Just checking out the new page arrangement. :-) I took this yesterday on my walk home. All the puddles of dirty water had frozen into slick skating ponds of dirty ice!

…by which I mean “stay up messing around on the internet till your eyes bleed!”

It begins, pleasantly enough, with a gentle night’s fall of snow, soft on the ground by morning. As the day goes by and you sit, oblivious, in a warm, dry office, pandering to the whims of the mighty, the sky lets loose more snow. It turns into freezing rain. That turns into ice pellets. You are still cosily unknowing. You receive a huge box full of gorgeous long-stemmed red roses, because your husband likes to celebrate Valentine’s Day by feeling like a philanthropist. Outside the temperature warms enough for the snow on the ground to turn to slush, then for much of it to melt entirely into filthy, muddy puddles of frigid water.

Your office closes early because of the weather, but it is the same time you leave work every day anyway. You curse this coincidence of fate and pull on your ugly brown hat and your ugly grey coat, both forgiven for their lack of fashionable merit because they keep you beautifully warm. You manage to avoid stepping in any fathoms-deep pools on the way to the T, but the trains are running late as usual and after waiting fifteen minutes on a smelly platform you have to wedge yourself in between a screamingly inconsolable baby and a man with a gigantic bag over his shoulder who refuses to move. You clutch your unwieldy and increasingly damp box of rose-smelling goodness to your chest and will time to pass more rapidly.

Getting out at Kendall, those delightful ice pellets are still falling on your head, and treacherously impassable, slushy puddles lurk in wait at the edge of every sidewalk. Cars fail to slow down at zebra crossings, despite your best glares. They probably can’t see your face under your big ugly brown hat. Your right sock is wet. You cross Broadway and cannot help jumping into a tremendous watery trap. Now your left sock is wet. Various booby-traps on the rest of the way home drench your legs up to the knee; by the time you reach Cardinal Medieros the environment inside your boots every time you take a step resembles a swamp of cold cucumber soup being strained back and forth through a thick cloth.

You are still carrying the cardboard box of roses.

Outside the door to your apartment you set down the wet box and the wet junk mail you picked up from the letter box, slide your wet bag off your shoulder, remove your wet hat and wet gloves, and untie your wet, dripping shoelaces so you can pull off the watery misery that is your boots. Now — you think — how are you going to avoid getting the (recently vacuumed!) floor all wet when you go in? Is there anything you can to do mitigate the mess you will make?

You sigh.

The stairway is pitch black, because no light bulb you put into either of the fixtures there lasts for more than two months without burning out and you have given up replacing them.

You listen for the sounds of neighbors.

There are none.

With pruney fingers, you peel off your stubborn socks (soaked and clingy) and your clammy jeans, standing right there in the stairway in front of your apartment door on a patch of (now wet) carpet.

You hold your head high.

You gather your things.

With dignity and grace you enter the house . . . naked from the waist down except for your underwear.

The good news is that the roses only pricked you once while you were putting them in a vase.

Ross inherited his grandfather’s binoculars when Grandma Evie moved out of her house last winter. They came with a handsome leather carrying case, and when you hold them they have a nice heft in the hand. They are cool to the touch. They feel solid and smooth (and in places a little nubbly). When I look through them I feel like a spy, or a hunter—breathing quietly through my mouth, walking one foot in front of the other, stalking the orange tea pot that sits on the kitchen shelf.

It’s been a sweet, quiet day. Ross and I both woke up early to meet friends, and when we went out of the house we were kissed with the most beautiful kind of warm winter sunlight—yellow and compassionate on our dry faces. I met Liz at what used to be my old breakfast hangout when I lived on North Harvard Street, and as we slid into a red booth I remembered coffees with Michael and winking at Erica over the table as Ben ordered his eggs and toast. Liz brought with her one of these little beauties and I stared at it lustfully while I consumed copious amounts of fried meats.

After we said goodbye I derived great, unexpectedly cheerful pleasure out of the act of driving home, singing my lungs out and grinning like a madwoman. I’m not sure why exactly —perhaps it was partly because I was tootling down the same streets upon which I learned to drive two and a half years ago, and it restored in me the sense of immense satisfaction I felt then—when I first realized that I was about to succeed at something I had been terrified of doing for years. On a good day, merely driving from one place to another can make me feel incredibly happy: brave, smart, independent, and free.

(I could also tell you how gratifying it was to vacuum the house in the afternoon and get rid of weeks of accumulated dust, but I suspect that might slightly detract from the liberated woman with wind in my hair thing I went for in the previous paragraph.)

Click through for exciting news!

One of my holiday presents from Ross was a book off my Amazon wish list by poet and writer Diane Ackerman. Titled A Natural History of the Senses, it devotes a chapter each to the science and vivid sensual delights of smell, touch, taste, hearing, vision, and synesthesia. Apart from being a hair too rambling and a hair too often self-consciously lyrical at the expense of being substantive, the book is incredibly beautiful. It glories in everything that connects our squishy, nervy selves to the rich world.

When I read the following passage in the chapter on vision I knew I wanted to share it with you, so here it is:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

It probably doesn’t matter either if we occasionally spend a week feeling self-righteously overworked and being insistently brusque to lovely people, as long as we make up for it in the end with a big hug.