So Very Dark

The blizzardy winter weather has finally broken, and temperatures have been hovering at least a little above freezing during the daylight hours, leaving squelchy mud in the place of slippery packed ice, only to crust and harden once the sun drops below the tree line.  The piles of winter snow have diminished to a few inches — our driveway remains impassable, but only just.

By the time we arrived home last night, a day of rain and melting had resulted in a soft, dense fog.  While ascending the still necessary trail to our front door, I had reason to pause in amazement at the gentle luminescent glow that captured every spare bit of light in the area and reflected and refracted the illumination thousands of times over through the air and across our snowy yard.  The ethereal blue-white radiance contrasted starkly against the unbroken black of the marshy path, and behind our house, winter bare trees reached spectrally through the incandescence…a fantastic sight, in the purest sense of the word.

In this enduringly grey and sodden month, life remains much unchanged.  School carries on at a pace at once alarmingly quick and frustratingly ponderous, classes seeming merely dull placeholders at one time and desperately vital at another.

Robin, at long last, had his most important operation–a fact that seems to have effected his spirits and exuberance not in the least, much to our bemusement.  (We have determined that the fault is likely mine, for naming him as I did.)  This past night, he was found perched precariously atop our bedroom door, seemingly perplexed as to how he had arrived in such a place and, finding himself in the situation, just what to do about it.  The only change seems to be in Mercury’s attitude, as she has become less tolerant of his presence than she had been prior to his brief time away.

Not much else of interest has come to pass — certainly nothing approaching the magnitude of our deeply exciting and incapacitating snow storm.  The days become longer, the world turns towards spring, and the days of each of us, in turn, become ever so slightly shorter.