It’s been snowing. My land is like a broken pony. It begins to silence itself and stays behind the fences with huge whiteness. When the sun breaks in through the silken black  trees, the snow from the past three days hits one with a huge blinding Pacific Northwest explosion of gorgeousness and rebirth.

And when one gathers all resolve and layer of cloth, to step out into the new sun and onto the white ground, the legs tremble like that little colt before the taming: though the sun is warm and melts the snow, the soft suffering knees are yet frozen and the feet do not want to get wet.

Before I did go outside in the snow-padded silence, with which the earth gains the acoustics of a sound-proof room, I sat in my little room thinking of the beautiful ones. I looked out the window and watched steam rise from behind the backyard fence: coming from nowhere, meaning nothing except: something is still, quite warm in the cold. I stepped out onto the front porch, from within a house one hundred and fifty years old. I saw the deep footprints left behind by a pretty girl who’d come and gone soundlessly. I heard the vagueness of a train whistle in the clear, and became ready to go out into the day and through the night.