A sunny day, something of a miracle following days of intermittent freezing rain. The other evening rain fell on our deeply frozen world while we were at work, covering the sidewalk and parking lot in ice. Jennie somehow managed to get to the van, brought it close to our building, and hauled our bags to it without falling. I realized my crutches would slip on the ice so, having left my ice tips at home, I crawled on all fours to the van. Now, the strengthening February sun throws deep, blue tinged, shadows across the landscape as I watch from the safety of the studio.
I am listening to music by Ernest Bloch, appropriate for Friday I suppose. Last night I listened to Mahler who was also Jewish. 
Mahler is not one of my favorite composers, although like Beethoven, he has grown on me as I have aged. Bloch, on the other hand, has long felt like a close and intimate friend.
I am trying to recover from an asthma flair triggered by the every present cigarette smoke in Spain. Coming home to frigid 
conditions did not help. I am learning the intersection between Post-Polio and asthma, and finding the space challenging. Both feature fatigue, and together…. well. Of course, there is also the issue of finding breathing difficult, an alarming experience at best, and perhaps more so for those of us who were in the iron lung.
We are still in deep winter, the snow pack somehow surviving our repeated bouts of rain. Our New England winter fields and woods are truly beautiful, still very much as Robert Frost painted them in his poetry. Here and there in the forest one comes across a birch tree bent almost to the ground by the weight of accumulated snow and ice, looking so fragile one becomes reticent to swing on it least it break.
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