02.07.03 - 10:49 a.m.

it snowed again last night. this winter has - perhaps - broken the long, dry spell of mild winters with little snow that had me convinced of the immediate fact of global warming. now, if we can just have a summer like a vermont summer - 80s in the day, warm and sunny, 50s or 60s at night, just enough that you need a jacket, just enough so that open windows and a fan are all you need to banish the lazy, drowsing heat of the day from the corners of the room, just enough so that, in the middle of a long, delicious night, you unconsciously pull up the soft quilt slung across the foot of your bed to banish the faint touch of chill that has crept into the corners of the room.

to be sure, i will not consider this winter well and truly satisfying unless we get one huge snow, the sort that shuts down the whole of the city - ten inches, twelve. the sort that leaves one worrying about powerlines and phonelines and cable lines, the sort where the tramp down to the corner store for supplies - soup, crackers, tea, the essentials of the winter homebound - seems an adventure. the sort where twelfth street hill road is closed to cars but open to sledding, and the truly adventurous sorts climb the steep slope up to the flat little plateau of the park ampitheater parking lot and the bounce down the steep run on innertubes, braving the possibility that they might (will, probably, really) just sliiiide across the road and down the next slope, into the creek.

so: one of those snows, please, jack frost. or god. or whomever. then i'll be happy. then i'll have no complaints about this winter. then i'll bear everything you sling at me this summer with admirable ease and charm, then i'll be a good damn girl.

today's snow actually satisfied one of my requirements, though. the earlier little snow squalls all happened when it was a fair bit colder, so the flakes were small and dry, fine powerdery snow that crunched satisfyingly underfoot, but did not cling to the limbs of the bare trees. not so this little storm: it's a veritable winter wonderland.

this morning, ninth avenue, the trees marching ahead like some art student's exercise in perspective painting, folding over the narrowing street until it disappeared in the canopy: no color in the world. no color in the world, and no sound but the sound of your own breath, too loud.

no color in the world, just a thousand shades of white and black and gray, gray, such lovely grays, pale and wintry, and gray in the distance growing so dark it seemed to shade toward blue.

now, from the 13th floor, the view down the long bowl of the river valley, east: gray and gray. only the brick of several buildings at the college stand out against the theme. the endzone of the little football stadium defined by the river and its long, narrow valley is swallowed in mist, and gray steam billows up from the squat factories and several of the old brick buildings at the college. gray and gray and gray, the worl is hushed and muted.

the best view is not from my east-facing office, but from the offices facing north: across the river, into ohio, where the bluffs rise steeply from the river's edge (we have the long flat plane on our side of the river. the city is a mile wide - perhaps a bit more - before the bluffs rise sharply. the city is a mile wide, and ten miles long, at least, stretching - well, stretching all the way to the little towns along the big sandy river, which defines the kentucky border.) and the only thread of development is just along the river's edge, a small necklace of houses perched waterside, with the wooded bluffs rising behind and above them. the trees are still wearing their fab white coat, a marching mass of them, lovely as a dream, lovely enough to make your breath catch in your throat, lovely enough to make you ache:

gray and gray and gray.

days like would be close to depressing - all this quiet no-color, all this muted light - if there weren't so many different qualities of half-color to the clouds. now, for example, all is dark and stormladen to the south and east, some winter storm, the sky darker than the hills beneath it, stretched stark and white beneath the features of the landscape, the gray tree limbs highlighted by their winter wear. but to the north and west - a suggestion of it, behind behind, because i face east - the sky just suddenly brightened. the clouds remains, some heavy blanket, but the light is bright enough as to seem like the sun has just been revealed, almost painfully bright.