"I blinked my way home through the wind today...
...with leanings and sneezes and cold through my clothes."
-Lauren FesteThe last few nights I have been awakened long before my alarm by the conviction that my panes will be blown out of my windows and onto my bedroom floor. The windswept look, while not necessarily fashionable, is certainly everywhere to be seen. My calves are only just adapting to the extra work involved in maintaining a posture at right angles with the pavement.
It has been rather blustery here.
It was nearly a week ago today that I feared for my life on the way to work. The setting is dark. There is no one on the street (because most sane people are cozy in their houses at 5:25 am), and it is cold outside. It had snowed enough the day before to last through the night. The continued cold and nocturnal precipitation had layered a dangerous sheet of ice over the crunchy snow so that when I placed my foot on the top step I found, for the first time, that our handrail is intended as a stabilizing feature, and not merely a leaning post. What is generally a three minute walk was drawn out to ten, as I gingerly slid from step to step with a growing certainty of an immanent fall which would cause me to break my wrist. Fortunately, however, I made it to work with nothing worse than a mark in the tardy column in my personnel file.
