Bigger and Brighter and Whiter

...or wider, whichever. It's March, nearly mid-March, and here I sit in State College, PA, looking at snow. Inches and inches of snow. (Well, okay, maybe only inches.) While I typically do not come off like a big rube when travelling, it is hard not to ooh and ahh and say, "Snow!" every time I walk outside.

I knew it would be this way, so when I left Austin I had all my layers on (the better to carry them), but was quickly shedding them like Heidi on my way down the concourse. It amused me that, the colder it got along the way, the greater the unprotected distance on the tarmac we had to walk.

I'm here to staff the American Comparative Literature Association conference. Right now I'm seated at the membership table, checking people's names against a printout generated by FileMaker and telling them whether they need to renew their memberships. Happily I got my wireless to work, so I have something to do when I'm not helping scholars who speak, read and write multiple languages. (And not walking over to the window to look outside and be blinded by the s-n-o-w. I just want to go outside and play in it... maybe later. The snow is supposed to be here as long as I will be.)

At home, flowers are already exploding... here, if they are peeping out I haven't seen them yet. I imagine they might be, or might be out by the 20th, but maybe not. Everything is still a little brown and grey and dry here, but in a different way from home. Flying over, I said ooh and ahh a lot, not only at snow, but at the mountains; I love looking out of the plane window in any case, (I love the shapes plowed fields and winding streets and baseball diamonds make) but I really love it when I see things that aren't the general western Gulf coast or Texas/Midwest corridor, coastlines and mountains especially. (I also love flying over thunderheads, but we didn't see any of those.)

Comparative Literature is interesting, but I don't have the spleen for it -- more precisely, I am too lazy to learn so many languages to any degree that would be of use in this field. Even learning enough Spanish to, say, wholly appreciate Isabel Allende, would take years.

I thought the sun was out, but what I see is just the snow reflected on the window behind the closed curtains. It's still snowing. I never get to say those words: It's. Still. Snowing.

Posted on March 11, 2005 to pure drivel

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