first snow

December 9, 2001

Today's Reading
The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen

This Year's Reading
2001 Book List

Photos

First snow

Birch tree at sunset in snow

Gas tanks and tanker at sunset

Wow, it really did snow! Somehow even when a few flurries started to fall last night while Nancy and I were out looking at the garish Christmas lights in East Providence I refused to believe we'd see any real accumulated snow. So when I looked out at the squirrel-vision tree and saw it covered with snow this morning, I was thrilled. It reminded me of Hokkaido. I could hear the voice of a woman stepping off the plane in Sapporo announcing "The last time I saw Hokkaido, it was white" with awe in her voice. The first snow always manages to be beautiful. Always.

Needless to say we did not sit outside in the bamboo grove at Cafe Zog this morning (yes we are in a Cafe Zog rut - or groove -it's way cheaper than Downcity or Rue de l'Espoir and the coffee is better). I am thinking of planting a bamboo grove in my backyard. Sort of a Cafe Zog North.

The antique shop across the street from Zog has so many red and white objects in the window that I am seized with Christmas spirit after all. Also drawn into the shop, which I guess is the intent of the window displays. Uh oh, they have LPs - Nancy will be here for hours. Alas the antique shop does not have a bathroom so we can't spend the entire afternoon there.

After a stop at The Coffee Exchange, it's off to the Brown Bookstore. Somehow we always end up at the Brown Bookstore.

The instant I walk in I spot a book with a picture of two red-crowned cranes and PETER MATTHIESSEN in all caps on the cover. I gasp. Nancy wants to know what I've seen. I pick up the book The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes and hand it to her. "Oh, is that tancho?" she asks. Exactly. These birds inspired my first complete sentence in Japanese "Tancho no bussu wa doko deska?" (Forgive awkward romaji phoneticization - the woman at the train station understood me and that's all that counts.) These birds drew me to taking a train across the breadth of Hokkaido and taking a bus from downtown Kushiro to the world famous Kushiro Marsh (referred to in Matthiessen's book as Kushiro Mire). I know I must purchase this book even before I notice that the illustrations of these gorgeous animals are by Robert Bateman. Oooh! Wow. This book is definitely coming home with me. This might even inspire me to search harder for the missing notebook from the Japan trip so I can finish the 1997 Hokkaido travel journal.

Now if I can just get an assistant with a cat toy to distract this birch tree and this tanker unloading at the Providence harbor gas tanks so I can get a good picture, maybe I won't have to give up photography after all. Well, maybe. The birch tree is recognizable as a birch tree but it's really hard to tell that the thing with gleaming towers in front of and to the right of the gas tanks is a tanker. It just looks like more gas-related buildings and not nearly as magical as it looked to the naked eye.