She called it "fish-eye pudding," my mother did: a name which not only aptly described the look of the stuff, but made it all the more fun for a little kid like me to eat. Clear and gelatinous, the "fish-eyes" suspended in the cream-coloured sea were the size of a fat pea, the surrounding custard sweet and fluffy with whipped egg whites.

I suppose in actuality, the "fish-eyes" had little taste in themselves. A starchy product processed from the root of the cassava and ground, they are better known as a thickener which carries other flavours excellently. Yet as they sat in my bowl, they were as much for entertainment as for edibility as I tried to isolate each one with my spoon and rank them in a line atop the pudding according to the size of each individual pearl. They refused to sink when pressed into the matrix, bobbing back to the surface like glass floats on a frothy ocean.

Did I believe they were really fish eyes? Yes, for a long time, I looked for any sign of ocular structure within their translucent orbs, eventually concluding that the spheres were simply lenses. My erroneous deduction did not hamper my willingness to lift my spoon repeatedly to mouth, however! Not the child who had once eaten thirteen angleworms!

Not for many years have I prepared this delightful dessert for myself because at best, the modern cook must make do with the eyes of minnows. Perhaps global warming or over-harvesting has destroyed the fishery. Today, true pearl tapioca is hard to find.

The air smelled of snow, a slightly metallic pinch in the nostrils, brazenly flying in the face of forecast rain. True to its promise, four inches of soft, white fluff covered both yard and highway when I woke, and the plows had not gone down. The tires of one passing car made no more than a murmur as they parted the virgin field, muffled in the deep, leaving no echo to drift above the padded asphalt. The stalking snow soon filled in the abandoned imprints, still falling in hushed, thick draperies when first light paled the grey horizon.

The path my feet cut as I walked in darkness through the scattering flakes is no longer visible beside either filbert or dogwood, and my route to the bird feeder has faded from the silent earth's map. The corner fencepost stands lonely, my visit to the wild lilac now forgotten by the moss-shrouded cedar rails. Not a trace of my pre-dawn meanderings is in evidence; no scuff, no divot, no hollow shows a reminder of my booted and bundled patrol.

The snowflakes count their seemingly infinite census as far as the eye can see, a cloth of diverse miracle thrown over forest and field in beautifully haphazard artfulness. Too often dismissed in a hasty world as nuisance, there is something hidden here, a gentle secret. Its meditation emerges from a quiet sky, as fragile as the whisper it speaks into the tin-scented air.

What is the true measure of a gift? Its monetary value? Hardly! The quality of its materials or craftsmanship? A child's drawing may be more cherished than an exquisite artwork in the proper eyes. The value of a gift is in the love of the giver, the heart behind the object, only to be recognized by the recipient.

As I held one wrapped package in my hands, my tears fell for fear it was not what I expected it to be, that I would tear off the paper to discover something not so much a part of the person as what I hoped for, that thing which would help me learn to share a part of his life foreign to me. The box lay in my fingers for long minutes as I tried to summon the strength not to be disappointed in whatever it contained because regardless, it would have been chosen with love. My hands shook as I carefully slit the tape with a thumbnail, wanting to preserve the precious paper which concealed my last, most special present, and I laid the green paper back with great care not to wrinkle or to do any damage.

A teardrop fell on the bedsheet as I saw only the back of a box which still hid its secret. I wiped another away, not wanting the spate of my emotion to leave a stain. Now I was convinced I knew in essence what the package contained. I turned it over. Clouds formed in my eyes and the rain came down, yet I still did not open the box as I tried to read between the rainbows in my tears. When at last I lifted the lid and saw what lay within, I could no longer keep grip on the last of my composure and broke into long, wrenching sobs over that for which I had longed, the core of my beloved's soul. God willing, some day I will fully comprehend the whole worth of this one so very special gift.

Today, I remember my mother. I walked away from her bedside on this date, almost to the hour, certain that morning would find nothing but her shell cast aside to be returned to the earth. How could I leave her?

Her spirit was weary of the world, had been so for years. Embittered, jaded, she lived a solitary and friendless life by choice, seldom setting foot beyond her door except as necessity demanded. She dwelt in books covering provocative political issues, in vituperative radio broadcasts, in a fantasy of conspiracy theories and government treacheries, and I often wondered how she could enjoy the anger and hate with which she surrounded herself from morning until late at night. She seemed to thrive on it and the way her obsession with it alienated those around her.

But at one time in her life, my mother had been another person. As I cared for her in her final weeks, stories came out, both good and bad, which helped me to understand how she had come to her present state. It was often difficult to sort embellishments from her stories, but a careful ear could hear the current which ran beneath them, a flow of truth and revelation which she may not have meant to release. I met the mother I had never known in those last two weeks. She too was acquainting herself with her daughter, and from this, a healing came. The rift which had erupted between us at my birth was bridged as we discovered each other to be human.

In my mid-twenties, I had promised my mother that I would never put her in an old folks' home or send her off to hospital until it became absolutely necessary, so when her health failed, I brought her to live with me. She remained here all but her final three days. I had kept my vow to her, and as I left her bedside, I knew that she was grateful and wished to leave the earth in privacy, in solitude as was her way.

Winter's firstborn daylight lifted from behind the mountains and opened onto an unexpected snow, its glint and sparkle mirroring the last of fading stars. It had come under silent stealth with its solstice gift of untold beauty, on tiptoe in the night and with a hush of reverence for the Earth, and where it crept into pasture and pathway, only the trees watched and the creek muttered in its lazy sleep. Quiet flakes nestled in flocks; white caricatures of wrens huddled within arbors of barren branches, voiceless against moss and bark. The silvery stillness read a profound philosophy to its tardy witnesses: peace, the snow speaks peace in wordless wisdom.

The year now turns, and daylight gains against darkness. Unless on a subliminal level, I will not notice the first few minutes won until January begins to enter its second week when I will find myself recognizing evening's retreat as it skulks off with its tail between its legs. It is an Aboriginal awareness which comes upon me then, an epiphany of sunlight's minimal expansion, a sense of changing tide in the sea of hours, and I will find myself watching for the pussywillows' bud and the 'mouse-ears' on the Indian plum as surely as if I were dependent on them for sustenance.

Light. It was the first word of my vocabulary; light, the moon. Light, the secret of vision; light, the universal euphemism of theologies. It is light which brings us revelations, light which shows us the path. Light in all its mysteries nurtures us, protects us, heals us. We follow it, covet it, rejoice in it for the benefits it bestows. Light grows from this day forward, rooted in the solstice's dark earth.

Stories which were old when I was young, captured in pages yellowed with the years even then, take me down a sweet path of memories as I transcribe them to share with the heart of my soul. Childish though they may be in their fancies and quaintly illustrated in the manner of the times, they have a romance all their own which has been all but lost, picturesque and poetic and filled with the bright ideals of family and goodness.

In the ear of my mind, I can hear my mother's recitations of the poems echoing the previous generation as her voice read them aloud to me, my grandmother's inflections rising and falling in her intonation of phrase and meter as she herself had heard them. There is no hesitancy; the words flow of their own accord in the writer's stream as it bathes the imagination in its placid current, a navigation not beyond the skill of even the most clumsy oarsman. These are lullabies, a delicately turned cradle of poesy rocking in the gentle breeze of a caring mother's breath.

In the simpler times of eighty years ago, evening's firesides saw parents and children gathered 'round with such volumes as these which I have picked from my shelves, the coloured images vivid and the pages crisp, and no doubt the flickering light made its dance in eyes which delighted in the whimsical depictions. But their charm had not faded with the inks in the time of my own childhood, nor fallen into tatters along their edges as the chipped pages have done. Beneath the tape and threadbare bindings, their magic yet abides, waiting only for a voice to speak their spirit into a dear heart.

For the first time since the storm, I drove beyond the immediate neighbourhood and saw some of the havoc the winds had wreaked. In the space of five miles, I counted no fewer than eight or nine Douglas fir which had fallen across the highway, trees of twelve inches in girth or more and at least forty feet tall. Deeper in the forests lining the road, groups of trees had come down en masse and lay tangled like jackstraws, or had caught among sturdier branches and were leaning, precariously held aloft above a mat of broken limbs. The highway verges were thick with branches and twigs, the grass barely visible beneath their debris.

Another system is slated to bring even more wind and rain to the area tomorrow to add more to the state's growing list of weather woes. Although neither sustained winds nor gusts are forecast to be as intense as the last storm, there is still hidden potential for severe damage to property from hazards created when it swept through the area. Many residential locations in the Seattle area are still without power and roadways have not been cleared of fallen trees, nor have crews had time to remove those hung up on wires or in neighbouring limbs, increasing the likelihood of further electrical outages. Likewise, another bout of heavy rain may well choke rivers with logjams and take them more quickly to flood stage, particularly where levees were weakened by the previous spates.

This old chestnut may prove wrong before this winter has run its course in Washington state:

Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

As my power continues to flicker on and off, I have yet to hear from two friends in Flatland. One lives on urban property with several large, old trees standing quite near the house, the other in a more open suburban setting and both in the infamous Puget Sound Convergence Zone. Stories trickle in through other acquaintances, representing Flatland as something akin to a war zone and I begin to think we folk here in this narrow, sheltered valley came off lucky.

It sometimes works that way. Several years ago, 88 MPH gusts raked through a home weather station on a lake not far from home, yet not a breeze over 10 MPH disturbed my trees. The wind came directly from the south and sheared across the river's mouth where it dumps into the reservoir, but where the river's channel lies, a range of hills afforded us full protection. A southwesterly wind might have torn off shingles and uprooted trees as this last storm did, or the rare easterly which is infamous for its destructive capabilities, yet gusts from due south are rare and more kindly.

The bulk of our weather comes in from the coast of Oregon near Astoria, sweeping across the flat relief of central southwest Washington where several major rivers begin to spread out in anticipation of the sea. There is not much to blunt the force of a storm until it comes spang up against the Cascade Range or the Mountain itself, which means it races across some of the most densely populated areas of the state. It is not surprising that over a million people lost power in this last storm. The wonder is that the number was no higher and the damage no greater, given the intensity of the winds which I am told peaked at 135 MPH. This valley certainly saw nothing so severe.

Washington is having more than its share of extreme weather this winter, balancing out a mild and dry summer with torrential rains and ravaging winds. Totted up at the end of the year, I think you'll find our seasonal averages and means fairly close to normal, surprisingly enough, when half the year's end's glass is poured into the empty one which began it.

Forty hours without power, twenty-four without a landline phone, and I got off easy. Never mind that the longest I'd been without lights previously was a mere 18 hours, as opposed to those in that same storm who lost theirs for up to two weeks. It's one of the benefits of living in an area where a small number of customers is served by a small, well-prepared company as opposed to the consortiums and their huge clientele. Although our lines run miles through timber country, the repair crews have fewer feet of wire in which to pinpoint a problem.

As I walked around the neighbourhood yesterday morning, I saw everywhere evidence of what I had heard in the night. Dozens of trees, both alder and Doug fir, had snapped twenty feet up their trunks and lay in splinters and tangled boughs. One ancient snag had gone down roots and all, the massive foot upturned and the body sprawled across a disused road. Twigs, boughs and branches littered yards and verges like confetti. I was thoroughly amused at the highway department's solution to remove the debris when their fleet of sweepers was deployed to more critical areas: they sent the snowplows down!

With propane at a premium and no idea how long I might be sitting in the dark with no heat, I kept the house near 60° during the daytime, lowering the flame when I turned in for bed on a mattress beside the hearth. By morning, the room was chilly at a temperature at least ten degrees less, but my only regret was not dragging out my expedition-weight sleeping bag. Instead, I bundled up in wool longjohns and curled up in a catlike ball beneath half a dozen layers of fleece blanket. Lack of light was not really an issue. Whenever I was on the cell phone, I kept candles or a propane Coleman burning, and when I wanted to see to work on needlework, I simply put on a backpacker's halogen headlamp and stitched merrily away.

Getting through an unpleasant situation like this is largely a matter of the mind. You might as well enjoy the adventure, pretend you're camping out or on a climb because cussing about it isn't going to make it any better. Now if only I could have instilled that philosophy into the cat!

So many times, the forecast of blustery winds and snow peters out in a fizzle of rain, but under the threat of a Winter Storm Warning, the skies have gone coal-black and the breeze is stiffening its resolve as it makes a practice run through the wind chimes. I've battened all my hatches for this latest of Pacific Northwest weather systems, tucked away in the safety of the garage all blowable objects save the metal awning of the kitchen porch. The water jugs are filled, an extra pot of coffee made, Coleman and kerosene lanterns stand at the ready, and the propane tank is nearly full. Foodstuffs are provisioned (although I may tire of a fish diet if we're in for the long haul), so what have I forgotten? Oh! A five-gallon bucket for the convenience! And now even that is drawn from the well. The house is prepared.

As much as I love a good windstorm, the trees to the west of me pose a menace to the house. My huge Doug fir was topped of its schoolmarms years ago, but even so, the new growth now towers twenty feet above the parent trunk and one ancient branch projects out toward the carport, thick as my waist at its junction with the tree. Yet the firs on the undeveloped neighbouring property are those which most greatly concern me, since several are of a height greater than the distance to my bedroom roof. I fret under the punishing winds when they come from the east to bow those evergreens westward, because it is as the gusts die suddenly that backlash snaps trunks and sends the giants of the forest to the ground.

The house has its share of wind-inflicted scars. The biggest storm windows failed to live up to their reputation some years ago and were removed by gusts and shattered on the sidewalk, never to be replaced in the warped frame which had turned them loose. So too, the unsupported kitchen awning once took wing and sent me scampering after its parts as they gambolled across the highway. In a stop-gap measure which held for the duration of the season's rampant weather, I tied the bent and twisted aluminum slats back together with wire, then later put up a more sturdy type of roof and anchored it to the ground.

The wind is gaining confidence as it plays the chimes now, readying for a concert. The cold rain hints that snow is following, and perhaps at blizzard force. I am snug for the moment with heat, water, food and light provisioned, and all would seem secure, except perhaps my jangling nerves. This one is going to be a doozy.

I'd swear they're in cahoots, those two with their "no fondling, peeking, poking, shaking, rattling or hefting" prohibitions regarding Christmas presents, and "they" know exactly who I mean, don't they? I smell teamwork in this scheme to tantalize and tease me. Consciously or unconsciously, I suspect you two have had your heads together, working out a plot. Now were I of a mind to, I'm sure I could find a loophole in those injunctions. Let me consider this a minute. There surely must be some way to adhere strictly to the letter of the law...

The truth is that I relish the anticipation, and the few times I've accidentally 'busted' someone's surprise by guessing correctly when thin wrappings or weight or sound gave a gift away have been disappointing, so I try to be careful; I really, truly do. Equally as much as your presents make me glad of heart, so do I enjoy your pleasure at witnessing my honest delight in finding something unexpected in my hands when the bows and paper have been cast aside. I would not detract from that for all the world by chancing an inadvertent revelation.

Yet I must wonder: No hefting? No shaking? None at all? Hmph! My reputation must precede me, that you lay down such stringent edicts and cruel embargos. Numbered boxes? One-each-day restrictions? Could you please submit a printed copy of the rules? Ha! Well, you missed a lick when you didn't mention going through a third party, and my agent is even now considering how best to apply her teeth to tissue and patting those enticing strands of curling ribbon with her paws.

But no...I will discourage the cat's curious advances, for I see your games for what they truly are: your extraordinary and original way of making this Christmas one which I will cherish as a gift in itself.

A Noel of Small Birds

All the birds of winter gather in to find a shelter,
Begging for a bit of food and warmth in the cold weather.
From their homes in barren trees, sparrows go, and chickadees,
Finches search for bright berries, flying back with treasure.
From a journey returning laden, they sing merrily.
Song fills the sky and the snow is so white, and red's the rowan tree.
Gifts of Man shall help in need, crumbs of bread and scattered seed:
Thankful small birds all, indeed! Merry to a feather!
Singing, soaring over the forest, freely they shall fly.
Dance on the wind over moorland and glen in the sparkling winter sky.
All the birds of winter gather in to find a shelter,
Begging for a bit of food and warmth in the cold weather.
All along the hedgerow gay, birdsong beckons in the day,
From the holly and the bay, and the hoary heather.
Tiny birds take wing to go wassailing. Questing they shall go.
Thicket and bush for the moment are hushed by the silence of the snow.
Masters of their frosty hall, they announce the minstrel's call,
Pleasure to accord to all, singing all together.
Thus their carol rises unbounded, joyful hearts in flight.
Echoing trills lie like mist on the hills on a starry winter night.

Friends would gleefully have my guts for garters if they didn't benefit from the fact that unlike them, I start assembling my next-year's Christmas presents before this one has passed its mark on the calendar. No last-minute rushes for this kid! No scrabbling through the shelves or elbowing through crowds to find that special gift for Aunt Matilda or Uncle Walter, only to come upon the perfect solution broken in a picked-over pile of goods.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I believe the Christmas season is much better spent in love of friends and family instead of traffic hassles or check-out lines. What better way than to begin with handcrafting a unique item seated by the fire in the soft glow of the lighted tree as my mother often did with a needle in her fingers, picking fine stitches in doll clothes for her child? Likewise, in the dim light of his shop, my father bent his back at the workbench through holiday vacation, painstakingly dovetailing corners or mounting the tiny brass fittings which embodied the worth of his labour in the wooden boxes he built with such meticulous pride. Both parents used their skills to make care-filled gifts which, if not of the same quality mass-production might have supplied were obviously produced with the recipient in mind and heart. It was the ethic and the effort which was bestowed on neighbours and relatives with a value far greater than any pricetag could show, the priceless gift of hours of being in the mind of the artisan.

The threat of a lump of coal in the stocking of a bad little girl could only have set me on the Road to Ruin, my budding interest in geology having already manifested itself in the stone-filled pockets of my jacket or my school skirts. Unlike most kids on the playground, I was not content to hunt for 'wishing rocks' (those with a complete band of quartz encircling their diameter) but preferred to spend class recess labouriously picking tiny garnets out of a schist boulder with a pin. Although the largest of my finds could not have been a quarter inch across, I proudly added it to my collection right beside a one-inch beauty which had been a gift from an adult friend. Yet it was that lump of coal I longed for, and for more than one reason.

It didn't help that a few miles from our home was a lapidarist's shop which my mother occasionally visited in connection with her own unrelated business. I would tag along and stand goggle-eyed, staring at the museum-quality specimens lining the walls and shelves, dreaming of explorations with pick and hammer in exotic locations like Brazil. There was nothing on my maple dresser to match the deep bowls of amethyst crystals which came from that country, nothing in the bookcase headboard of my bed to parallel the staurolite crosses or the glittering pyrites, no rainbow-banded agates, no synthetic boules nor rough star sapphires, and certainly no coal.

From this delightful shop, I obtained my first copy of "Rocks and Minerals: A Golden Nature Guide" at the expense of several months' allowance. I learned from its pages what specific gravity meant, how to rank a specimen on the Mohs scale of hardness with only a few rudimentary tools, read with fascination about blowpipe tests and bead tests (both beyond my amateur abilities). I pored over the little volume for hours, committing crystal shapes to memory, hoping some day to find them in the field. Seeing my keen fascination with the subject, the proprietor always made time to talk to me, and sometimes (but not often) he would offer some small but fine specimen at a substantial markdown to my mother or an exchange of goods at the asking price.

Yet as Tennessee Ernie Ford was singing "Sixteen Tons" on the radio, the store's shelves held no lumps of coal, much to my dismay. It was not until my mother accidentally discovered a coal yard that we were able to obtain samples of sub-B bituminous, picked up free along the roadside where one of the massive trucks had spilled part of its load as it turned into the driveway. One small chunk went into my collection, and the other larger one was used to grow a Depression Plant, an experience/experiment every child should be allowed to enjoy at least once.

You will not actually need a lump of coal for this project. The plant (a fragile, coral-like growth) may also be grown on a brick, a chunk of landscaping pumice or any similar porous material.

Materials:
A lump of coal approximately 3 inches square
A dish at least 2" tall and 6" in diameter
4 Tbsp. non-iodized salt
4 Tbsp. laundry bluing
4 Tbsp. water
1 Tbsp. non-sudsing ammonia (I have used sudsy and it still works)

Combine liquid ingredients and salt and pour over coal in the dish. Add a little salt each day to continue the growth. A few drops of mercurochrome may be added to give colour.

The bubble tree was my favourite of all the family's Christmas decorations because it was such a wondrous thing. Nine lights illuminated the white paper needles of the little artificial tree, nine two-coloured globes capped with tall, liquid-filled spires which seethed like a chuckling hotspring. A line of bright bubbles would spout upward in rapid succession once the bulbs had been lit and allowed to warm, percolating within the pencil-thin tubes of glass in a spangle of fascinating effervescence, although occasionally, one would wax temperamental, and a hard flick of the finger against the tube's bottom might be required to jar loose the small plug of clear material which kept the boil from rising. You see, not only was the little artificial evergreen lovely, it held a scientific principle which intrigued my youthful mind.

Brought out of storage on St. Nicholas' Day with the manger scene, the tree stood a bit over a foot and a half from tabletop to spire tip and always took a place of honour in the room, sometimes surrounded by a batt of cotton snow. It was never decorated other than with its own lights where it sat on top of the old Muntz television or on the maple hutch, never tinselled or garlanded for it needed no adornment to make it more beautiful than it already was. Each night until Christmas, it would be lit and allowed to burn until my bedtime, and I would often sit beside the cabinet radio listening to carols, simply watching the rising bubbles play in their coloured glow.

When my father passed away and my mother was forced to move, the tree was packed away in a box and forgotten for many years as were many things, and when it emerged again, the white paper was yellowed by exposure to moisture and only a few spare lights remained unbroken. In a last-ditch effort to give the tree a new lease on life, we sprayed it with flocking which deteriorated after a single season, but because it had earned a special place in my heart, I would not allow my mother to throw it out. The poor, pitiful thing was tucked away in a steamer trunk and the next time I saw it, I was an adult. At that point, I claimed it for my own over my mother's protests and carted my childhood treasure around the countryside as I moved from place to place until at last, I hit on a means to restore it, if not quite in its original form.

It is green now, wrapped in the twigs of a new artificial swag. Its lights are a modern, larger version of the ones I loved so well, and still occasionally need that same hard flick of the fingernail to set the bubbles in motion, yet at its core is the old metal armature and it stands on the same heavy ceramic base it once did, but newly painted. As I sit with old carols on the CD player, I watch the bubbles' merry progress upward, seeing much more than the superficial beauty of its lights against the branches. In the depths of this precious keepsake's history, I see the spirit of my little tree shining from within.

Now that the reservoir is being let down following the November flooding, the new channels the river has cut are becoming more apparent. This is an annual occurrence which we who fish the lake watch with a careful eye, already planning the distance of our casts or the dropping of the anchor, mentally mapping out the bends and meanders cut by the current deep beneath the surface.

It is sometimes a conscious action, sometimes not. The slick (as we call it) gives the river away. Darker because it is deeper, less disturbed because its current expends its roiling energy navigating the tight confines of the main channel's bottom, it leaves a track like a contrail and as plain to read to those with experience. The eye wanders across lightly wind-chopped water to a faint streak which looks almost greasy, smooth and undisturbed, registers the curve in relation to a familiar stump on shore. Knowledge of a hidden snag springs to mind and the mental cast is revised and adjusted. Ah, yes! Just there! That's where the big trout will lie.

The river will mislead us several times before spring sees it settled in its permanent bed, changing with each new spate. It may travel today on the near shore, on the farther two weeks hence. One never knows which chapter of its tale to memorize, nor where the story ends, only that the characters within its pages are the living water, the fish and we who angle for them in our dreams.

Like many little boys who have reached their 30's, nothing would do but what my dad had to have an electric train. He'd caught the bug from a co-worker who had a Rube Goldberg contraption in his basement, mounted on plywood, rigged on cords and pulleys. My father's friend could lower a finely detailed countryside from the ceiling and walls until the whole of his small basement was filled but for a narrow walkway along one side for observers and a hole in the center of the tableau where the operator stood.

Snow-covered trees and village shops with frosted windowpanes filled out a magical winter panorama where figures of children skated on the pond and adults with Christmas packages under their arms made their way, while after climbing papier maché switchbacks or disappearing into tunnelled mountains, lines of tracks ran along the flats and over bridges, or diverged at any of several junctions to skirt the farthest edge of town. Two or three engines and their freight sped along the silver rails at any given time, passing through crossings with a hair's breadth between one locomotive and another's caboose, or sometimes pulled off on a siding to wait the passage of the streamliner. The only thing brighter than the gleaming headlamp was the sparkle in my father's eyes as he watched the trains' endless circling in a scene which must have reminded him of his Wisconsin childhood.

After several visits to the friend's, the family began exploring the surprisingly numerous shops in the Seattle area which specialized in train sets, and my father finally settled his dreams on a Lionel in HO gauge. It was purchased in due course without his tacit knowledge and remained hidden in a closet, secure until Christmas Eve when, to his delight, it was brought out in many separate boxes, one housing the starter set and the others, many accessories. He laid out a basic figure-8 that night on the living room floor, much to the enjoyment of his little daughter and the Siamese cat who seemed to think the train needed pouncing.

The shiny black engine resembled the old pufferbellies, with a smokestack which huffed clouds of genuine 'smoke,' supplied in a small lozenge which looked exactly like a one-inch red rubber hot water bottle. My father would add a few drops of this uniquely fragrant liquid and set the train to chugging 'round the room, a trail of grey puffs following it as freight cars bearing names like "Rock Island Line" and "Great Northern" coupled or uncoupled with the flick of a switch, waiting on a siding to be picked up on the next circuit. A red caboose always tagged along behind, its lantern lit with a warm yellow glow. A second engine (a sleek silver streamliner) was eventually added, giving rise to several spectacular train wrecks as they coincided at the figure-8, deliberately engineered by my dad.

In truth, the train became a family toy and stayed set up right where it stood on Christmas morning for at least a month, although with alterations made to the route it plied beneath chairs. How well I remember the sound and feel of the two-rail tracks as we assembled them in wider variations! The sharp plastic edges of the ties clicked brightly against one another and the solid snap with which the delicate pins fit from one thin metal component into another struck a note unlike any other. To my ultimate delight, I was allowed to assemble them, once given a caution about their fragility.

Inevitably, the set had to be dismantled so that my mother could vacuum, but it was not simply boxed away and forgotten. Especially at Christmas, it would be brought out, again to take over the living room floor for several weeks, and likely with some new accessory hidden beneath the tree. It became part of our tradition, and although my father never achieved his own personal 'train room,' I am certain he found his pleasure in the hours of enjoyment we all shared watching the train as it circled 'round about and home again, home again to the station in our hearts.

Boxes of memories are trundled from the closet and set about the room with lids thrown open, and from their tissue-wrapped contents an aura of poignancy arises, joyous yet bittersweet. Here there are feathers from the child of my heart, gone now five years, and there the jewel-like snowflakes my father once held in his farmworn hands. They are few, these ornaments of retrospect, yet each takes a place of prominence amid the branches. One cannot see the touch of time in their colours, though it flows through them in a spate of reminiscence as I handle them with reverence, calling up recollections of scent and sensation as if yesterday were no more than an hour past.

There are days hung on the Christmas tree, seasons of togetherness and closeness, and though a tear falls sometimes on the soft paper wrappings of a keepsake, the sentiment wrought is not one of melancholy but of a wistful happiness. Love and an angel ornament its boughs, and birds: cardinals, jays and cockatoos uplifting my spirit on their myriad wings. The tree is lit, its tiny blue lights dancing in reflections not of their luminescence, but of the mind.

In the Catholic household of my younger years, the Christmas season opened not with Advent, but with a visit from St. Nicholas as was the tradition in the Old Country from whence my father's people came. Some say that the observation of the saint's day begins with the eve before the 6th of December as Christmas Eve precedes Christmas, but our tradition held with the evening of the date, a schedule (as my father explained) which allowed the saint to pay first call on all the children of Europe where he was better known. Whether the clock bore out my father's logic, I never checked against the Dateline. It would have detracted from the mystery which surrounded this special day.

I would arrive home from school, filled with anticipation for the bag of sweets I knew the saint was bringing to the well-behaved child who had perhaps told a few white lies or sassed her mother, but no greater sins. He had never let me down, St. Nicholas; never punished me by delivering chunks of coal or potatoes instead of candies to let me know of his disfavour, even though I was sure he knew I sometimes longed for a lump of coal to add to my mineral collection. No, within St. Nicholas' sack of treats would be things I had not seen since his last visit: paper-thin ribbon candy which looked like folded rainbows, jelly-filled fruit drops in the shapes of bunches of grapes or lemons or berries, swirly red or green mints, chewy toffees with centers of nougat, but never peppermint candy canes. The shepherd's-crook delights were reserved for hanging on the tree when it was put up on the Saturday preceding Christmas, and woe betide the person who plucked one off before the turkey dinner!

St. Nicholas' visit was to me a miracle, unlike Santa Claus in whom my belief was always shaky. Santa came surreptitiously at midnight, long after I was asleep, whereas although I never saw Nicholas himself, I had heard audible evidence of his existence. Never too long after the evening meal, there would come a sudden thump at the front door (always when it was least expected) and I would race to the entry to find a plain brown bag folded like a lunch sack laying on the floor, heavy with a fine selection of beautiful candy. I would try to catch a glimpse of the saint through the window as he sped away, yet not a trace of him could I find; only my father's familiar footprints in the snow.

Two years ago, I didn't know a football from a field goal, but while visiting my fishing buddy over New Year's, I allowed myself to be talked into watching the Rose Bowl for no other reason than to share quality time with a friend. My chum carefully explained the game to me, drawing diagrams and labelling the players with their positions, answering my sometimes stupid questions with a smile and patience until I had a rudimentary knowledge sufficient to follow the action and to derive some enjoyment from the play. I had no particular loyalties; the teams involved were simply names to me and nothing more.

The year passed without football entering my mind until we again sat down before the television on New Year's Day of 2006. Although my friend had to refresh my memory of terms like "first and ten," "conversion" and their significance, I was surprised that the words came quickly back into my vocabulary once the game had started. I found myself being able to talk somewhat intelligibly on the subject (at least while it was fresh in my mind) and with several other female family members present, I didn't feel like such an idiot when I was forced to confess ignorance on some point or other.

Although you might not call me a football 'fan' yet today, a notable step in that direction occurred with the Seahawk's involvement in the subsequent Super Bowl. It was the first time I had seen the home team play. The whole family turned out to watch the event, ten of us packed into one daughter's cramped living room, perched on couches, lawn chairs, camp stools. Those who were left standing applied themselves to meal preparation, and before long, the buffet was lined with dishes ranging from chips and salsa to pizza, a variety of sandwich makings, grilled burgers (vegetarian or not) and a raft of sweet desserts and beverages too great to number. It was a party, a Super Bowl party, and its unique atmosphere of folk united by a common interest began to draw me into the fold of fandom, never mind that the Seahawks lost in what I thought to be a shameless exercise in favouritism on the part of the referee.

I dismissed football from mind until Thanksgiving when once again, the family invited me to holiday dinner as their "other daughter." Sande and I watched both games that day, excused from kitchen duties to take our time in friendship and even rivalry as we rooted for opposing teams during the latter of the two. I astonished myself by cheering for the Cowboys, specifically saying that I wanted to see them play against the Seahawks.

Caught up in the camaraderie of the previous season's Super Bowl party, I hope to see 'my' team vindicated this year and I wonder: is this how fandom begins? Perhaps. I know I was jubilant to learn this morning of the Seahawk's narrow victory over the Denver Broncos, inflicting my shriek of "Yippee!" on the ear of a man who has no desire to know a football from a field goal, except to pass the score along to me. Baseball, Bob? I suppose if I've come this far with football, there might be hope.

Anybody have a Geiger counter? It's time to put up the Christmas decorations!

Oh yes, those two sentences are certainly related, for deep within the boxed ornaments in the closet is a set of glow-in-the-dark icicles dating back some fifty years to an era when little was known about the effects of radiation. The plant at Hanford was regularly releasing its wastes into the air above the farmlands of eastern Washington then, and clock dials and watch faces told the time in the greenish glow of radium isotopes while constellations of radioactive stars glowed eerily through the night on children's ceilings or the headboards of their beds as they did on mine. The Nuclear Age was upon us, a godsend and unlimited supply of energy (or so it seemed), and we embraced it and naïvely welcomed it into our homes in many forms.

I had never given any particular thought to the pencil-sized plastic icicles which I had so loved as a child when they were hung on the Christmas tree year after year, and when the lights were shut out at night, I'd stand admiring their subtle color and the luminescence they imparted to the adjacent branches. It was a faint glow, to be sure, a mere cast of light paler than a sliver of moon throws, and coldly greenish in its hue.

We also had a set of six snowflakes made of plastic which did not glow, not until they had been packed in close proximity to the icicles one year. When I darkened the room to admire the ornaments one night before bedtime, I noticed a suggestion of phosphorescence coming from within the tree's boughs in a six-sided shape. I passed it off to a trick of light, a ray reflected from some other source, until I noticed yet another and another, and finally when I had counted six unmistakably glowing snowflakes, I began to guess what had happened. I removed one flake, took it into absolute darkness, and there I saw it shining all by its little self. Yes, it had become contaminated by the radiation being emitted by my precious childhood icicles.

I no longer hang the radioactive icicles on the tree, preferring to have all 24 of them on a string across a doorway. I pass beneath their tips several times a day, never without looking up and wondering how rapidly they'd make a Geiger counter tick.

Where have all the cardinals gone? Although this beautiful bird does not occur in my state, they are to me a symbol of Christmas, and as far back as I can recall, only once has it happened that my holiday cards have not borne their image. That notable exception occurred when a Clark's nutcracker (a species which holds deep personal significance for me) made an appearance in WalMart's card display, as if calling to me for acknowledgement from the shelf.

It is my custom to shop a year ahead for cards, laying in next year's supply soon into this year's marketing campaign, and so it was that I began looking for cardinals just prior to Thanksgiving. Had I been checking off species on my life list, I might have added chickadees, various sparrows and finches, ducks or geese, robins, the inevitable patriotic bald eagle, doves (of course) or even a woodpecker, but no cardinals were to be found. I was almost fooled by poorly illustrated cedar waxwings which passed for a female "redbird" at first glance, but the mask and bill shape gave them away as impostors, whatever the artist might have intended.

Yesterday, I searched through dozens of aisles and end caps, hoping to see a trace of red which was not Santa Claus' suit, the scarf on a snowman or a kitten sporting a Christmas bow. Trees held bright red apples in their boughs, a moose wore a scarlet harness, but the closest creature I could find to my beloved "redbirds" was sketched amid a falling snow of glitter: a faded, pale linnet (house finch), its streaked and spotted breast more obvious than its dull pinkish hue.

Will the cardinals come again? I feel as if I am waiting vainly for a legend to arrive: the ivory-billed woodpecker of the season.

Tai-chi: It has been a long time since I went through the slow, graceful moves of the exercise, but although I have forgotten the sequence and must now re-learn the pattern, my body remembers the poise and balance it demands. One would hardly expect physical fitness to result from such a seemingly relaxed and effortless posturing, yet the truth is that the form is an excellent conditioner, requiring constant control over the muscles as the slow motion is kept regular and flowing. The full 'set' as I perform it, done twice in succession takes approximately fifteen minutes to complete, and done twice a day, leaves both my mind and body feeling simultaneously invigorated and relaxed.

Done in conjunction with yoga and the occasional warm-day bike ride or walk, a daily practice of Tai-chi has been sufficient to maintain my muscle tone during the idle months of winter, despite the fact that I often grow bored with its repetition by the time February rolls around. I've used other means to stay in shape, from a stationary bicycle or a HealthRider machine to resistance cords and dumbbells and have found none as satisfying or as salutary. Although a far cry from aerobics, the meditational nature of the routine is in its own way beneficial to the heart as a stress reliever as well.

Mind and body are inextricably linked, and at the core of the matter, stress is ultimately responsible for more illnesses than germs. Western physicians tend toward using pharmaceuticals to treat the mental and physical aspects separately, whereas Eastern medical practitioners takes the opposite approach, prescribing exercise and meditation to find health from within. "Treat the mind, treat the body," is a tenet often repeated in the so-called 'alternative' medicine texts, a sound philosophy, and even if it is not a cure-all, what harm could fifteen minutes of gentle exercise do? Surely far less than some chemical which will leave unavoidable residues in the organs! Given my choice, I will choose to follow those clever Chinese, and carry my personal tigers to the Mountain with Tai-chi rather than swallow a pill.

There is a tattered yet precious book on my shelf, with its spine discoloured by age and one corner of its faded blue-green cover gnawed away by some long-forgotten pet. It is "Water Wonders Every Child Should Know: Dew, Frost, Snow, Ice and Rain" by Jean M. Thompson, and although its lavish photo-micrographs are only black-and-white, they are still acknowledged today as some of the finest taken in their time.

My copy of this little volume is 90 years old, passed down to me from my mother's own childhood, and it was one of the first books I held in my infant hands. Its text is suited to much older readers both in content and vocabulary than the title suggests, ranging from the instructive, "....growth (of ice crystals) is very clearly divided into five or six types of crystalline formations...through the various stages of development as the nuclear, or smooth-edged crystal, the scalloped, the ray-like and the branching stages of growth; after which they loose their individuality by becoming solidified and merged into the solid ice form," to the more romantic, "...hoarse winds rise and rage and croon their wailing symphonies about the picturesque old gray-gabled farmhouses," with appropriate snatches of poetry quoted from the masters here and there. An amazingly broad education is offered in its pages, acquainting the reader with culture side by side with scientific data, unlike the texts of today which deal with bare facts and figures and have no undercurrents with which to capture the interest of inquisitive young minds.

My own young mind was ensnared not only by the archaic and quaint language of the century's turn (the book was first published in 1907), but by the wealth of fascinating images of snow rollers, dumb-bell shaped snow crystals, feathered ice formations, bowl-shaped hailstones and the like. Long before I could fully comprehend the odd-sounding words which described trigonal formations and granular crystallization, I would sit for hours studying their micrographs.

I had in my possession a 300x microscope and would catch snowflakes on its slides, even though it meant sitting in the cold to view their unique, spectacular beauty in its short tenure on the glass. Advised by the book, I would first chill the slide in the refrigerator's freezer, then race outside and try to catch any of the smaller flakes as they descended, then hurry to mount the slide under the lens before my hand's heat could warm the plate. The 'scope was illuminated only by a flashlight beam and daylight, a far cry from optimal conditions, and although I never saw any of the more remarkable oddities of Nature which the book portrayed nor indeed any perfect formations, I was delighted with the wonders I had been privileged to witness.

In my later years of mountaineering, my ascents took me among sights "Water Wonders" never described: sun cups as tall as a man, the striations of glacial ice compacted in annual layers like the rings of trees and a vast field of corn snow, treacherous as a slope covered in ball bearings, yet none has passed my eye without the memory of this book coming into mind. It may have played a role in my decision to become a climber, this treasured volume, driving me to seek the perpetual winter of the high summits with the steadfast tenacity which is the trademark of an alpinist's life. Its yellowing pages still guide me into mysteries beyond its fundamental instruction as I flip open to a random page and read, "...silence settles over all, unbroken save perhaps by a straggling flight of crows winging their way heavily to safe shelter among the distant forest of pines."

As a person who normally gets up with or before the dawn, these chill mornings find me snuggling deeply into the folds of the electric blanket and hesitant to crawl from bed. The nighttime setting of 64° on the thermostat seems to leave the house colder than it did in autumn, the drafts keen and biting where they sneak beneath the covers, but no thought plays a greater role than this in my reluctance to face the day:

The Coldest Place on Earth

Many's the time I've made a climb
Into the land of ice and snow,
And endured the chill of my own free will
Where I'd chosen to go.

I've knocked my knees at ten degrees,
Shivering inside a tent,
Slept on the ground with frost all 'round
And did it without lament.

And like a fool, in a highland pool,
I've swum amid floating floes,
Turned myself blue in the process too,
Except for my rosy nose.

I've paid the cost of the bite of frost,
And sacrificed some skin
When the summit's call meant giving all
And never giving in.

And yet I dread getting out of bed
From under the blanket's heat.
I am not pleased when I have to freeze
My dainty little feet.

It's metal, the tub, and there's the rub,
For behind the shower door
Each morning I face the most chilly place:
That cold, cold bathtub floor!

Dove grey skies have spent their energies for the moment, and a foot of snow is streaked with fierce brilliance where the sun carves openings in the cloud. The brief, relative warmth has given power lines good reason to shrug off their icy coats and the fenceposts cause to doff their hats, though still the evergreens cling tightly to their trappings, as if aware that the next spate of flakes must keep to its appointed schedule.

It is powdery, this snow. It kicks up in puffs of spindrift at the slightest interruption. A junco's tiny weight sends an avalanche tumbling from the summit of the bird feeder, the brush of a wing featherdusts the contorted filbert's branches, and the hapless finch landing in the yard disappears into white quicksand, only to emerge with an indignant chirp and flutter a second later, confused. A Steller's jay is not so polite and curses prodigiously when the footing proves unreliable, unintentionally shooting through and off the far side of the feeding station in a mist of glittering crystals. The wrens are wiser and patrol close to the foundation, leaving checkered footprints behind the protection of toppled delphiniums and hellebore as they search for insects and the last of autumn's broadcast seeds. A solitary towhee crashes through the berm of snow mounted on a cedar rail and heads off in embarrassment to a nearby tree.

A freshening of feed improves the jay's cranky mood, and soon his fellows come to table beside him to gobble down sunflower seed until a red-shafted flicker takes possession of the platform, its freckled body filling the small confines of the covered tray. A battle of beaks is waged by two blue rivals on its roof, but the flicker cannot be bothered to give them any notice, and neither will dare challenge this woodpecker's cousin whose beak is twice as thick and long as theirs.

Soon after the supply has been replenished, the yard is pocked with bird tracks as the younger and more timid members of the flock search for scattered millet and sunflower seed around the feeder's base. Yet there is little need for competition here. As the next course of flakes begins to fall, the guests are leaving one by one, each with a bulging crop: the tithe I offer in return for the birds' bright company outside my window.

Only my footprints mark a path through the night's snowfall, a line of scuffs cutting an erratic arc from sidewalk's end to driveway where I pass through bent on photography during a pre-dawn shower. The shadows lurk deeply blue in the wake of my boots; the light is cold and the beauty austere. Silence is my companion, the muffle of the white blanket stilling all sound with the cautionary whisper of its flakes. A morning in the snow is like no other: calm and absolute, soulful in its mystery. My line of footprints is an offense. I should not have sullied this snow with my presence.

As if in answer to my unspoken confession of guilt, a new shower comes hard to fill in the traces of my transgression and now only a pattern of dimples remain unforgiven. The bumpy yard is more impious than I, with its cocky and sassy spikes of hawkbeard which are too willful to bow easily to the snow's first demand. A subsequent shower tames the weeds' conceit, and watchful clouds play chaperone over further displays of vanity on their behalf.

The trees are dressed in their Christmas-card clothes, each branch, limb and twig carrying its surfeit of white silence, bearing their enigmatic gift into this wintery sanctuary. Surrounded here by tranquillity and a certain solemnity despite the last traces of my footprints on the carpet, I feel the quiet of this snow within my soul.

Clip-clip-clip! Up the hill the snowplow goes, engaged in a favourite early-season sport: chipping road diddits off bare pavement with the blade. Road diddits...I'm given to understand that they're called 'reflectors' if you live in Georgia...are those little bumps along the center line which help keep night drivers on their true course, named for the sound they make when run over: diddit-diddit-diddit! or in this case, clip-clip-clip! as they pop off and go flying toward the ditch. Lest anyone think I am unjustly maligning the driver of the plow, rest assured I have it on good authority from a neighbour who pilots just such a machine for the Department of Transportation that this is indeed a game the plowman plays, else why would he be grading a dry, bare stretch of asphalt and only with the blade down when in the cover of dusk or darkness?

Another popular seasonal pastime is Mash-the-Mailbox, again a nighttime hobby. Along the straight 55 mph stretches of roadway, the plow is driven at 70 mph or more in order to throw the bulk of snow with as much force as possible to achieve the greatest distance. Points, Tom assures me, are accrued by passing as closely as possible to mailboxes and destroying them with sheer power of the snow's impact without nicking them with the blade, which would disqualify the "kill." A skilled player can take out singles with ease; triples such as those belonging to Clyde, Dennis and myself are harder to eliminate with a single blow, requiring some finesse of angle which is not always possible to achieve.

You might think that the DoT would be liable for this wanton, semi-licensed vandalism by its employees, but no one has yet filed a successful claim against the county despite repeated offenses. Many locals have given up their rural mail, preferring to have it delivered to safer post office boxes. Others have contrived to snowplow-proof their property with bars, straps, welded screens of horseshoes with some small measure success. For now, the two boxes on the downhill end of our grouping are protected by the first (Clyde's) which was flattened several years ago, never to be replaced. Mine is bent but closes, Dennis' will not close securely. Nevertheless, they have enjoyed a greater survival rate than the innocent diddits which only last night were wiped out almost to a man, ensuring the plowman's summer employment on the crew which will be charged with their reinstallation.

In 1969, some little fly-by-night, hole-in-the-wall operation called my mother with an invitation to view their product line. She was old enough to know better and I should have been, but as a young wife of two years who had yet to experience the pitfalls of credit buying and or telephone solicitations, I tagged along on my mother's heels when she went to the address we had been given: a one-room office in a small strip mall, empty but for a table and three chairs.

The proprietor seated us and went promptly into his spiel with nothing on display except a three-ring binder filled with glossy printed pages touting a variety of goods from leather coats to vacuum cleaners. My mother's interest was particularly drawn to a set of "waterless" cookware, new to the market in those days and rather expensive, and my eye was caught by a sewing machine which purportedly did everything the current Singer did and more. The salesman went on to explain that although the machine was produced overseas (read, "in the Orient"), its parts were Singer-interchangeable. Furthermore, it carried a 25-year guarantee against breakage, as did the cookware.

Innocent of the sales tactic about to be used on us, my mother and I inquired the price of the two items, only to be told that the company only sold package deals of any three products...three...for $650. That was a lot of money in that era, but still a good price, considering. We said we'd like to think about it for a couple of days, but the salesman responded quickly that it was a one-time offer. Oh, how gullible we were! We put our heads together, hashed it over and decided to split a set of fire alarms between us in addition to the sewing machine and waterless cookware, each to pay half the asking price. We were promised delivery within two weeks, signed a one-year credit contract with the company, and out the door we went.

Surprisingly, our goods were at the shop when we visited the office fourteen days later, although at the end of the following week, the office had been vacated and looked as if it had never been occupied. Only then did either of us feel any sense of misgiving, so blindly trusting as we had been.

However, the story doesn't end the way you might think it would, given this dubious history. My mother's set of waterless cookware served her well up until her last days. I constructed hundreds of garments on the sewing maching, many of heavy fabrics or leather. It has never been serviced, other than a routine oiling by the owner (something I had neglected for the last fifteen years and had to attend to before I could finish the morning's mending), and even more amazingly (knock on wood), it still is powered by its original drive belt. Emdeko did not believe in planned obsolescence.

For all of how seriously it was snowing when I left home on Thanksgiving morning, only half an inch lay on the ground twenty four hours later. At this point, it could be called pretty, although cowlick tufts of grass stick up through it and the grey asphalt shows as an unsightly gash. It's not something you'd put on a Christmas card, not this little dusting. Total concealment of the ragged pasture, sagging roofs and weathered cedar fenceposts wading knee-deep are what define a snowfall's beauty, but this will do for the moment. It is just November, after all.

November snow at my previous residence was a fairly reliable indicator of the remainder of the winter's weather. I lived in Flatland in those days, and sure as the flakes would fly around Thanksgiving, not another fleck of snow would follow unless it turned up as a spit in late March which never stuck to the ground. A fan of the down from Mother Nature's featherbed, I used to dread those November snows, counting down the days in the hopes we'd make it through the month without the stuff appearing because then (maybe, possibly) a white Christmas might be waiting in the wings. It was trustworthy, if one was willing to forgive its misjudgment once a decade, reliable nine times out of ten, but even a mere skift of flakes would prove enough to hoodoo January, as I recorded time and time again.

Here in the mountains, it's a different story. The Thanksgiving week snow shower has become almost a tradition, but it tells nothing, gives no clue, as ineffectual a prognosticator as this present thin blanket is at hiding molehills where it rests in tatters in the yard.

Twenty-three hundred miles away, roosters called me into morning.

It's a good Thanksgiving, and I am greatly blessed.

Year after year, my hunting neighbour Clyde has gone out at the start of elk season with high ideals, braving the inclemencies of Pacific Northwest weather, only to return at its close dispirited and with an empty bag. I will say that to his credit, he is more selective about what he shoots than the average hunter in the area, and more conscientious with regard to taking shots which he knows will be quick to kill his animal, unlike many who will fire at the first sign of horns. Yes, I would call Clyde an outdoorsman of the first water, knowledgeable in the forest, prudent in his practices, but still it bothered me that eight years could pass without fresh meat coming home to table.

Three weeks ago, I saw his partner's truck pull into the driveway with a magnificent rack of horns displaying above the pickup's box, a "five by six," as such things are described. Jerry had got his elk on opening day, and had come to borrow Clyde's ATV to drag the bull's carcase out from where it had fallen, an estimated 450 pounds without the hide. Not much of a meat eater myself, I was drooling at the thought of this particular flavour. Elk is one exception I allow into my diet. I held out a small hope that Clyde would take a portion of the meat for helping his companion process his kill, and that some portion thereof might trickle down my way as it has done in other years. I did not know then that my neighbour had been with him when the animal had been taken, nor that Clyde had also tagged a "four by five" the following Monday and that there was plenty of elk to go around.

My neighbour is quite famous hereabouts for his recipes, and I am not the only one who stands with outstretched hand when the smokehouse door is opened. Only this morning, I'd seen him head that way with a bowl of something underneath his arm and the alder smoke curling out of the stovepipe already. Later, when he jumped the fence today with a sack in his hand to tell me the story, I was guessing sausage or jerky, still warm from preparation. I peered inside the sack. It was a steak about the size of a good top round.

As I catch up to the rest of civilization by reading the last two weeks' papers, accounts of the flood damage to Mt. Rainier National Park chill me. The principle focus of the reports has covered the southwest corner where just beyond the Nisqually Entrance (the only entrance open in wintertime), the ground which once held Sunshine Point campground washed completely away, carrying trees and structures with it. Power and sewer lines were severed, some sections of the paved road have been obliterated, and several creeks have diverted into newly formed courses, threatening other sections of the road as well. As repairs continue with tons of rock being moved daily to fill in and rebuild, the Park is not expected to reopen until Christmastime (if then), and that with only limited facilities.

With a budget of $3 million in reserve for such disasters, the Park will certainly need to apply for emergency funding just to restore access to Paradise where a new visitor center is in the process of being built, but this corner was not the only area hard-hit by the floods. On the southeast side, multiple landslides block the highway or have ripped away new gullies as deep as 80 feet which now will have to be bridged. On the northwest corner (Carbon River, my old district), two miles of the gravel access road are gone, as is Ipsut campground at its end, with the river now running where it once was set among the trees. Given the fact that for many years, Park Service has considered closing the Carbon River Road permanently due to the cost of its maintenance, I am certain that it will never be reopened; likewise the Westside Road which has in years past been subject to Tahoma Creek's fury.

The damage which occurred to the trail system and the backcountry campgrounds accessible only to hikers has not yet been assessed, and this will bring another burden to the expense account as additional personnel will need to be hired to effect timely repairs. Although backcountry access would be a lower priority than other tourist draws, lack of it could significantly impact the number of visitors coming into the Park to feed an already belaboured budget. As fees were increased over the last several years, visitation had declined markedly already.

The face of the Park has changed, and despite the best efforts of Man to forestall another such disaster, he cannot hold against Nature forever. After years of being treated too casually by tourists, the Mountain is now reclaiming its own.

The Mountain's bowl has filled with snow again, and now stacked lenticular cloud hangs on the three summits like a broad-brimmed hat, casting shadows on the craggy countenance. Where some slopes lie in sunlight, they are brilliant, glossed with ice and sleek with its sheen where they reflect the sky. The view is far from static. The cloud formation spreads, shrinks, heaps and collapses within the few seconds I look away, in one moment sharply outlined and in the next, blurry and indistinct as if Mountain and cloud were one entity presenting different faces like a model: happy, pensive, shy or coy behind the veil. Then in a whimsy, a small puff of dark, low cloud pops up from behind the evergreen ridgeline like a tiny terrier, laughing and full of play.

We rail against the weather, we Northwesterners, but it is weather which gives our environment its life and character. Regrettably, it sometimes also gives our lives their moods. Change is both expected and agreeable, whether for bad or better, simply to have some variation in the theme. When either sun or rain overstay their welcome, our social courtesies may lapse as we wait for them to depart the premises, so even a rainy day following prolonged sun may be greeted as a guest. Today, I am enjoying the Mountain's frolic with the clouds.

Half an inch of rain has fallen since I emptied the gauge this morning and the view of standing pools in my driveway tells a story. The ground is supersaturated now, having absorbed all it can hold in its upper layers, and this rain...this drenching rain...has nowhere to go but down the slopes as direct runoff. It is this rain which will scour trees from hillsides, send mudslides crashing, even if it does not bring the rivers back up to flood stage once again.

With the freezing level rising and heavy snow at the middle elevations, I'm reminded of the previous floods which nearly swept my mother's little river cabin away on their tide. Twice in 29 years, she was forced to evacuate, but on other occasions she stubbornly refused to budge even when the water was lapping at the boards of her deck.

She bought her place on a small creek in southwest Washington one summer and was not informed that it sat on a seven-year flood plain, nor did she think to ask. The river was scenic and serene, running only a few feet deep at most in a ten-foot deep channel. The neighbourhood kids would wade across it during the salmon run in the fall to scoop the big fish out from the deeper holes and hold them up in their arms. The run would often thrash the water as the spawning fish headed upstream, their bellies rubbing gravel and their fins standing above the surface. Later, the winter rains would bring the river up six feet or so, still well within its banks and not posing any threat.

Then one year, an early snowfall blanketed the hills above the headwaters, only to be followed by a torrent of rain and high freezing level which melted all the snow and turned the river muddy. Debris from logging operations washed down in the runoff, choked up at an already existing beaver dam downstream of my mother's home. Before long, the flow backed up, filling the open pasture between her house, washing out the community's gravel access road and cutting her off from the highway even as the main channel's level rose higher and encroached upon her yard.

Her first experience with a flood was an eye-opener, but it passed without damaging her property or imperilling her life. In subsequent floods, she was not so lucky. The house's skirting washed away, her propane tank shifted on its blocks, and twice she had to have footings replaced when the water etched away the soil beneath them as it rose to the level of her deck, two or three feet above the surface of the yard.

The seven-year flood plain lived up to its name, with the heavier floods coming every ten years or so. She never considered moving, my uniquely obstinate mother, content to live with rising waters and to find some minor amusement in the odd things she saw floating past her doorstep: whole trees, or trees that looked like Viking ships, or someone's rowboat or a bloated cow. That, and the occasional piggyback ride to safety kept her entertained.

Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife has been working for many years to re-establish the naturally-occurring salmon runs of yesteryear in the state's rivers and smaller streams, while at the same time providing sports fishermen with greater opportunities to catch the Northwest's most popular fish through creating "put-and-take" fisheries, i.e. farm-raised fish trucked to popular fishable waters and released specifically with the angler in mind. If readers thinks the two ideals seem somewhat at odds with each other, they would be correct. In practice, the fisherman has been the primary beneficiary and few (if any) salmon have survived the tangle of hooks to go upstream to spawn. Illegal methods for taking fish have accounted for the majority of catches, as well as over-limit fishing and (to a lesser extent) fishing in closed waters.

Part of the problem lies in the dates set for the season, which opens before the fish start to make their annual spawning run. When they come in from the sea, the banks of the rivers are already lined with fishermen, and the flow rate is generally still at its low point, water clear and slow-running, conditions which favour the 'snagger' all too well. Such has certainly been the case on my favourite stream, although last year, the WDFW made a sweep which eliminated many of the prime offenders. Even so, the fish remain too vulnerable under these water conditions, inclined to make the sprint upstream only when the rivers run faster and more deeply.

Salmon season in my area had only just begun when Washington's record rains began falling at the end of October. The creek was at a significant low. No fish had been trucked from the collection point at the dam on the major river yet, although a creel census showed that a few were being caught in the area. Then, within a very few days, the rivers were in flood stage, making bank access impossible and boating dangerous. A limited number of fish were captured at the fish ladder and transported to the smaller streams, but fishermen, legal or not, were at a decided disadvantage as the floodwaters ripped through every river in the western half of the state.

Many of the rivers have now changed their courses, exposing new areas of gravel and sand in which the salmon spawn. New channels have been cut, including one which took out my favourite riffle along with a portion of the campground adjacent to it, and where once my stream flowed a mere ten feet wide, it is now broader than an average cast. Several of the popular holes upstream of it have filled in with debris and new lairs have been etched out along hard-to-access banks, protected by cliffs and brush and "private property" signs. It is the fish who have the upper hand now, as the first explorers of the new territory. As they establish their new breeding grounds in the flood-ravaged reaches, it will be hard luck for the fisherman, but at least for this first year, the salmon may stand a fighting chance.

Ask a group of little kids what they want to be when they grow up, and one of them is bound to say, "A forest ranger!" Yep, Smokey is an idol for many youngsters, all right, and a good many adults will assert that the ranger's employment falls in the category of 'glamour jobs,' right alongside anything else which puts its professional into uniform. That bright badge shines mighty bright when the sun's on it, y'know, and nobody's homely in a beaver hat, but the truth of the matter runs a good bit deeper.

I've been thinking about my years in Park Service as I sit here glowering at the continuing fall of rain, remembering the patrols of miles and miles and miles in endless, drenching downpour, recalling the mud and the chill and dragging my sorry, soaked carcase into the clammy interior of my duty station, only to find that the person I was replacing had left me no cut firewood. I'd been too bedraggled to notice the rainbow ranks of wildflowers lining the trail, too weary to lift my eyes to the peaks of the evergreens where they pierced the grey cloud which hid the touted vistas, my mind's eye fixed only on the relative comfort of a cold cabin and a rough bunk where I could drop and sleep until the mice waked me, running across my face.

Officially, I served three summers and at least five winters at a backcountry cabin adjacent to one of the more popular drive-to campgrounds where I gave nature walks, campfire chats, wrote permits and made thousands of visitor contacts as a smiling, cheerful representative of the Park. Glamourous enough, though on the flip side, I often dealt with knife fights, drunkards, poachers, rebels against the system, brainless idiots who thought they knew all about alpine mountaineering because they'd climbed a rock or two, and even the occasional rude tourist who refused to pick up his litter, citing that it was 'dirty' once it had left his hand and landed on the ground.

At various times, I worked clearing a logjam in the lake's outlet, standing waist-deep in icy water, wrestling timber with a peavey, hauled out heavy iron fire grates on my back, carried emergency supplies in on snowshoe only to have them stolen by snowmobilers the following week. I cleaned outhouses and fire pits, gathered litter, repaired trail, handled dangerous chemicals in the chlorinator shed, none of which fell under the terms of my job description but needed to be done and timely. I was waked by visitors at any hour of the night, on call to handle whatever emergency might come up, even to rout the raccoon who had chosen to visit the food left out on the terrified camper's picnic table.

There were rewards, too...the hiker who 'lifted' one of my canned sodas while I was on patrol and left me twice the going price in change, the Girl Scouts who enlisted my aid in devising tricks to play on their Scout leader (cold spaghetti in the sleeping bag was one), the bright bespectacled girl of six years who could cite scientific names of more wildflowers than were in my own knowledge, the fishermen who brought the ranger a dinner of fresh trout. More than once, I took tea with backpackers who sought a spare moment's shelter beneath the cabin's porch roof, sharing in their stories of parks beyond my own in a fellowship brought about by that selfsame weather which so often was a plague.

Oh, yes, those were the ranger years, all right! And truth to tell? Although you couldn't get me to hike in the rain today, I'd gladly pin the badge on again and take up where I left off in my 'glamour job,' all things considered.

The lake is brown and clogged with debris from the flooding, islands of timber floating like dumplings on a thick, muddy soup. Along the northwest shore, a drift of roots, branches and whole trees has piled against the bank to form a mass which will eventually shift and find its course to come up against the log boom preventing most of it from reaching the dam. There is one small breach in the boom to allow boat traffic through, but it too will block up as the winds shift and must be kept clear by the maintenance personnel for the utility which owns the reservoir.

Only two weeks ago, the lake level was near its minimum leaving a vast plain of mud from shore to shore. It's an ugly sight, that, as opposed to the broad expanse of fine fishin' water which ordinarily fills the basin to a common depth of fifteen feet in summer. However, its let-down has been the saving factor for several small communities below the paired hydroelectric plants on the river which cuts through a deep, unpopulated canyon between the two dams, carved there in geologic time with a much higher rate of flow. The canyon would be able to accommodate an even higher flood stage without particular harm, but the utility must regulate the flow through both dams in order to mitigate its effects lower down. The balancing act is not always as successful as it has been through this latest crisis, and often both the small towns and the delta have experienced severe flooding when management misjudged the volume of water expected from any given storm.

The worst floods tend to come on the heels of a heavy snow, unlike this one which was entirely rain-generated. When a warming trend comes on the heels of a significant snowfall, the resulting melt quickly takes the lake to a level which cannot be managed by the dams and water must be let over the spillways. This is also the time when the lesser rivers and creeks will be most affected, contributing additional runoff to the major rivers already at flood stage. Of course, in this last period of precipitation, snow fell at the higher elevations proportional to the rain. With the lake now at its present high level, another warm, wet system would be disastrous. This may yet prove to be one of Washington's worst flood years on record.

A sneaky devaluation of the pound has taken place over the last few decades, and no, I'm not talking about currency. I mean weight. I don't mean that an ounce is no longer an ounce because as far as I know, that's still 28 grams and a fraction. I'm talking about that three-pound can of coffee in your hand.

Used to be 48 ounces, good old "sixteen times three" filled the tin up chock-full. Then some enterprising marketer decided it could be shortened up a few scoops, and even if the public noticed, nobody would particularly care (or if John Q. did, he'd be helpless to complain as it became the standard). As I recall, that first reduction wasn't much...maybe an ounce and a half, down to 46.5. The conspirators in this dastardly and devious plot retained the can's original size, citing that it would be too costly to revise the processing equipment. "Well, it's only an ounce and a half," we said, and bought both the grounds and the bill of goods we'd been handed.

The next subtraction in weight was more substantial, maybe another four ounces. Can sized stayed the same, and so did our euphemism, "three-pound can of coffee." We were lying to ourselves every time we wrote it on the grocery list. That 42 ounces was no more "three pounds" than the Man in the Moon, and the little bit of nitrogen they pumped inside to keep the flavour fresh hardly made up for the fact that the price stayed pat under pretext of inflation and a crisis in the crop of mountain grown.

The next change was visible. The "three-pound can" shrank an inch in height. The decrease to 39 ounces was hardly noticed by the consumer who opened it and saw it as fuller than the last can he'd bought. Stinky, mean and nasty, that bit of work! But the eye feeds the mind, and both are gullible, as any advertiser knows. "Settling of contents post-manufacture" can't account for that large a gap 'twixt rim and grind.

Well, last week, I had coffee on my shopping list. The heft felt wrong when I lifted the can down from Safeway's shelf. "Oh!" I said, as I looked down at the lid. "They're sealing them with foil now, conserving on steel," a thoughtful gesture toward the ecology (or so I justified). The can size was the same as the 39-ounce model, and it wasn't until I opened it that I noticed my "three-pound can" of coffee now contains a mere 34.5 ounces.

How long will it be before some clever marketer decides to start offering coffee in genuine three-pound cans again? Those of us who prefer to buy larger quantities of our favourite beverage would certainly appreciate an honest measure of the bean.

Inside the house, the thermometer registers at 71° (a supposedly comfortable temperature), but as I look out the window at the nearby hills with their dust of newly fallen snow, the goosebumps rise on my arms. I am not feverish beneath the heavy fleece jacket, only chilled by the intangible ambience thrown by sky and slope as they take on the shades of winter. It is pervasive, this sense of cold. It penetrates the walls and hangs in the air like the bitter breath of age.

Another telltale: the towhees have come in to strip the garden of the seed flung wide by the cosmos and the asters, scavenging the smaller fare in preference to the millet in the feeders, seeking it with eyes as red as the berries of the wintergreen. The birds have heard the story the weather reads aloud, and thus gather to the warmest hearth to tuck up in its shelter as the myth is proven true: the clouds shall fall to earth and the hills shall wear their garment. White winter is coming down.

The stars are dull with time, the fabric saddened by its duty.
The flag is faded, and just yesterday,
My father's eyes were brown and bright with youth.
I take his honours in my hands,
And weep the tears of half a century.
Where are his fields and his farmland? Fallen fallow.
Where is the life he gave his plantings? Gone into the dust.
Where is the life he gave his country? Sung into an untimely grave.
Behind the faded stars and colours,
I am the solitary keeper of his living memory.
In my ending, his spirit will vanish from the earth.

I suppose it's only logical that as the next front marshalls its resources and prepares to blast the Pacific Northwest with another charge of rain, my thoughts should turn to a sunnier venue, or it could be a hankering for the flaky, white filets hidden somewhere beneath the kokanee and trout in the deepest recess of my freezer which reminds me of the ocean waves and the surf perch lurking in the lee of the jetty. In any event, for several days, surf fishing has been on my mind, a sport gas prices kept me from enjoying this last year.

The gear is the simplest part of the equation. A salmon rod will do, rigged with ten-pound mono line and a reel dedicated to corrosive salt water. The leader is specific: a surf rig comprised of three feet of metal line with two droppers, a terminal snap to hold a one-ounce weight. The easiest method for setting up is to use pre-snelled hooks (tie your own or purchase them), and you will want plenty because you will be casting quite close to the rocks. At $2.95 a dozen, it will be more economical if you dig your own bait with a clam gun. This is a back-breaking labour and can only be done at low tide but, conveniently, The Bite will be on the incoming tide just as it approaches its peak. If you still have the strength to cast after digging at least a hundred sand shrimp, you're good to go.

The fisherman's timing, on the other hand, must be impeccable. A tide table is mandatory, as the hours of low and high tide are only one factor to consider. Height of the sea is critical, and fishing should be done when the gap between high and low are greatest, hopefully to coincide with one of the peak highs of the year.

Sand shrimp (the preferred bait) resemble a crawdad and provide one of the principle sources of food for the 1-1.5 pound fish, second only to barnacles which are not reasonable for the angler to collect. Clam necks may be used instead and are more likely to stay on the hook especially if tied, and jumbo prawns will do in a pinch, but they are also rather too expensive, all things considered. Wave action accounts for as much lost bait as do actual bites, and the wily surf perch is particularly adept at sucking bait without so much as a trace of a tug being evident to the fisherman.

The drab-coloured sand shrimp inhabit the mud flats where clams and scallops are also found, but the seasons for shellfish and surf perch seldom overlap. They are dug with the gun (a tube of metal, 4" or greater in diameter with a T-shaped handle) using a sudden thrust to its two-foot depth in the mud, followed by a laborious extraction. Yield per plunge generally never exceeds three shrimp, and each may be broken into two pieces. A hundred will provide approximately two hours' fishing pleasure since the hook will need to be rebaited on almost every cast.

The surf fisherman may or may not wear waders, depending on conditions. I have always enjoyed the rare sunny day at Washington's beaches for my sport, and prefer to wear a heavy layer of sunscreen with shorts and a long-sleeved shirt as I wade in to my knees to make my cast as close to the jetty as possible. It is here that the fish feed, hunting barnacles on the lee side of the rocks. The tidal action makes it difficult to detect a bite, so it is prudent to set the hook at the slightest tug. When a fish is hooked, it will tend to run crossways to the surges, providing a much greater fight than its relatively small size would suggest. A surf perch is not a leaper like a trout but will give as much sport, knowing how to use its environment to greatest advantage.

A variety of fishes may come in alongside the target species, some desirable and some not. The dogshark is one of the most common and least wanted. Flounder and sole appear less frequently, and rarely cabezon may be caught to give a gourmet treat of its pale aqua blue flesh which whitens upon cooking. The roe of cabezon is toxic and care must be exercised in cleaning them.

For the times I have spent knee-deep in surf and getting sunburned, my score for the two-hour tidal change has ranged from skunked to thirty on any given day. Although surf perch might be peasant fare when compared to halibut or salmon, they are a delight to catch and a challenge to the angler's skill as well as being tasty. Maybe it's time to defrost the freezer after all.

Although the weather keeps us in ignorance of its schedule, the chill today forecasts a just-around-the-corner imminence to complement the northern blue, pale and patchy among the clouds. It makes its pronouncement in clear syllables, the warning implicit: the tenure of autumn is done and winter is in its ascension to the throne.

Sun, that odd light in the sky which has not been seen for many days, now pierces the hummocked cumulus surrounding the Mountain and shows something which crept in at the rain's back to take possession of the foothills' peaks. The great Presence to the east is not the only figure with a cloak of white around its shoulders, no. Among the piled batts of cloud, the upland crags display a garb of ermine and the evergreen boughs are bent earthward beneath a coronation cloth of new and deeply fallen snow. Silent and stealthy and determined, winter seeks to usurp the reigning season and to seize the valley for its fief. Benevolent or no, the despot holds the serfs in thrall.

Well, as floods go, this one ain't much, though I could hear the river pounding as I marched down the back of Dan's property in my gumboots, aiming for the riverbar. After four days of steady rain, yesterday she came a gullywasher, dumped 2.60" in the pluviometer and the weather department issued flood warnings for most rivers in the western part of the state. A right frog-strangler, as they say, so I headed down to the river via the back path, hoping to take pictures to keep my Georgia man amused. Oh yes, it was still raining, and hard. Got over the first crossing on a stick after getting mired in the slop of a little mudflow on the first try, but the second? Little side stream which normally wouldn't have wet the tops of your shoes was flowing muddy, fast, and a good eighteen inches deep, so that was where I dead-ended.

Undeterred, I went overland along the back of Ole Tom's Place, sweeping aside scotch broom which towered over my head, slipping in the wet fall of alder leaves, clambering through a boulder field covered with the local version of kudzu (sweet pea vines) until after almost getting my foot trapped between two hidden rocks, I finally reached the side of the railroad trestle which spans one of the Mountain's great rivers. Fought blackberries to get up the steep, short slope to the tracks, and cast a baleful eye toward the backside of the "No Trespassing" sign which had prevented me from taking that route in the first place.

Below the first part of the span (a wooden bridge with a walkway), the side stream had swelled and was now running as a second channel of the river, leaving islands of alder standing in the bends of its café-au-lait coloured braid. The main flow had broadened to encompass most but not all of its bed, roiling over any obstruction in its path, tumbling huge boulders beneath its surface with dull, growling sounds which could be felt as well as heard as they transmitted through the superstructure of the bridge. Waves mounted against the concrete footings, and the bank had been etched away into sharp cliffs on either end of the second metal span, a stretch which had collapsed in the Flood of '96 due to debris build-up against its upper side. Downed timber was building against the pilings, and in the center of the metal bridge, a Doug fir had fallen some time since Sunday when I'd last heard the train pass through.

As I stood there taking pictures, the rain was still coming down hard, and I had no intention of tackling the back route home again. Figured as long as I hadn't officially read that "No Trespassing" sign, I could be excused for coming up behind it now that my mission was complete.

Rings and chains form in my fingers as they fly in one of few needlearts not learned at my grandmother's knee, for she had no ken of the tatting shuttle nor its knotted threads and picot joins. In essence simple, in practice not so, I had failed many times to master the skill through written instruction and only when employed as a needlework consultant in my eighteenth year did I find a person who could teach me the art. Shoba Devi's patience with me is something for which I wish I could now thank the East Indian woman, for this simple pastime has rewarded me with many fancy laces and enjoyable hours through the years.

Tatting (or 'frivolity' as it is sometimes called) resembles crochet it first glance, however most pieces are made with two running threads, one each from ball and shuttle. It consists of simple half-hitches, much like macramé but made on a much smaller scale. It is in the making of the rings that the beginner is most likely to err, for with the thread looped around the hand, the shuttle passes over and under it to form the knots with a snapping motion which transfers the bend from the running thread to the looped thread so that the running thread becomes a core. One knot left in the running thread in error, and the ring made of half-hitches cannot be drawn up properly and closed.

As with many crafts which people find difficult to effect, tatting is on its way to becoming a lost art, so one year, I attempted to teach a class through a local fabric store. The venture was a smashing failure. Despite taking the hands of my pupils and forcing them to perform the stitches correctly and repeatedly, not one of the students was able to create a functional ring once I had walked away. For the longest time, I faulted myself as teacher although I have taught other needlearts with great success, and only after giving individual instruction to a friend and having her master tatting with relative ease was I finally satisfied that perhaps the fault was not entirely my own.

Today I sit watching the rain fall in torrents, my tatting shuttle slipping through the threads twined in my fingers as if empowered by some spirit of bygone days. A sadness falls with the grey rain, a sadness that I can find no other to whom to pass this fading skill. Under the shadow of technology, no one cares for frivolity these days.

Smoke from the neighbour's chimney drifts lazily across the fence, barely skimming the top wire on a downdraft and bent on a clandestine mission: the invasion of the crawlspace beneath my house. Its first incursion of the year always surprises me as it is drawn up by the furnace in the middle of the night and its faint odor is dispersed by the fan into my bedroom, but it is never long before I recognize it as the annual event from the higher note in its scent which tells of burnt junk mail. Dennis is adhering to the letter of the law which prohibits disposing of the universal plague in an outdoor fire.

With a state election only a few days away, the number of political fliers in our rural mailboxes has been growing daily and certainly among the neighbours here, quite pointlessly as well. I am not the only one who folds the glossy leaflets into a shape suitable for recycling without a glance at their content, and the only influence they might have on my decision-making process would most certainly be negative if I happened to notice the candidate they touted, based solely on the ecological insensitivity their propagandizing shows.

My sentiments run even deeper toward the canvassers who have not the common decency to provide me with a human being to curse when they wake me with a call. These I have made note of, and in every case, I have cast my vote against or not at all. Let me say this to those canned politicians who call me after bedtime: your rudeness is detrimental to your cause, your blindness to that fact shows that you are an idiot. If you wish to gain my vote, respect me and my privacy. Stay out of my bedroom, whether you intrude as a voice or a wisp of smoke from a neighbour's fire.

Weather in all its forms wields an undeniable reality which these last few days bears calling a confining rain. It has come down remorselessly, soaking its drench into the hillsides, ripening the soil to potential landslip, punishing the summer-dried earth for having discarded its memory so soon. The gutters are filling, the amœboid puddles merging, and the rivers are on the rise, prompting a flood watch in the lowlands. Still it is falling without trace of conscience, sheeting roadways with its burden which are too worn to shoo it to the swollen ditches, too wearied by its overstayed welcome and anxious to see it home.

If many of the author's perusals dwell on weather, there is good reason, for no other event touches us so regularly nor manipulates our lives with such persistent subtlety as it does. Whether outdoorsman or office worker, who does not wonder upon rising what the day's weather portends? Wind, rain, sleet or snow, it appoints us in our daily rounds surer than a clock, for the artifice of time is no more than a schedule over which we have some modicum of power. Yet we need not yield to it fully, for although we take shelter against its mood, there are comforts to be gained from its directives. Why else would a cup of hot chocolate sound so good right now?

Her paws twitch and the muscles of her back ripple, whiskers vibrate as if searching for the proper frequency on which to attune her other senses. The cat is asleep on my lap, dreaming of some pursuit, be it play or prey.

What do critters dream, I wonder? Do they experience the same random closing of synapses that humans do, those anomalies which generate piano-legged dogs and familiar faces which turn into telephones or pterodactyls? Do Skunk's sleep patrols range over fantastic shapes of furniture, or does she fancy flying after birds, soaring weightless in the sky as people sometimes dream? Are there sounds in the shadowed corners of her mind as well as images? Or tastes and smells which no human dreamer can access? The cat sleeping on my lap is clearly dreaming, and in my arrogance, I wonder: Does she dream me?

Her cheeks are pouched with a cat-smile and her mascara lines sweep upward in amusement at whatever whimsy now makes her tail tip quiver. She reaches her arm out, curls her paw around my arm and draws it closely to her face. Barely a whisper, a tiny purr shivers against my leg and I have found the answer to my question from a dream which has no words.