Nothing Here Worth Your Life (Sacrificed on the Altar of Tech) / Wind / An End to Innocence (Toys of Christmas Past and Traditional Tibet)

It’s a Sunday afternoon in New England just three days before Christmas -- Ma’s making the roast in the kitchen range, also tapioca pudding so when Sister Nin comes in from outdoors with the shovel she’s been wielding in the blizzard there are cold waves of snowy air mixing with the heat steams of tapioca over the stove and in my mouth I can taste whipped cream cold from the icebox on the hot pudding tonight.

While Ma cooks she also sits at the round kitchen table reading the “Boston American” -- Pa’s in the parlor playing the Gospel Singers of Sunday cigarsmoke funnies time -- I’m getting ready to take my big blizzard walk into the Massachusetts Shroud begins just down the end of dirt road Phebe Avenue, I’m rummaging in the closet for my hockey stick which will be my walking-stick and feeling-stick to find where puddles and creeklets have disappeared under two feet of snow this day.

.

I start out, down the porch steps, overshoes, woolcap, coat, corduroy pants, mittens -- There are Christmas wreaths in all the windows of sweet Phebe—No sign of G. J. or Billy with the kids sliding on the park slope, no sign of them on their porch except G. J.’s sister in her coat all wrapped communing with the plicking fall of vast snows in a silence all her own, girl-like, watching it pile on the porch rail, the little rills, sadnesses, mysteries -- She waves -- I plod down off our Sis-shoveled walk into Mrs. Quinn’s unshoveled walk where the going is deep, profound, happy -- No shoveled walks all the way to Billy’s where bigbrother sixfoot Jack has worked in muffler with pink cheeks and white teeth, laughing -- Black birds in the black cherry tree, and in the new snow breadcrumbs, bird tweak tracks, a little dot of kitty yellow, a star blob of plopsnow ball against Old MacArthur’s wreathy front door -- O the clean porches of New England in the holy dry snow that’s drifting across new painted planks to pile in corners over rubber doormats, sleds, overshoes -- The steam in the windows, the frost, the faces looking out -- And over the sandbank now and down on semi-snow-plowed Phebe comes the great fwoosh of hard stormwind from the river cracking leafless shrubs in stick-unison, throwing swirls of coldsifted powder, pure, the freezing freshness everywhere, the sand frozen solid underneath -- ...