White Wake Up

I wake up to winter. Not the dull brown of the badlands of eastern Colorado in January, or the rust still-quite of a North Carolina forest in February. No, winter. The things one sees on postcards and calendars or thinks of when Colorado is mentioned; towering peaks and snow. Just a few inches, grass still peeks above the powder in some places, but after a month without it, it's a lovely sight to behold.

It's cold out; single digits, fighting to get into the teens on the fahrenheit scale. The cold sun makes the snow glimmer like a blanket of diamonds. Mercifully, there's no wind. Wind would be cruel. It is enough to justify my parka, the one I just purchased not too long ago, the one that's too hot if it's much more than twenty-five degrees out. Looking up at Pendleton and then over to my personal Kilimanjaro, I find myself thinking the day has certain Himalayan motif, which I use as justification for brewing lapsang souchong for my morning tea.

Chakchouka is on the menu for breakfast, something spicy and north African. A big pot of three bean, two meat, Jamaican jerk style chili burbles in the crockpot. Both meals in perfect context for a cold winter's day. Sabina makes us mochas as a pre-breakfast drink. We speak on smacking one of the coffeehouses, down valley a little later.

Even tough it's the last day of Christmas Market, with the cold and snow, I don't suspect there'll be much in the way of crowds. When it snows, the down below meteorologist speak in doomsday tongues and only the bravest-and/or stupidest-of the snowbums brave the Road. Want to hear a loco merchant rant? Mention a metroplex meteorologist foretelling snow in our Sahel.

Prophecy does speak of a few more shots of snow. Even though flatlanders might stay out of the mountains if even a flake is mentioned, up here, amongst the locos, there is a collective sigh of relief. Hopeful prayers that this might be a beginning. It's winter, after all, and it should at least attempt to look like it.