When we left San Francisco for the Sierra foothills, I expected the occasional dusting of snow. Temperatures that only rarely, if ever, dipped into the low 30s F. That’s what the internet led me to believe anyway. Of course, we’ve gotten enough snow already that I felt compelled to buy a set of snow cables for our car.
Living in snow again has been one weird déjà vu moment after another. I grew up in New Jersey, went to college in Boston and Ithaca (upstate NY). I know snow. Just before my last winter in Ithaca, I lost my snowproof, super-insulated Timberlands in an apartment move and couldn’t afford to buy new ones.
If you want to ever know why I hightailed it out to California, there’s your answer. A serious upstate winter without decent boots.
For the last 37 years of my life, I have pretty much avoided snow. But here I am again, pulling on waffle-soled boots and trying not to slip on icy surfaces.
For all that, the beauty and romance of snow and snow falling and how it settles and clings to branches, how very silent it is… My haiku soul is on fire. I think often of one of Shiki’s sickbed haiku (tr. Burton Watson):
Open the shoji-- let me get a good look at this Ueno snow!
Not because I am in a sickbed (though I’ve been there, too) but because of how well this haiku captures my inner longing for the beauty of snow, how its brightness outside penetrates dim interiors in every sense imaginable.
Anyway, here are this week’s seven haiku, and where they got mailed to.
haiku 20221212 >> Coimbra, Portugal
weather report the tinny morse code from the rain spout
haiku 20221213 >> Cedar Ridge, CA USA
flashing silver among the pine needles candy bar wrapper
haiku 20221214 >> London, United Kingdom
cedar branches drooping with snow morning moon
haiku 20221215 >> Berlin, Germany
decades without snow I have to learn how to walk again
haiku 20221216 >> Kentfield, CA USA
retirement planning my money and days in a race to the finish
haiku 20221217 >> Portland, OR USA
paw prints dotting the fresh snow -- someone else's cat
haiku 20221218 >> Austin, TX USA
world cup final in all of france not one fingernail remains
Seven days, seven haiku. Same number of games a national team must play to win the FIFA World Cup. Oh what will I do without World Cup matches to look forward to? Write some more haiku, I guess, and sweep snow off the steps…
And don’t forget, if you want me to mail you one of my haiku postcards, all you gotta do is ask.
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