whiteness covering all you see, something changes in you as when you were a kid, that ancient winter quickening, a new flow you can feel, a current native to the bone, this new cold white adventure just beginning to build, for there are things to be done, special things-- snow to be shoveled, outdoor items to be covered or moved into snowless places (good thing the snow tires are on -- a smile), break out the Sorels, the heavy socks and gloves, get the snowcoat, thick hat, shovels, heavy brooms, car brush, window scrapers, cover the wheelbarrow, put the ladders away, bury the garden faucets and hoses beneath mounds of leaves, stack more firewood closer to the house before the snow builds its deadline.

The dawning birdsongs are sharper and clearer - more frugal; energy is at a premium -
Appetites change too, as a result of all this action, this freshness of air scrubbed through the night by trillions of fine-edged waterflakes; hunger gets big, the body gets ready for what is to come, the work and the fuel, the food and the firewood, the lifting and shoveling and hauling, fighting the doubtless wind, pushing through the deepening snow, ice to be chipped away, like old days of waiting...

COLD WEATHER RIFF

At last we've got some weather I can call cold, who grew up in upstate New York just south of the north pole where winter weather meant daggery January winds racing howling down from the north with icicle teeth as we teens stood thin-clad on the rimed streetcorners at night bein cool, hangin out... It just doesn't seem to get that cold any more, a situation that often prompts my fogey intro "Why when I was a boy...," begetting in turn that roll of the eyes in any teenagers or so in the vicinity "Oh no, not that story again, about the weather..."

Yeah, and unlike you kids nowadays at the age of 9 I used to go out at 5 a.m. in NY winter blizzards to deliver the morning newspaper before going off to school, and those were blizzards like you don't see anymore. One place I used to deliver the papers to in the wintry darkness was in the big old cemetery out beyond the edge of town. None of the dead subscribed, but the cemetery caretaker did, and he lived in the big old Addams family caretaker's mansion with its pointy spires and tall narrow windows, beyond the high, creaking, speartipped, slowly opening cast iron gate...

At the first squeal of the heavy gate there began to sound from the lower depths of the house an infernal howling, a devilish moaning, long and lowing, yearning for the flesh of a young paperboy trudging down the long wide deep-snow walk in the dark beneath the high arching bare-limbed, arm-waving, body-grabbing elm trees, toward the big plate-glass-windowed doors that glowed with a sinister nightlight there in the distance through the snowflake-spewing wind...

"What ghosts must live here," would always race unbidden through my 9-year-old mind surrounded by graves, the keepers of the air brushing my face with the whispering snowflakes of the dead...

That soul-chilling yowl was the eccentric caretaker's herd of Great Dane hellhounds, each twice my height on its hind legs, yearning pent up all night in the silent house until there was my sound at the gate...

As I approached the house the hounds arose from the cellar depths and began their clacking galloping yowling traversal of the long wood-floored corridor that stretched from the far back of the house to the front door, timing their journey perfectly in the dim light so that just as I reached the doorway and was about to place the newspaper on the doormat safely out of reach of the drifting snow their massive paws would strike the giant plate glass windows of the doors like bearclawed catcher's mitts and send a whang of a bonging gong shuddering thoughout the dead-air house and me and the universe, and the dogs would stand slavering overhead, booming their deep bass roar-bellows over and over through the ice-toothed morning air as I positioned the newspaper, turned and walked toward the gate and squeaked once again beyond their reach, until perhaps tomorrow, before dawn... Those were interesting times...

And that was cold, that was cold... you don't get weather like that anymore...

Or newspapers...

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

BEING SEEDS

Last night after a cold but sunny day of casual work in the garden and firewood (chainsawed a big stash of cherry from the landscaper below) I was beginning to think we’d had our last frost and Spring is here, when I looked out the big front window before heading to bed last night and there was already a big white BAM! on the deck, and snow was falling heavily in fat flakes.

So Spring is NOT here yet, nyah, nyah, said each flake, my potseeded lettuces getting more anxious by the day, like the beginning bergamot, dill, thyme and Italian parsley, all bent in green eagerness from their little pots toward the window each morning to sense what they can about the weather and the temperature out there, is it time yet, is it time? Are we there yet? sussing out the day length and all that other stuff plants know so much about, wind strength, moon phase too probably, angle of sun etc., all that natural computing going on in their stolid green beings. And we think we have the brains.

So this morning down at the ice-covered train station, my thoughts wisping Springy things around in the background there, I gazed at the beauty of the sugarcake mountains powdered with white against the big blue morning sky, when up at the edge of my uplooking eye I saw something moving and looked further upward -- there, coursing along in the high blue were two broad wedges of geese heading north-- in silence, from down where I was, though way up there the air was likely filled with excited chatter at the big goings on.

I stood and watched them go for as long as I could see them, each wedge being 70-100 geese; the sight filled me with the feeling I've been waiting for, the rush I get each year when the unspoken promise is kept once more as nature declares the arrival of Spring, and it came to me what seeds we humans are.

AN EVENING’S TASK

From out of a sunny day it started snowing late this afternoon, and up here when it snows like this you anyway want to go walking where you can feel the deeps of calm at the heart of the snowy forest, the calm we are born from, that you hold in your open hands.

The snow whispers itself to itself upon the ground, upon the trees; the way is now untraveled, the snow unstepped as I walk up through the white that is featherfalling everywhere; along the narrow road through the snow-covered oaks, the smaller trees lean over the road in a tunnel to whiteness; here and there along the way the roadside cedars block the fall with their own tall feathers, leaving patches of dark road as though the way beneath the snow were a river of black ice leading into white forest --

Along the higher and narrower path, whole groves of tall, thin bamboo arch over beneath the curving weight of snow, whole groves of pale eyebrows where once stood dense stands of green flags in the wind-- above them now rise empty trees frosted with snow, reaching like their own ghosts into a sunless sky the silver color of themselves and the silence...

I leave the narrowing road and turn upon the rough path upward along the noisy snow-fed stream galloping down through the trees and at the source of our water I step into the pushing cascade in my high boots, begin to clean away the debris of a week from the mountain above and the water rises in our channel-- where there are folks, there are rules, and after a few moments in that wild splash through the heart of the silence my turn at the task is finished.

I emerge from the path onto the road with only my coming footsteps in the snow and stand there looking around me, listening, letting it all soak in: the sky, the trees, the stream, the snow, the road, the breath, the passing of time, the stillness, like water being, like forest seeing, trees reaching, all yet to come alive from the silence when spring brings back all the voices...

WILD NEWS

When I go outdoors these winter dawns, before I make big human footprints all over the snow I spend the first few minutes reading the wild news on that big white page, checking out the animal tracks there, surfing the feral net to see who's been by and gone from where to where, what they did while here-- the Baron, for one, always comes out of the night woods from the south, circles the house, checks out the compost pile, browses in his favorite spots, avoids the fence around the garden, noses up some green weeds and at last moves on up to his place of daytime repose in the forest. Monkeys don't move by night, so there's no trace of them, which is fine by me, no news is headline news in re the thieving furballs. Every once in a while there's a fox pacing through, sometimes a hoppy rabbit or a maundering dog, now and then a wild pig nosing around for acorns and earthworms.

Then a couple of dawns ago, just after I got up and went to check the snow level out the front windows, I saw the delicate tracks of a cat, of all things, that had paused in its travels through the night blizzard to look in at the big glass doors at the front of the house. Perhaps it had lived with humans once. While wandering the dark Siberian world the cat had leaped up onto the deck, walked along the front wall and stopped there, with snow blowing under its fur, to look into the darkness of the house and remember as we slept.

Yesterday morning, before getting a day's wood from one of the stacks, while checking the snow for the latest news I saw cat tracks in the deep snow, where the cat had emerged from the welcome snowlessness under a long stack of firewood. In traversing our land the cat was traveling from understack to understack, in between stacks bounding across the snow in giant leaps and minimal pinpointy-feet landings that said in silent invisible exclamation points: YEW!! YUCK!! YOW!! SNOW!! The tracks led at last to the snowless space beneath the shiitake logs and thence into the mountain bamboo. I know that cats in general hate snow: my neighbor's cats, for example, shudder at sight of the horrid white stuff outside the doors of their warm house; just a glance at it out the window makes them leap to loll under the kotatsu all day. But this also snow-hating cat was living in the stuff, even during the night!

As I loaded up with firewood I wondered what cat it might be that is out here at night in such storms; I couldn't recall an eccentric wandering feline; any self-respecting cat around here that has a human pet will be in the house at night sleeping next to the warmest thing available... Oh yeah-- there was that cat I saw hanging around the Baron one day in early autumn, when the big antlered guy was browsing on the compost pile; the black and white cat came up slowly, the way cats generally approach feral animals fifty times their size. The cat got within a meter or so of the white-tailed noble, the Baron lifting his head now and then to assess this mite entering his field of vision, but he kept on munching as the cat settled nearby. For a long time they just checked each other out, the Baron dining and the cat sitting and watching the big buck eat, till I as a gardening human house owner had some task to do.

There can't be one cat that watches bucks eat from close-up and another cat that wanders in snow at night and knows what windows are. Must be the same eccentric cat, out there in the night.

That's the wild news for this morning.

TOM SAWYER GRANDFATHERING

Wow, do grandkids want to help! Fortunately there's over a foot of snow all over the car that you would have cleared off earlier this morning but you knew the three grandgirls were coming for a visit today, so now that they're here excited outside, all dressed up for snow and wondering what fun to have first, before their curious eyes you wield the magic extendable snow brush in a fascinating way over the roof of the car and a big chunk of snow puffs to the ground in a joyous manner, when all at once a flurry of 7- and 10-year-olds are grabbing at the snowbrush, saying "Me! Me! Me! Let Me do it! I'll do it! I can do it, give me that! No, I want to! No, Me!" and so on in childy warmth at the heart of the mountain whiteness, actually fighting to help, and it just so happens that you have two other brushes at hand; the car is snow free in about 2 minutes.

After sufficient pause in admiration of such thorough work, you wander onto the large deck that has nearly 2 feet of drifted snow on it that you would have shoveled off early this morning with the big slide shovel, but you knew the grandies were coming so you waited for the high tides of energy and enthusiasm, i.e., after the car is cleaned, and before there's any mention of sledding. You reach with interest for the handle of the shovel, just to casually clear that large playful deck of so much fun snow. You give an easylooking artistic push, the snow gathers in a writhing pile as it glides across the deck and spills over the edge in a cloudy thump to the ground below as you return for more glee in this snowy wonderland, when three snowgirls as one grab the shovel handle saying "Me! Me! Me! I'll do it! Let Me do it! I can do it, give me that! No, I want to! No, Me!" and so on in wintry playfulness. And as luck would have it, there are two additional shovels right at hand and the big deck is clear in about 3 minutes, under careful direction from the head artist.

The reward for all this generous effort is the mention of major sledding, another big feature of mountainsides, where squeals of delight are right at home.

UNFLAT SPINACH

"HEAVY SNOWFALL VINDICATES BRADY DESIGN!" reads the Yours Truly Mental Gazette headline this morning, as the publisher himself went out into the snowburied garden to see if his spinach, onions, garlic, chard, carrots, shirona, shungiku etc. were flattened as they had been in all the previous years' heavy snowstorms, which data he had thus far been unable to obtain because Winter has been on Spring vacation since Autumn. (Oh. It snowed heavily during the night.)

In previous years, even though I had used tunnels with strong fabric over sturdy hoops of bamboo and metal and whatever I could get my hands on to protect my produce, the heavy, icecold laugh of Winter had mocked my efforts, sitting on my spinach with tons of snow and bending my hoops at 90 degree angles, rendering them unusable, just to rub it in. Winter can be such a bully.

Anyway, I devised an engineering approach that I'm sure isn't new, though I've never seen it before; it had to involve the fundamental Brady criteria for pretty much all endeavors: simple, cheap and preferably reusable. So I got some sturdy stakes (buttressed on the long axis with wooden stakes at two places to prevent bidirectional collapse) and a roll of netting, and therewith fashioned the constructions you see here, over the strong fabric tunnels of yore.

Worked like a charm, as the photos show. The netting arrangement held up excellently: broke the fall of the snow, distributing it and its weight along the downward stress vector, thereby protecting the tunnels beneath which my onions et al. are still standing, now isolated even more from the night cold by their snow igloos, with the added advantage of being invisible to winterhungry, onionlusting monkeys.

I can't rest on my vegetable laurels here though; as past experience has indicated, even now, way up there in the great ice palace, King Winter and his flaky minions are counterplotting already-- I can feel that chill of something large and cold overhead, hear those icy howls of laughter in the wind...

NIGHTFUL OF DIAMONDS

As I cruised up the road on my motorcycle last night, the headlight beam kept filling with millions of tiny diamonds flashing into sight from out of the dark air, all from a big winter cloud that was barely edging over the mountain into the deeper dark, spilling some of its riches on our side and giving me the pleasure of a ride though swirling gems.

It was all the more enjoyable because I tend to ride slowly up the bendy mountain road in the pitch dark night of winter, wherein the occasional patches of ice can be hard to see, but I just roll right over them because I'm not racing anymore, I'm riding wisely now, having painfully realized at last that there's no real hurry for me to be home 20 seconds earlier.

When I was younger I would have taken on the whole thing as a challenge, there were challenges everywhere and a twisting mountain road was at the top of the list, a complex speed-skill-time-agility-bravery challenge, a personal challenge to me from mountain, road, weather, world, time and darkness, with quite a few other things thrown in there as well, to fill it all up. At those earlier ages you're always looking for challenges and taking them on-- what are inexperience and energy for, after all.

It's crazy but it's true, and as you get older and do a few wipeouts, if you survive sufficiently intact, and for long enough, you get to admit vulnerability, you get to acknowledge your limits, you get to feel your frailties, you get to know the fleshy reality of yourself right to the bone and the sinew, so you slow down, and when you slow down you get to see things you're finally ready to see, things you've never noticed before in the blur of being, things like millions and millions of tiny diamonds flashing in the light right in front of you all the way home through the winter dark up a mountainside-- worth the wait of a lifetime, if you've slowed down enough to get to be my age.

SNOWLADIES

Well the grandees arrived yesterday afternoon and, having suffered one long child-year of deep snow deprivation, were unable to get out of the car without squealing and running straight to the snow mountains I'd made in front of the deck and climbing right up and down them over and over for immediate replenishment, in the fever of their delirium making snowballs to throw at anything at all until they came to the next level of their senses and ran en masse to the tool shed - filling their boots with snow at every step, but who cares about feet when there's food for the starving - to get any item at all that could hold snow, like shovels, trowels, buckets etc., then they fanned out into the garden and began to fill in holes and elevate hills and otherwise rearrange the snowscape to their frenzied liking when at some point I mentioned a nice big open snowy slope up in the forest where they might want to go and play, and with one voice of yes they flung their forgotten tools to the ground (where the tools still are, as I notice out the window on the garden) so we all walked upmountain into the forest - actually we adults walked and the kids ran - where we came to a nice clear slope of virgin snow and the three filled the forest with squeals at the sight, a sound most awesome yet somehow quite at home in the sylvan silence, as they ran up the hill arms waving, scarves flying, boots falling off, the hill would be perfect for tobogganning if we had a toboggan but they don't have toboggans in Japan so the snowcovered trio just used their bodies and ran up and slid, rolled, tumbled and galloomphed to the bottom then back up again, quickly exhausting the adults, who at last herded the snowsodden three back through the woods with their snowmelt mittens and icewater boots, I gave one my handwarmer to help her survive till we arrived back at the house with three little melting snowladies who right away gathered by the toasty woodstove and had some hot tea and opened their presents, all without the slightest bit of a fight it was great, we all sat around the low homemade wooden table in front of the stove and had homemade pizza before the kids all took turns wearing the moonmask. A typical first day of the snow cure.

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.

RAMBLE IN BLACK AND WHITE

Sorry to jump up and down and shout all suddenly like that at this hour of the morning, but I was up till after midnight last night not watching tv but rather engaged in an increasingly antique activity known to members of my generation as “reading a book.”

As a result of that and the fact that it was dark until so late this morning, I overslept on what I suddenly realized was a work day, so when I lumbered out of bed and looked out the window I couldn’t help but jump and shout since even in the dark I could tell it had snowed, because the entire landscape was just the opposite.

All over the ground I could see this whiteness that must be snow, unless during the night there'd been a bigtime explosion at a styrofoam factory nearby which I doubted because there isn’t one and anyway I would have heard it, since dreams mean shallow sleep and as I recall I dreamed a lot last night-- I dream in color, which makes them easier to remember. I’ve heard that more people who were born before color tv dream in black and white, but if they lived here even they could tell it snowed last night and would jump and shout in the morning dark like I did.

But then again, since I grew up before color tv and read books, maybe I’m dreaming all this in black and white, and this might not be a work day, so I'll just stay asleep a bit longer and see...

THE SANTA BARBARA/KAMCHATKA DICHOTOMY

Seems like the snow this year opted to fall in February and March, for some reason eschewing the springlike December and the mild January, reserving itself for heavy snowfalls every few days thereafter, just as we in the igloos were expecting outdoors to drop the icy act and not require so much firewood of us who are already making garden moves and re-stacking shiitake logs in our minds.

But as I’ve mentioned occasionally in these weathered musings, oftentimes it’s blizzarding here and beachweather only a kilometer away, which makes things interesting. Yesterday we drove into Kyoto for some shopping and a stop at the YWCA (where I exchange paperbacks now and then); it was sort of like leaving Kamchatka and a few moments later arriving in Santa Barbara.

This morning down at the train station after another night’s snowfall, as I stood looking around in the early sunlight under a clear cold sky, the lake blue, the mountains crisp white, patterned in geometric patches of lumbered areas, some of them almost vertical - I can’t imagine lumbering an almost vertical landscape - the view went on until blue of water and white of mountains met a sky-high curtain of dark-silver silk, strung across the lake: the shifting border of snow country. Beyond it the snow was falling heavily, obscuring everything; I was right at the edge of the high-pressure area; the border could shift this way any minute, and I’d be in the heart of a blizzard.

It probably will shift a couple of times before the day is out, putting us in and out of Siberia by its massive whim; maybe tonight it will swing north for good and we’ll be in Santa Barbara as of tomorrow, instead of Kamchatka.

SNOWGLOBE

The other day it was snowing and blowing fiercely, the new snow already stacked up several inches atop the old, and Echo had to go into the city and do a couple other things on the way, but because of the snow and threats of bigger snow later in the day, she decided to take the train rather than drive, so I drove her to the next big station, three stations down the line.

About halfway there, as though god had snapped her fingers we emerged from heavy snowfall into a land of blue skies and tweeting birds, people were walking here and there unhunched, wearing shorts and flip-flops or sunbathing-- ok I'm exaggerating a bit but that's how it felt in the mind, the sudden transition from Yukon to Miami. The weather had just broken into tiny pieces of winter that melted on the road behind us. Long live the summer.

Later, on my way back home in the birdsong sunshine, about halfway there I saw not far ahead a roiling white carpet hanging from the sky, a pale wall into which the world and its road disappeared. Winter was right where we had driven out of it a half hour before, it had not moved or weakened, it was waiting, the great wall of white, hanging there like a veil before another world, the gateway to Snow Country.

I rolled up the windows and wished I hadn't hallucinated into shorts and flip-flops. I hit the big drift and the bright world disappeared, I could see maybe 2 meters to any side in the multicurrents of the snowstream, drove slowly back to our village and up the mountain a teeny-tiny person in a teeny-tiny red car at the heart of the way-biggest snow globe I'd ever been in.