Seasons: winter 1

January 02, 2020

Seasons: winter 1

Each time I think back to leaving California at age 17, thankfulness wells.

If I could do it over, I would do it differently, with far more awareness of what I was abandoning. But I would still go.

A wordless instinct moved me toward four-season worlds.

My train wound from San Diego to Los Angeles, then through Arizona and New Mexico, up to Chicago, and over to Indiana. Little did I know that those two days were the start of a life of travel, with pauses here and there, and four seasons in almost every place.

Indiana, Chicago, (New York), Detroit: the upper Midwest sank into me.

And then we were off....

Each place had winter, more or less. In 2002 I started a blog, which was lost in 2012. Photos remain, with impressions and some memories.

Winter was less in the year of Hong Kong (clear and crisp) and Sichuan (grey and damp to the bones), more in the years of Changchun, China - to the west of North Korea, where we discovered that forty degrees below zero is livable and invigorating!

Illinois was wet, white, and blue, Minnesota wide-open and ice.

Kosovo's mountains were lofty and homey at the same time and its slush ubiquitous; Macedonia felt similar, with more asphalt.

France was soft.

Indiana...Indiana was home in ways the others had not been. And it was ours, with ice-coated silver maple and yellow poplar, cats to pounce on the drifts, and twinkle lights galore.

Wisconsin and Idaho are new.

I welcome the clarity, the silences, shadows long and geese high up. Fireplaces, candles, lights and light more welcome and embraced than in other seasons.