.:. As life so often does, it will come down to a dilemma: do the responisble thing, clear the path, make life more accessible? Or– and this is where my heart has always lain– do I throw my ecstatic body into the snow and make the frivolous and seraphic indentation? To celebrate the core metaphor of my life– “two paths diverged in a {snowy} wood”- I have just this morning purchased a ticket to home. But not the ancient family homestead in Wastefield, Massachusetts; rather, the new return-to-nature-farmstead in Barneveld, New York, where vastly more snow and a plummeting mercury awaits; closer, too, to the venerable Young famly elders, the incorrigible Charles “Chub” Young and the fiesty Adeleide, or “Adel”, or, to me, “Grandma” (sometimes, even, when I am feeling that reverence and awe that comes with realizing the span of life present in these amazing souls before me I opt for the more respectful and formal “Grandmother”).

But that is the celebration, not the dilemma. The dilemma is, as usual, made up of far more spectral stuff, of which the cold and lacework geometry of snow is closest living metaphor. With my UCSD mailbox becoming cluttered with coupons for Student Loan Repayment and cajoling invitations to Consolidation Loans, I begin to realize that a massive arc of my life has come to a conclusion and it is now time to, as they say, pay the piper his fee; else the bundled joys of my life– the children of my creative energies– will be whisked away by the intoxicating music of the magical pipes. What to do, though, when there is Eastern Europe, and Uzbekistan, and Siberia, and Japan, and the Gobi Desert, and– not in any way least– the continent of Africa?

Shovel, or make a snow angel?