I love it any time people fill the street up and no room for cars it is a time for strangers to bump eachother unbarriered and everyone to put their legs into good motion and be together moving in big communication. Imagine the geese are people and the snow pavement and imagine what the geese might want to march for...

What a surprise this morning after a howling night to wake and find  a wintry coldest snow stormy kind of morning that swirled and drifted until dark. Every day now will be different until the leaves are grown to full green in April in the valleys higher up I think the winter will last until June.

Driving to work this morning I was thinking about my car among the stream of cars. It is the dirtiest, dented stained and it seems to grow smaller as pieces fall off.  It would fit right in at a junk yard but looks out of place anywhere I park like an undernourished feral cat. My father drove battered cars too. When my sister was sixteen and me a little younger we borrowed his car without permission. The muffler fell off.  We put it in the back seat and brought it home. When my parents went off for a semester to England on a teaching exchange my father left me his car to use. I was a single Mom then with three children. The car was an old Toyota Tercel with a broken starter mechanism. I knew every hill in the area for the necessary rolling jump start it needed. Sometime the children would push. Sometimes I feel a little ashamed, cars seem to reflect ones status like everything else, and my car lives among many big shiny new ones. Then I think of my father and his rusted Subaru that he would never fill with more than $5. of gas because he didn't want a full tank of gas to go to waste if the car died. I love that the roof of my car becomes a small pond when it rains and it is low enough to use as a writing surface when I need to write. It would feel at home next to my father's car. I cried all the way to work and I loved the tears that were my father's.

The body that my body has been loving through the winter was away for awhile (and another two days). I've been missing flesh on flesh.

I have been tagged by Owais on this and invite others to join in and tag themselves!

I like to skin animals it's more than like, it is a visceral love for the whole process. Women are good skinners being delicate fingered and patient.

I twist my hair (mostly when I'm driving the car). It is the hair twisting I did as a child one hand was always on my head.

I am always hopping up and down meaning never sitting still for long a gopher/go-fer girl

I can stick (with glee) my hands into things that people find repulsive but animals find fascinating.

One thing that I can barely stand is the noise that tires make on the highway but I like the sound of studded tired rolling to a stop.

(this photo was taken in a Nepalese shop window in Carbondale, Co. I couldn't help it!)

This valley has a string of small towns running from the Interstate along the Roaring Fork River to Aspen where it rises to a winter closed pass. The first town sliced by the Colorado River and the highway contains all the run-off  people extra pavement even the mountains seem to shake themselves free leaving scattered box stores where the slopes begin to level out.
This morning I drove through the scarred Valley where the snow is beginning to recede. Everything looked ugly. I was thinking that along with this new tattooed tail I'd gotten a troll splinter in my eye. I stopped at the post office. I pick up my mail about once a month. It feels like I am letting it out of jail when I turn the key and open the cell door. Then a box! From Jeannie The worn stuffed platypus! And I realized it's no troll splinter in my eye. Everything really is ugly here. Everything but the platypus. I lit a stick of Jeannie's incense in the car and drove back into the mountains. Thursday and Friday are my week end. I had a few afternoon hours to while away before going to see Ken Rudin, NPR's political adviser, give an informal talk. I decided to take the dogs on a ski up Independence Pass. I decided not to change clothes I was too cold to think of undressing even if it meant dressing more warmly. I was wearing a woolly dress and woolly tights. We skied up into a light falling snow. The dogs dropped off the trail  down a steep embankment barking fiercely. I looked way down and there was a huge porcupine nibbling bark from a low scrub oak tree. It was too steep and tangly to ski down so I took off my skis and slid and punched my way down to the dogs, The porcupine was safe high from the dogs but eye ball level to me. He winced at every bark but posed quite sweetly for my camera.
I was glad of the wooly tights climbing scrambling back up they stuck to the snow when everything else left me sliding back down. I skiied for almost two hours. It is the hardest thing every time to turn around. The ski back was biting cold. I wrapped my scarf against my mouth and was happy to smell when it grew damp from my breath that it was wool too. Wet wool is a good smell to smell when you're cold  And then what a wonderful talk it was about life on the campaign trail there were still balls of snow on my legs reminding me of the other kinds of trails. I met Dawn after the talk for a little dinner. She had been at a yoga class after work. We ate at the Bistro above the bookstore. There was a round table full up with great women eating who had been to see Ken Rudin too. We both fell in love with them. Why didn't we stay hmmmmm. I gave Dawn a ride home in my ratty  little car she smelled the incense from Jeannie's package.

This is normal in my balance of life. I love that everyone has a different view of normal and I love how the perceptions can change. We are so adaptable.

I don't think I could keep one single interest by itself for more than a moment. My interests love to play with eachother tease and tangle and combine forces and become stronger than me and  one alone. I have trouble keeping up sometimes. It is also interesting to mix strange ones together and see what happens.

Me and beyond that my children although I'd not want to call it a project.

I'm not sure that one can hold anything else or any other body as a constant. It wouldn't take them into account. They can wither or grow away as they will. That leaves the self as an only constant and what the self can find. I like to think how Hamlet thought and what an unconstant was he! "Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love."

The schools are closed today. The pieces of ground that appeared last week are buried again.

This week I bought an old bike for touring.

I think I'm not so much a growing person as a cycling back person so the renaissance repeats. Each time I realize I already knew what I am learning, only the tracks are worn in so the knowing is settled deeper into the ground.

What a silly simple thing to have suddenely realized how much I love living in my body. It has been filled with a cold for a few days. My home place is full of snot and queazy making stomach juices. It's unsettling. I try and build a skin layer outside me an extension of the one too phlem filled to retreat into. It's not thick enough.
I love living in this body. I love its hungers and how it moves. I love its worn threadbare easy comfort and its deep well of fortitude.

These are the kind of questions I never feel the need to ponder. Hmmmm

 I think it is part of being human to loosen some rules up every day. It is a good practice for figuring life out to be undoing things as much as doing them.

Ask Celka about the time we camped out on Pitch-Off Mountain just the two of us

When one's heart breaks it feels like all the love leaks out. I think I've learned that there is an infinite amount of love to fill it back up. So the heart can crack and spill out love all it wants.

I would like to have watched another year of everything changing. I sort of want to have done less.

This is a changing time. The nights are still dropping cold into a single digit. I wish I had feathers. I feel like I've run out of winter fuel. I shiver as soon as the sun dips away. Yesterday after work I went to the local book store to warm up before meeting a friend for dinner. I found a book "Life in the Cold" on winter ecology. I am reading the chapters about birds. I have bird magnets in my eyes, but I didn't know that most of the over wintering birds even the corvids keep warm when not in flight by shivering they shiver all night they shiver during storms. Now I won't mind the rest of the cold season. I can practice being a bird. Or tree.

 Thinking that I am living in the earth. Not living on the earth.

Yesterday I went skiing with a friend after a random fluke phone call of let's meet if the road's not too washed out, neither of us wanting any more of this snow, grown crusted and roughed by the sun and still so deep. But we wanted something, and left everything else from the day undone. We skied up a long north sloped mountainside the kind where winter lasts longest. It cast it's spell. We forgot about the loosened warm ground in the valley and our hunger for walking over rocks for open water,  my own hunger for time in the raw places above tree line. I love that those places are buried impenetrable for half the year and the other half as naked and vulnerable as land can be. The missing keeps welling up-the need to settle myself softly into that fierce still cold buried high land.

I am caretaking two horses this week. They have a foot fungus from standing in spring muck. I need to clean out their feet every day and rub in ointment and break the ice off their water tanks carry loads of hay and shovel loads of manure. I am not a horse person. I like their huge mass. I can't imagine riding holding on a back where only a lucky mountin lion might naturally be. I wish they were goats.

I think it happens around the time we become weaned.

When I was readying myself to ski in the forest service parking lot I tossed Sticky a carob malted milk ball to keep him nearby away from the road. He took it to the top of the snow bank, dropped it and chased it as it rolled down the sun crusted snow. He did this over and over sometimes  digging it out when it rolled into a sunken footprint. Then we skied. The snow is disintegrating but still deep. Caverns are opening up below buried dead wood and the low spread branches of conifers. Sometimes I fall through and the snow feels like wet cement. Small slope angles change the sunlight's effect. North is powder South is slush and East and West are glazed. In the warmer places the dogs sink in to their necks as if the snow is practicing being water again. The beavers have been out chewed through the ice to nibble something fresh grown. The snow on the lower ponds has melted into a green blue slurry. Sticky walks out and lies down in it. If I'd been more dog I would have done it too. I ski onto the cabin roof  if Sticky were a skier he would have skied off the roof too. We delight in play. Sticky likes to sneak up behind people he knows and bite them in the butt. Gnomi and Sticky both meander preferring to follow coyote tracks. We spend the whole day off trail. The dogs lead. They find a shallow buried stash of sinewy bones. Gnomi pulls up a pelvis and chews the cancellous marrow bone of the iliac crest. Sticky gets the skull more for the perfume than a snack he rubs his neck along the double strand of molars. At night  when I'm writing in bed Sticky's head is on the pillow and one rough padded paw drapes across my neck. Gnomi is the worker dog. She watches the whole world so I can be watching the sky for birds.I am a good human. I follow them around and come when they call me. I share all my food. Sticky likes almonds, crystallized ginger and figs. Gnomi is a dog food purist. She sleeps at my feet. She must know that's where the goblins would come from.

Last night Dawn and I went to a slide show forum put on by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic about the future of the Arctic environment.  Paul Nicklen a Baffin Island native National Geographic photographer talked his way through the most amazing photographs with stories about being fed fresh caught penguins by a female 12 foot long leopard seal. He reminded me of Morgan Spurlock in his delightful grounded gush of character. The environmental editor from the NY Times lead the panel. The other two members were a bearded Swiss Ice Biologist who has lived and worked in the Arctic for 30 years and an Inuit woman who spoke with such grace and eloquence it made our hearts almost burst open.  Arundhati Roy of the Hyperboreal. We sat spell bound and open pored and didn't want it to end. It's snowing again this morning.

I love to be alone on Sundays. It was odd and windy today rain squalls blew in between a gusty sunshine. By the afternoon the wind settled down with a cold thick snow and I left for a film screening with an exra hour to ski. It wasn't quite long enough but good and full with exploring Maroon Creek's open water and mallards. Alone doesn't mean without ducks.

I think a gracefully not fitting in. So not breaking down walls but finding doors and windows to open and letting mice gnaw holes and rust eat what mice can't.