A shortish WYFP tonight. I'm posting from my in-laws in Nebraska. A sit down dinner for the tribe looms ahead. I'm on a slow connection. You get where this is going. I may be in and out tonight. Please take care of one another, as you always do. Try to chat with everyone. Sprinkle mojo liberally. Make new folks feel welcome, etc.
Let's start with this
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
and then move along:
I guess my FP is having to leave Portland behind this week. I know most of you who live in areas that have gotten tons of snow would give just about anything to leave and go somewhere else. But we so rarely get snow in Portland, and when we do, it almost never sticks. This week was different. This week, we got SNOW. (Feel free to post pictures, any of you from the area. I can't access any of mine right now.)
There was more snow than we've gotten in 30 years in Portland. It was a beautiful, white, freezing, wonderful pain in the ass. We loved it. And when we get home, it will be gone.
As for where I am currently? Nebraska is bleak this time of year. If you didn't know better, you'd think there was nothing much to recommend it. It's flat and weary-looking, with aged ice and tired snow. But you can find surprising beauty. You just have to look beyond what is abruptly apparent. If you do, you find sights as strange and fascinating as the surface of another planet: Snow that drifts into shallow, narrow depressions in the wind-worn ice to create sweeping designs of surprising complexity. The reflection of the sun on icy branches, illuminating shifting geometric patterns that follow you from tree to tree as you pass. Moonless nights so dark, and ice-covered fields so smooth and vast that the glass-like surface actually reflects the light of individual stars, making a frozen sea that truly resembles phosphorous plankton on a calm, tropical ocean.
I'm sorry that we had to leave the Portland snow. But here is good. Here is warm inside. Here is loud with the unselfconscious love and uninhibited laughter of my husband's family.
And plenty of beauty waits outside for those who have the time and the desire to see it.
Early New Year's wishes to all of you. May you have time this coming year to find the beauty that exists right where you are.
What's on your minds tonight?