Written on a snowy Sunday morning in January

I love these snowy Sunday mornings. Everything is so quiet, wrapped up in a blanket. The occasional car driving by or the scraping of shovels on the pavement are the only noises coming up from the street, and the building seems to still be asleep. I woke up at 7am; it was still very dark outside. It made me suspect that my clock wasn't working correctly. When I got up to double check the time with the clock in the living room, my suspicions were allayed, but it became painfully obvious that the sun was not going to make an appearance today.

I have made myself a breakfast of oatmeal and hot chocolate, a holdover from my childhood, when on snowy days like this one, my brother and sisters and I would pile on all our winter gear and help my father shovel the front walk and driveway. I wish that I had realized then that we weren't just doing a job, but we were making memories and traditions. We would all come in, usually sopping wet from snowball fights or sledding down the steep driveway, clomp down to the basement in our snow boots, where we would shed our wet clothes, hang everything up to dry, and then scurry up to the warm kitchen for our hot breakfast. (If it was a weekday, we would have already sat listening to Bob Steele on WTIC AM, hoping for a snow day. It is funny to remember how we would hold our breaths as he finished the towns beginning with "M"s and started through the "N"s. [Those kids in Litchfield County ALWAYS got the most snow days.])

Last night, my friend DM invited me to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with her at the movie theater in Harvard Square, and then we grabbed some supper over at Cambridge 1 on Church Street, where we deconstructed the film.(Anyone else who has seen it, was young Daisy's voice dubbed at the beginning of the film? It seemed not quite right.) From our table, we could see through the back window to the old cemetery; it looked beautiful in the light from the street as it became further covered in snow.

Walking back up Brattle Street to where I had parked my car, we couldn't get over how quiet Harvard Square was on a Saturday night. So much has changed in that area since I first moved to Boston. Stores have come and gone (the amount of time I spent in that HMV was ridiculous) and soon mainstays like Crate and Barrel and Out of Town News will be leaving. It is rather sad, but, as they said in the movie, "nothing lasts."