SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW!

It didn’t stay long and it began in the dark but it was most welcome to me. I have wished for the soft ‘peth’ of flakes as they land filling up spaces between my bricks, making triangle caps on the fence tops, covering Lew’s head as we stand side by side in the doorway, the dim light behind us not dulling the whitening earth that seems to glow from within. I always think I hear a sound that reminds me of a quiet hiss, like tiny ball bearings moving through a rain stick. I just love the snow and I had resigned myself to another snowless winter. Everyone tells me I would tire of it if I lived in a clime where it was routine, and they may be right, I might groan if I lived on the Russian Steppe, though I fancy my groan would sound better in Russian. But I prefer to think they sell me short and I would be as transported then as I am now, finding the frozen splendor enchanting right up until the moment my yurt blew away.

Thank you for your kind and such thoughtful comments regarding Dad’s move to Port Ludlow. He seems happy there and is loving waking up to a view of the inlet close outside his bedroom window with a look further to the right out to the sea. The items I have in my home from his are beginning to find new lives in my house. My mother seems to have held close most of the world’s small pewter sugar bowls, jugs, cups and vases and I have them now holding winter posies on bookcases respectfully dusted to receive their new trimming. She also collected pewter bread trays, which I long loved for their soft color and smooth shapes and the rock hard rolls they always cradled, warmed far too long in the oven. We would time after time remind each other “let’s not forget the rolls” and immediately do just that. It became our signature dinner failing, just as her gravy and Yorkshire pudding were her crowning high.

You can see a few of the pewter trays and a tankard with a glass bottom in my previous posting along with their rug before I unrolled it. I think the round platter is old, they bought it in Japan when they lived there. It has a tiny delicate moon in the sky emerging from a single cloud. There is also a broken tea cup which I almost tossed out once I had unwrapped it from it’s rumpled tissue protection, blackened, almost sticky with grime. I washed the pieces gently, wondering at its having been kept with the rest of my grandmother’s china that my mother treated with great reverence. We used this china when I was a child at Christmas and special occasions and I marveled then, as I do now, that the cup bottoms are so fine that the shadow of your fingertips sneak through with background light. As I gingerly fitted the broken cup pieces momentarily into a whole, I thought back through its history and aha’d that this was the cup of family folklore, the one casualty of the fire in my grandparent’s hotel which burned down, dropping the china cupboard 2 stories into the basement. I have heard this story many times and always delighted that some kind of magic had saved this china belonging to the women I loved, breaking just this one cup as a nod to the ordeal all the dishes went through. And here was this cup, saved and kept with the rest, cared for no less for it’s lost perfection, it still has a place with the set to remind us that this was a treasure that outwitted a tragedy.