The Snow, The Heart

 

At dinner, I didn’t eat.  I’m missing the meal last night and again tonight.  But we took or I took the time from the meal to introduce The Song Dynasty tonight.  The book we are using for comparative history has things organized so that the Tang, the Song, the Yuan and the Ming all come in one successive chapter after another.  Periods in other parts of the world are more likely to be looked at in detail rather than covering fifteen hundred years, so swiftly. 

We talked pizza during dinner.  I wanted some, of course.  I was hungry.  But it would have to wait.  Tomorrow night though.  The younger one has fond memories of Dominos in Beijing.  Apparently they had some special cheese in the crust type of offering that has lodged itself in her memory as the final-word on pizza.   I fought the fast-food option at first.  But hey, we're on a mission to try different types of pizzas.  We’ve tried seven or eight local spots so far.  And so, tomorrow, when we are over picking up worms, we will visit the Dominos of Poughkeepsie, as there isn’t one conveniently located on this side of the river. 

 

Lovely warm day outside.  The snow was melting, sure.  But that meant the skiing worked even better than usual.  I went down to where the brooks flows under the trail and considered the water which had risen with the melting snow.  There, twenty feet from me was that nondescript apple tree that would soon command all attention up river, luring in bees by the hundred, when its blossoms turn.  It can’t be long now. 

Hackneyed perhaps, but it occurred to me, returning from the apple orchard, enjoying a pretty crisp clip, heading slightly down hill on the return, chasing a barred owl that kept flying forty feet ahead of me, and then again, in a straight line ahead of me over and over until finally tiring of me, he arched left and cut over the long field that usually hosts the cow and banking up and into a maple tree down in the valley that there was essentially nothing about cross country skiing that was in any way inferior to downhill skiing.  The sun, the snow, the heart pounding, and the ease of rolling out the back door onto this passageway immediately at the ready, that this was as good as it gets.  

 

 

 

Thursday, 02/25/21