Ice

What little snow we had was gone by the time I left Maine yesterday afternoon, courtesy of another southern storm that rattled the bay and spiked the thermometer to 52 degrees. It rained all the way home, sometimes as heavily as a summer thunderstorm. It's getting so we can have all four seasons in the space of a week. When our President-elect discusses change, he could include the weather.

Must everything in the 21st century be subject to dislocation, even the semi-precious brilliance of a Maine winter? You never know from day to day what to expect anymore, a pink slip, a restaurant bombing, a bad diagnosis, a fallen tree. The media is very good at this stuff and we fall for the way they sell news. I used to be good at un-media-ting as soon as we got to Owls Head; it's not so easy now. They're getting to me, and the only safe place is outside (splitting wood, hiking, staring at waves) or in books. In the middle of the night I'm getting quite accomplished at combining the two, a hike with Thoreau to Katahdin, for example, or a "mug-up" with Elisabeth Ogilvie on Criehaven. Tonight, however, it sounds like pleasant reveries in Maine will be impossible; the southern storm is changing to sleet and ice, and the wires may come down, and there will be cars in the ditch and sparkling trees across the road. Something halfway between summer and winter, an ice storm leaves the most brilliant of fantasies in its wake, and the most dangerous.