Step this way

The blue hue in the clouds promise that this snow won’t last all day, still the snow falls. This snow is beautiful. It is light and without the wind, it isn’t drifting. I can live with this kind of snow.

Yesterday, we made a pilgrimage to Costco. I caught up with Chrissy in one of the aisles in the center of the store. Our cart was shoved to one side next to the granola bars. People with their carts waited patiently to go by us and the other people in the same aisle. For an instant, I had a need to get away from any bit of a crowd. I left Chrissy where she stood and pushed the cart to the end of the aisle. When I parked it, I turned back around to maintain a visual check on her progress. It was then that I realized how few people were actually in the aisle. There were only three or four shoppers and a couple of carts. I quickly did a 360 view of the people around me. There were no people in the aisles around me. I was 30 feet from the nearest person. I breathed a sigh of relief and laughed to myself.

This never happened while in Japan. When we went shopping in Japan, Costco was the worst. Costco felt like a narrow Alaskan creek packed with spawning salmon. It was all-full of bumping and jostling. Occasionally, one person would break against the flow heading in the opposite direction disrupting the flow of the mass. I would never be able to take a full step in any direction. When I would make it out of the aisle to the end where I could find a breath, a constant flow of shoppers would trek by. Even the areas I could catch a breath, weren’t all mine.

Now, through the view of my window, I am beginning to make out the snow hanging on the wire fence a quarter mile away. The fence marks the boundary between our neighbor’s field and an alfalfa field. I haven’t been able to see that field for the last three weeks. A thick fog has sat heavy on us for that length of time. It flocked all the trees and brambles in the yard. Clumps of grass were tufts of white against an earth backdrop. Today, a couple of inches cover the ground and the blue is creeping through the clouds. It is nice to catch a breath on a beautiful day.