December 20, 2009

Light snow drifting through black air. The land is, paradoxically, darker now that the city lights are back on. I will not know until full light if I can move my car. My complaints about the power being off were, of course, selfish. The radio says this morning that 37,000 in Buncombe County alone are without power, and some may not have it until Wednesday.

The “Arbeit macht Frei” sign has been stolen from Auschwitz. One can only imagine the motive.

A feeder and an open platter of seeds have made my porch a resort of winter birds: finches and three kinds of sparrows, juncos, wrens, cardinals. The male towhee comes, but I have not seen the female in a while, and that worries me. All their little bodies are puffed and round with insulating feathers. A wren got his foot stuck in the feeder. I got to hold him in my hand for a moment, whole the other hand bend the metal enough for him to extract his foot. I expected him to peck me, but he didn’t. As far as mass, he was practically nothing, but such heat and vitality in the little ball of fluff.

Afternoon. I was caught in a round of drowsiness followed by sleep, followed by drowsiness, a sort of cabin fever brought on by a mere two days of entrapment by the snow. So I rose up and dug out DJ’s car, and my own, and tried to move mine, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if Caroline’s burly four-wheel-drive-driving male relatives had not been there to rescue me. Seeing that I couldn’t get back up the alley once I was down it, I parked the Prius on Caroline’s pavement and took out on foot, to the grocery and the video store and Mountain Java. Ice water applied to the toes every few feet is a marvelous quickener, and now am I wide awake and ready for what comes. The nap dreams were interesting, though. I was employed by Dick Hueber, the owner of Westcott Cordial long ago, to sell concessions at a gigantic concrete amphitheater. Not only was I in charge of concessions, but of a large tank of beautiful tropical fish.