Flurries

This morning I was out changing a bulb when I started noticing little aberrations in the air around me.  Like tiny shadows, or flutters of something not quite solid in the air.  And, of course, it was flurries.  It says a lot about how accustomed I've become that the first flurries of the season exhilarate me so much.

Not so my first snowfall, all the way back in 1993.  Twenty years ago I came to New England, having never experience any temperature colder than the mid-fifties.  It only rarely goes below seventy on St Thomas.  So I was excited and curious to see snow for the first time.

What a let down for my friends.  They called me out, I rushed outside, I felt the first icy sting of the first flake hit my bare cheek, and I ran back inside.  I hadn't anticipated that snow would hurt.  Now, though, I've learned not to think of that feeling as a sting, but as a zap.  Hey!  You're alive.  Winter's coming!  Wake up!

For the first few years I lived in a Cambridge, MA,  I would always mistake the first snowfall for something else: flowers, feathers, volcanic ash.  In my defence, those things are a lot more likely to fall from the skies over St Thomas than snow.  I think it took a few years for my brain to understand that I wasn't home any more.  It took a lot longer for my brain to decide that New England was home.  Or at least permanent residence.

So winter's coming.  My shoulder's been tapped.  It's not the cold or the snow that get you, it's the dark.  So I've got plenty of bulbs.