Saturday, January 30, 2010

Sledding Snow.

Many and big thanks directed towards the person of JBW, who pushed me back out into the finest sledding snow I've seen since the nineties, I think, or maybe 2000, if that was 2000—whenever that was, back on Carr St., when we picked up those two big snows back-to-back in grad school. It may have been 2000. I was in my second apartment, across the street from my first, so that must bring us screaming into the last decade, but still and no matter: JBW, he of the MD and MA upbringing, knows from snow, and as he said, 'Today the runner sled is king,' which means we're packed, we're powdery, we're icy, we're of the sort of snow that even a homemade 2'x4' 1/4" plywood sled—slider?—would and did do in a pinch, though the steering left something to be desired.

Cold. Sleet like a textbook definition. Roads packed down to where you wouldn't want to be out there.

In the oven right now rides along a roasting chicken, some yellow-fleshed potatoes, and, as soon as the timer dings, some skinny little carrots to finish off our one-pan meal. The fancies want 12 degrees tonight. They also wanted a foot of snow, but that doesn't mean that later on I won't step out onto the back porch, covered over again by a half-inch of snow that didn't even make the radar, and see what cold feels like.

Much talk today about how this is not the sort of snow you see all the time. That this is the kind of snow you only see every few years. Not so much amount, but type. There's a lot of bluster over here at ANYLF—never seen it rain like that, don't remember it ever so hot, etcetera—but this is for sure a five-year snow. Maybe ten. This is and was a go-down-in-the-basement-and-build-an-unsteerable-sled snow. And that's good, because that's about the way things went today.

I'm thirty-five. It feels right about now like an unsteerable sled pitched me several times off it and down a hill. I love it.

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