Winter Weather January 29, 2022 noon

Connecting with my previous post about ways to pull yourself out of the ditch of despair: Twenty years ago, when I was injured in a fall, and in a depression over family matters, I joined a gym. I had a couple of goals in mind. For one thing, I wanted to get in shape, get fit. For decades, I had devoted myself to my work and my parenthood, and now I was free and wanted to find myself lost under the fat of a sedentary lifestyle. Also, I thought I would look for a romantic partner. Actually I wrote a funny story about this whole endeavor called FIT. I have written dozens of short stories over the years, but only two of them were humorous and Fit was one. Did it work? Well, yes and no. I did get fit, and I was so healthy and strong that I joined a club I had read about in the Courier Post section on entertainment and activities - The Outdoor Club of South Jersey. At that time, but no longer, they had a dating group, an Outdoor Singles group. My story was built around my first hike with the Outdoor Club on the coldest day of the year when it was 10 degrees and going down and there were all kinds of warnings about the cheeks on your face freezing off if you went outside. I went to a sports outfitter and got Hiking boots, Under Armour and lots of advice from a store clerk who correctly saw me as someone like his old mom and didn't want me to get lost in the forest or have my cheeks frozen off.

To this day, when I look back on that first hike, I am astonished at my audacity! I drove into the pine woods on a pitch black night when the moon had not yet arisen, and down meanandering roads until I saw a man putting up a sign in the dirt for hikers to park. He was a character out of a horror movie in his own right, an intiidating Blkans type, like a surly castle servant for Count Vlad. All was well, however, a half dozen other hikers showed up and we hiked in the silvery moonlight in the frozen forest and had a campfire and shared the food we brought. Earlier when I had phoned, the hike leader had mentioned how variable the weather was in the pines and I came to hear that warning many times over the next ten years when I hiked with the group. The warning was to not be deterred by rain forecasts or snow predictions because you could have flooding in one area and light showers in another, and the same for snow.

Today is a perfect example of that phenomena. Here in my little town about a mile from the Delaware River, we had only two inches of snow whereas in the Villas, where my cousin lives, about 60 miles from here, they had over a foot and her front door is snowed in. My friend in the pines, in Shamong had nearly a foot, as did my sister in Clarksboro, about 20 minutes drive south of here. We do have quite a blow going on, however. The wind is rattling the windows and pitching great handfuls of snow at the house while gusts of wind shake the burdened branches of all my evergreens and fling great cakes and pies of snow off onto the ground.

If we haven't met before, so you wouldn't know this but my little humble bungalow is in a grove of more than two dozen trees, half of them deciduous and more than 50 years old, and the other half evergreen. For many years, my daughter and I bought Christmas trees with root balls and planted them in the yard after Christmas. They all mostly survived so we have those, plus one we brought home in a coffee cup from a vacation in Williamsburg, Va., which is now three stories tall and there is a Norfolk Pine that I adopted when it was knee high which is now also towering about three or four storries tall. As my neighbors cut down their trees and turned our town into a shadeless desert, my little yard became more and more of a sanctuary to the evacuated squirrels and birds. I have so many evergreens that the views out of most of my windows are still green in mid winter. Although the view out my north facing bedroom corner window is into the bare beseeching branches of an old oak. Through those branches every night, go sailing diamond and ruby studded bits of jewelry which are what the airplanes look like on their way to Philadelphia's International Airport, as I am in their flight path. It is as though someone had a treasure box of bejewed costume jewelry and was stone skipping them through the sky, one every fifteen minutes.

That brings me to my UFO sighting. In the middle of the week, when I was looking out the window as I do every night when I put down my book and turn out the lights, I saw a large round glowing light in the high sky, above the flight path of the airplanes. It was the size of a full moon but it wasn't in the right place for the moon. I went into the living room and looked on my laptop to see if we had a special moon, and saw we had a waning crescent moon night, not a full moon, yet there was the large glowing orb which seemed to be cut in half as though half a circle with a reflection of itself beneath it. Well, whatever it was, I was tired and I went to sleep.

Whether or not we have been visited by other entities from other planets is an open question to me. I have watched lots of UFO shows and find them inevitably a bit "conspiracy nutty" a kind of willful belief like a child's belief in Santa Claus or a religious zealot's belief in God and the bible. Nonetheless, I find it improbable that in the vast universe we should be the only planet with life forms, and also that there should be no other life forms that are more advanced than we are. I didn't know until recently that the majority of alleged UFO visitations such as Roswell, have been over nuclear weapons facilities, and a recent show made the presumption that they may be watching our nuclear weapons development to make sure we don't become interstellar destructive. Just as a neighbor might watch another neighbor who devolves from gun collector into gun range creator and armed militia leader.

It all seems plausible to me. I am afraid of our penchant for developing weapons of mass destruction that can go far distances as well. Every day, we see on the news the massing of forces and weapons along the border with Ukraine by the Russians and it frightens me with its siilaries to the situation just before World War II, but just as history may repeat itself somewhat, things are never exactly the same, and it may be that this time, we can use refined forms of negotiation and balances of power to resolve this aggression without starting another global catastrophe. How crazy and greedy is Putin?

Oh well, that is far far away from the other theme, the snow falling upon our world, the white visitors from heaven called snowflakes. Snow crystals are worthy of a blog post all on their own, but I am not well informed enough and also too tired of typing to tackle it.

Happy Winter to all those of you who, like me, enjoy the winter and the snow! Jo Ann