Sitting naked in bed, the wind howling outside; I am swaddled in sheets and comforters and I am propping the laptop precariously on my knees, having decided– after several long minutes of silent debate– to actually write something here.

First, of course, is the weather. The reader will have no doubt come to the conclusion that I am obsessed with recounting the state of the weather. I am; I guess I always find that its vast, climactic force so heavily influences both my doings and my feelings that it is of prime importance to relate. It makes, I believe, all that comes after a bit more positioned, in the emotional topography. And while today it was most greyish, mild, and wet, tonight promises to be hellish: the temperature has dropped dramatically, and all that was merely water will now turn to ice. I felt the frozen drops at the base of the window I just opened, to feel the icy breeze across my naked flesh.

Christmas Eve-Day will be treacherous then, as perhaps any pagan holiday should be. A basically frozen world, unforgivingly slippery. Even the Germans– as hardy a stock as they come– will stay indoors, I fear.

Not me though: I am off through the woods to witness for myself the frozen world, the glass-encrusted branches, the ice-stalagmites hiding in the roots, by the stream.

The grey-and-brown watercolor wash of a day was interesting… at first glance, it was all the slushy brown ennui that I forgot to remember about the East Coast. But as I waited for the extended family to arrive for dinner, I stared long and hard at the woods, where small patches of green were revealing themselves, washed free of the snow and turkey-tracks. And I saw that it was a powerful time, oft-overlooked: a turning to mud, a muddying, a mixed-up ochre that was all runny with water and transition, one state bleeding into the next. Dirty moss and peeled bark, that’s the layer beneath the day, but the surface is a wriggling stream, criss-crossed rivulets and spongey masses stuck between your toes. It made me think, too, of that strange mottled reddish-brown color of the hawk I just saw the other day, sitting in a lonely tree in a long farm field, puffed feathers against the cold. Life is a painting in your mind.

Ahhh… I was going to bring this around, cull out its depths for you, but I see the clock leaning towards midnight, and I am spending too much time staring at the water damage on the ceiling-boards and listening to the wind outside. I guess I think it is a shame, sometimes, that we are no longer creatures of the wild; that I find myself reticent to leave the comfort and dryness of this room, these bedding swaddling cloths. There lives in me some vestige of my animal ancestry that finds its comfort in the freedom of the wind playing over my slumbering form, curled in a wet hollow, deep in the woods.