Snow Slush Summons Winter

After a short night of sleep, interspersed and interrupted with bizarre dreams, rampant with lawyers drinking light wheat beer from glass blender jars, I awoke to a wet, heavy blanket of slushed snow, matter in a strange transient state between solid and liquid. Groaning, reluctantly, I went about my morning, making coffee, selecting earrings, but made sure to incorporate a thick black sweater and thick black sweater tights into my outfit. Nearly every day while living in Ithaca, I, joined by my many peers, would traipse through clouds of gray snow and slush under gray skies; walking through the elements, though frigid, visceral, had an almost meditative quality to it. Collective, communal, simultaneous misery and revelry in the harshly beautiful climate, at once oppressive and refreshing. Driving through the elements is merely precarious and dangerous and threatening. As I maneuvered my car adroitly to the office this morning, watching the snow accumulate and stick, I wish for nothing more than a teleportation device, to whisk me away in time and space, to some isolated tropical beach, without cell phone or computer or other mechanized communication device to haunt and torment me. Just a blanket and a broad-brimmed hat and a bottle of coconut-fragrant lotion.

(image taken from Fred and Ginger Vintage)