Deja vu

In New York today it is 32 and cloudy. Dark. Brooklyn today reminds me of Bruges; I was there in late October of 2002 and it was gloomy like this, yet beautiful. Winds are reported to be 10 m.p.h., but that seems rather low, especially in Midtown where I was earlier today. But they were nothing like 100 m.p.h. Robin wins the extreme weather award. There was a reason some of those settlers got discouraged and headed back East, like Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame, who ended up in Arkansas, I think, where she never faced showers of grasshoppers and blizzards that went on for days at a time.

I have a very warm coat puffy with down and as of today, a warm, goofy-looking knitted hat from Nepal with ear flaps and a soft fleece lining that makes me smile whenever I put it on. And oddly enough, I am loving winter. It's like returning to a land I had almost forgotten. This feeling of having been here before, a long time ago, the way I know the turns in the road to my childhood home in Connecticut in the dark. Somthing older than anything, older than language and memory.

Winter would come to North Carolina once in a while, most notably the time in 2000 when we got nearly 2 feet of snow and the area was paralyzed for days. And it always reminded me of something! It seemed like childhood, or "Dr. Zhivago," or something more primordial. Winter. Riding home on the subway around midnight the other night, half-asleep, everyone in their winter gear, I remembered the dream I used to have in childhood, of a journey in the snow.Dark, mysterious, the wolves howling in the distance, the snow falling. And it seemed like I had already been here, at least once before.