Knocking, Accommodating the White

Snow man.  Snow.  It snowed today.  We were waiting for it all night and it never started.  But I was up before five and it was clearly underway by then.  It’s about twelve hours later just now and it hasn’t stopped.  It’s intensified.  Big, puffy flakes, falling, rising, whipped around in the wind. 

 

I had calls today with people in Nairobi, Beijing, Tokyo, Bristol, London, Madrid, Toronto and Los Angeles.  It wasn’t snowing in any of those places.  But here, that’s all there really is to talk about.  My mom and stepdad are safe.  My dad and stepmom are safe.  We have our electricity on, so do they.  Out in the living room is a fire in the fireplace. 

I decided to finish of the Sima Qian’s “Shiji” today.  So many anecdotes of fearless officials, and cowardly officials of sagacious leaders and inept kings.  The most common way to account for things is to offer your life or be told yours is to be taken, only to have it commuted for a fine, and be reduced to a commoner.  I’ve often wondered about the evolution of a post-modern Chinese sense of morals in the absence of proper communist ideology.  To read Sima Qian is to be reminded of what a deep moral webbing underlay reaches out, informing a contemporary Chinese sense of ethics, of what decency and sacrifice and nobility all mean. 

As I binged my way through the final hundred and thirty pages of this two-volume, nine-hundred-page, abridged version, I noticed it was starting to get dark and when I was done, and confirmed that it was already four-fifteen, I suited up and headed outside.  Earlier in the day, I’d imagined cross country skiing, and that will come, but for today, just ambling down the back yard out to the rail trail was a sufficient adventure.  Down on the trail; remarkable. A foot of snow absorbing all the sound.  The soft layering, deceiving you into thinking you could jump down ten feet and land softly.  The wind blowing strongly, and the trees occasionally knocking, accommodating the white weight and the sturdy gusts.  There is no one else down here.

 

 

 

Monday, 02/01/21