Watermusic

Lace, cage

I live in a pretty lace cage.  Yesterday was the eleven-year anniversary of my start date on the Appalachian Trail, when I marched forth, and still, here the snow piles in drifts.  It is pretty hard to cut a mast, or install chain plates, or scrape bottom paint, with four feet of snow on the ground.  It's hard to imagine the harbor melting enough for a launch.

Snowshoes

Office

Cedar and wood stove in Maine, winter 2012

And yet we came down here to rebuild a boat because it's farther south, closer to the ocean and the Gulf Stream, and we could work almost year-round.  Instead, I miss my snowshoes and wood stove and office.  I could tell you the reasons for this chaotic stormy precipitous winter--how the ocean is 21 degrees warmer than normal and all of that warm water evaporates and then crystallizes and again falls on top of us, how the ocean rose five inches in two years in New England, how the changing climate has shifted the prevailing planetary winds south, allowing the Gulf Stream to be less mobile and giving those in Massachusetts all of Alaska and Maine's weather, how these scientific facts are not covered by the media because our news outlets including public radio are bought and sold by the same people causing this outlandish weather, and how this kind of climate chaos is the new normal--but you wouldn't listen.  You wouldn't divest yourself of fossil-fuel stock or organize or protest;  I haven't either.

Computer, vitamin D, toilet paper, window

I rearranged my room to face the window, an alleged treatment for depression, and already it is bearing fruit as this blog post.  February is a hard month for me, maybe the hardest.  Maybe it is for everyone and God made it the shortest month because we could only endure 28--or, in some years, 29--days of it.  March can't come fast enough.  But here when it came, it came with snow.

So the branches pile with drifts white as layer cakes.  The roots wait embalmed, and entombed, covered by what Eliot called "forgetful snow."  I hibernate.  The whole world waits, coiled to spring.