Winter

I wonder if the Eskimos, who have so many words for snow, have a word for the dirty, slushy, icy mess that the plows are now pushing into big piles on the sidewalks.

So it's snowing again today. When I was walking to school, the snowflakes were the size of snowballs. They were big and wet and by the time I'd walked the 7 blocks from my apartment to my office my black wool coat was solid white.

New York makes a fellow feel differently about a lot of things. Snow is kind of a nuisance here, but when I was a kid in Oregon, I loved it so much.

An Oregon winter is nothing if not wet, but it was a rare occurrence for the temperature to be below freezing at the same time there was precipitation. My siblings and I would wait by the window late into the night, hoping the rain would become snow. It sometimes did but it rarely stuck. And if it did stick it was twice as useless as what we could get by driving an hour into the mountains.

I wore the wrong shoes today and my feet got drenched.

To get to the point, I'm sick of Winter. On the bright side, I only have two weeks left. In mid March I head to Portland and then to beautiful San Francisco. I'll be gone 1.5 weeks. And when I come back, Winter will be over. At least, that's how I've planned it.

And by the way, if we can trust wikipedia (and what type of world would it be if we can't), then the Eskimos do have a word for the white dogshit that's currently littering the New York City sidewalks.