Feb. 25. Clear, cold, and windy. Thermometer at 7° at 7.30 A. M. Air filled with dust blowing over the fields. Feel the cold about as much as when it was below zero a month ago. Pretty good skating.

Journal of a Sabbatical

February 25, 1999

nor'easter

Now this is a weird compulsion. There wasn't really very much snow here so I drove toward it. I stood there on the beach feeling the wind blow hard from the northeast. Snow and sand in alternating ripples. Wind definitely out of the northeast. Two gulls dismembering a crab. Since when do gulls share the bounty? Maybe grebes out there by Emerson rocks or maybe just whitecaps - snow blowing too hard to see. Long walk into the wind. Easier going back. Back in the car, listen to weather forecast, load up another roll of film, go back out. Visibility declining. Not a lot of bird sightings today.

I spotted two horned larks in the parking lot at Salisbury Beach. Where are there 20 closest friends? And what is it they like about parking lots? The wind doesn't seem to bother them.

Weird dreams last night:

1. I had to cook dinner for Kate and her Dad, Jim, in my kitchen. I was making spaghetti sauce and he announced he did not want spaghetti with meatball sauce. He wanted a baked noodle casserole. Somehow I had to bake the meatballs in my toaster oven in little white cereal bowls with handles on them (hmm, I remember those bowls from when I was a kid). And the meatballs were still too mushy. And he wanted a bread crumb crust over them.

2. I was in Starbucks and had just read about a brutal murder committed in Andover. I kept trying to get people's attention to let them know how terrible it was and they all kept telling me those things don't happen here. I was jumping up waving the newspaper.

3. I was driving along a beautiful country road and spotted some ducks in a field by a big beautiful house. A servant came out of the house and played some chimes that were all in a line and the ducks lined up in a perfect line and marched in time to the chime into the house. As I was watching them through my binoculars, the owners of the house came out and shooed me away. They didn't want me watching their ducks marching. The owners were Henry Kissinger and a very tall blonde woman.

Gotta stop reading the newspaper too close to bedtime.