First snow

The storm that blew through yesterday laid upon the mountains finally their first blanket of snow. From the hilltop here, you can see rock falls and outcroppings jutting still black through the fresh white dusting on the dormant volcano. From here you can not tell if the snow on the mountain is two inches or two feet thick.

The sun in Fall is so bright for lacking warmth. It brilliantly etches trees, mountains, squinting from light flat and harsh. How can the sun be so cold? In spring or late summer it is softer, yet so full and warm. It must be the way light polarizes as it bends and bounces through the whisper thin skin of air to fall upon the mountains.

The twins sit at the table in the trailer on this Saturday morning. I worry that when the house is finished in a month and they have their own room that I will be deprived of this closeness of hearing them think aloud to each other only five feet away from the couch where I write, of having them warble like wrens about anything and everything and nothing at all.

Right after eggs K.C. was strumming a rubber band and asked if a musical instrument could be made of rubber bands. I had a new pair of sneakers still in the box, we got the box and stretched the rubber band over the opening. I explained frequency. Within a few minutes, she was playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” as if on a guitar. I told her it was now an instrument, and we could even mark the notes, “A through G” on the side of the box.

A thirty foot travel trailer is not always crowded, even when filled.

My second small pot of coffee is done, and I look at news of Oregon and the world: Cheney/Bush attempt to derail real action on global warming; Portland doused in the rainiest day of 2007 (the storm that whitened my mountains); Cal versus Oregon; drug free zones; truck crashes.

We are so much a part of it and so far apart from it, a day at a time in the trailer on the hill at the foot of the mountains with their first frosting of snow.