january, come and gone, with no sign of the lithosphere save for the contours it lends the layers of stratified snow and ice. it feels like it snows almost every day, or somethings at least. the atmosphere sputtering with its mouth full of ice. sleet that leaves tiny malformed crystals in my eyelashes; rain that freezes into a glittering, brittle shell atop the snowdrifts that pile higher than my head.

I am not the slightest bit sick of it. I like it when winter looks like winter, not some drab and skeletal remnant of autumn. the park has taken on entirely new dimensions: in the meadows, the foot traffic has compacted the snow into a whole new landscape, and you feel like a giant trekking across it, with your head impossibly close to the treetops; in the less traveled groves and vales, you sink up to your hips in an ocean of blue-white powder, like some sub-arctic seabird embarking on its pelagic wanderings. this is a transformative winter.

I feel like winter myself, in a sparkling, reimagined way. the cold is bracing, but not bitter. the icicles, pure and gleaming, match the silver that has begun to take root in my hair, baby-fine though it still is. every day looks like it was painted by magic, and for now the meteorological metrics that make the magic utterly explicable also make it all the more special.

ps it took some work, but my dog finally likes the snow too! here is a video:

it’s amazing how time just keeps going. or maybe it isn’t; the Earth’s angular momentum all but guarantees it. what’s amazing I suppose is how the lives of our tiny human selves ever feel important enough that time should stop for us. it never does, after all.

2010 comprised, for me, more transition than revelation, more solitude than attachment. the last year of my 20s and the first point in my life, I think, where I’ve felt the exact age that I am. I look at my students and am grateful for the years that have grown my prefrontal cortex. I look at the sky and am comforted by the inevitability of our orbit, our tilt, and our inertia.

happy new year.

after school today I found myself in the east fifties, so I decided to take a detour to see the tree. the sky was beautiful, sapphire, starless. the crowd, a sea of wool and teeth and quiet laughter, was equal parts hustle and happiness; equal parts tourist and native. my white winter hat on a tour of future photo albums.

sometimes–or really always–I just love this city so hard.