The world is hurtling forward, while we sit like a wheelbarrow in the middle of the sidewalk, a project that was interrupted and now waits, disregarded by the guilty party, shamed by the passersby.

A bluebird was in the yard today.  I don't know what she was thinking.  Lately, the February sun shines with promise and the temperatures are up, but it's not nearly time for spring migration.  Whether she's a loitering left-behind from fall or an early bird, jumping the gun on getting south fast, I can only guess.  And whatever the reason for her presence is, I am grateful.  Her coat was drab and mothy, as if she were too harried to care much about her looks.  Still, the sky blue hem on her wings was unmistakeable against the wash of brown branches now free of snow.  She sat for a while on a small arm of our cherry tree.  Having become so accustomed to the twitchy flitting and restless antics of the juncos and chick-a-dees, I felt pleasantly refreshed and relaxed as I watched the bluebird.  It was a kind of meditation for me.  There she was, a blue dot in the tree, a living dot, a warm dot, surviving, without ostensible anxiety or worry.  Maybe there was no food nearby, but she would find some not far away.  Or she wouldn't maybe.  The conclusion would come to her.  And not the other way around. 
     Birds are an inspiration.

Back in second grade, Harvey and I made a list of the places we loved best.  At the top of mine was the library.  I couldn't imagine a better life than one that offered story time at all hours of the day.  His favorite spot was my dinner table.  He wasn't used to sit-down meals, and he said he liked that we always had edectible appetizers.  That's how it was written on the paper: "edectible," which was a hybrid of "edible" and "delectable" I think.  My mom kept the list when she found it in my backpack that night, and we still have it.  Fortunately, she doesn't know that eight years later, Harvey tried kissing me in the library.  Our teenage angst had dominated a rather uneventful Friday night and driven us through the lower level windows, cracking a pane of glass when the latch slipped and the window fell.  It made us nervous, and we regretted our rash decision, but I laughed and pressed into the gloom of the vacated basement.  Harvey followed me.  We ate cookies from the refrigerator and crawled into the children's nook.  I took off my shoes, and Harvey said the blue of my toenail polish matched my eyes.  The insinuation of his comment made me uncomfortable, so I turned away and stared at the wall.  He threw a pillow at my head and when I pulled it off he was inches from me.  I jumped up.  "Harvey."
"I thought you said nothing could go wrong in the library."
"What?" I said.
"You used to say that the library was a magic place that allowed only good things to happen."
"Harvey."
"You said it."  His eyes looked like full clouds just before a good rain.
"Have a cookie," I said, offering him the sleeve of Oreos.
That made him mad.  He got up and clambered back out the window.  I didn't want to follow him, so I waited and waited until I fell asleep on the cushions.  It was after midnight when Mom called.  In the car, she asked where Harvey was.  "At home, probably," I said. 
"Weren't you with him?"  She seemed amused.  "Don't get that boy into any more trouble.  He's got a tough enough life as it is."  What she meant was that he wasn't popular. 
"Everyone at school thinks he's hot," I said.  "You should see him without a shirt on."
"Ali."  She grimaced, and we didn't talk about it again.

When I decided to stay in Boston and search for jobs, I began the hunt with my crosshairs locked on big bloated publishing houses.  After a few quiet days, I broadened the scope to include smaller publishing houses.  It didn't take long before I was sleeplessly stalking every company, American or otherwise, that had hired an editor in the past two centuries, begging them to let me in for an interview and a bowl of soup.  Eventually, I surrendered and sent my application to a restaurant named Vlora that was looking for a hostess.  During the interview I could have guessed that the situation wouldn't work out.  Pop music rocketed out of the loud speakers, and blue lights rose up from the floor like beacons beckoning from Dante's icy canto.  "Do you have lots of clothes?" Aldo, the owner, asked me.  I nodded, but truthfully I was living out of a carry-on suitcase.  "You need to dress nice.  No blue jeans."  He frowned at my jeans.
        I returned the following day for training.  "Nice outfit," Aldo said, nodding approvingly.  I didn't tell him that I had bought the dress, tights, and flats after our interview the day before.  My training included directions on how to properly wipe menu covers and how to stand appropriately by the door.  (Standing etiquette discourages pocketed hands.)
        As soon as I was home, I sent Aldo an email that said I appreciated the generous offer to work at his prominent restaurant, but I didn't think it was a good fit for me.  "There are more important things than money," I told Hannah.
        "Obviously," she said.  "You had a job and you quit."

Blocking the door, stood a large man.  His stature was so huge that only tiny slivers of outside light could slip into the hut.  When he shuffled forward, I noticed that he wore a long trenchcoat which rippled against his sides like eel's flanks.  He made his way to a carved table, one that seemed to have materialized, and set down a sack.  Looking over his shoulder at me, he grinned.  "Everyone should be here soon.  Punctuality was never our strong suit."  He returned to his task of emptying the bag, but not before I caught a glimpse of his teeth.  They looked so rancid, I could almost smell them. 
        "Who?" I said.  "I'm sorry I barged in on your home.  I live nearby.  My parents, they live nearby.  I'm their daughter.  I didn't mean to barge in on your home.  I'm not supposed to be here.  I was just out for a walk."
      The man said nothing, only continued with his task.  I watched as odd tools emerged one by one--a hammer, a handsaw, a length of rope, a candlestick, a golf club, a tourniquet. 
     "What are those for?" I asked.  He looked at me and grinned again.  This time I could see all the way back into his mouth where a gold cap twinkled like a chalice tucked away in a hidden chamber.  He picked up the instruments and hung each of them on a separate peg along the wall by the door. 
       "First rate, aren't they?  Don't get too attached to one."  He was talking to me now.  "You'll have last pick."
        At that moment, noises of footsteps drifted in from outside.  Within the lifespan of a breath, the sounds were followed by their sources, and in walked a haggard crowd of cloaked figures.  They were chatting but softly.  As they filed past the display of hanging weapons, each plucked one of his/her choosing and carried it to a seat at the table.
         "All right," shouted the man who had appeared first.  He banged the butt of a machete on the tabletop.  "Order.  Order.  Committee Of The Unemployed, hear me.  We are in session.  Do not speak until you have spilled your own blood.  Ah yes, Thompson."  Everyone turned to look at Thompson who was raising his right hand.  His palm oozed a tail of blood which wriggled as it stretched down his wrist.  He held a knife in his left hand, and his teeth were clenched. 
          "What's the blonde doing here?" he asked, pointing a bloody finger in my direction.  All eyes turned on me.

          I woke up then and looked down at my legs.  They weren't bound or chained.  I ran all the way home and made it back for dinner.

With the intention of returning home before dark, I had left a note for my parents, relieving them of their obligation to cook me a wholesome and taxing meal.  I had with me a block of cheese, two bottles of home brew, bread slices, deli turkey, mustard, oranges, and sunflower seeds.  The snow would provide refrigeration for the beer and dairy.  Again, I didn’t plan on being gone longer than a few hours.  It was too cold to brave the night in a perforated shack. 
         At first, I was afraid that I wouldn’t find the place.  However, after heeling with the running creek for barely ten minutes, I stumbled across the hut.  It sat in the snow like a brown package that had fallen off a delivery truck.  The ceiling was lower than I remembered, and the whole structure looked too meager to be anything more useful than a stepping stone for some greater dwelling.  The walls were no better than cardboard.  I did, however, trust them to not collapse unexpectedly.  Inside, there was a cheerfully small amount of snow covering the dirt-hardened floor.  And maybe it was just my optimism, but the interior felt warm.
        The hut was without tables or chairs.  I cleared snow out of a corner until there was mostly hard ground visible and sat down.  I ate an orange.  I tossed the peelings outside.  The clouds had thickened and snow was coming down lightly. 
        When I awoke, I couldn’t move my legs.  They felt glued to the floor.  My first thought was that I was frost bitten.  I was oddly toasty, even though the sun was nowhere to be seen and the open doorway had allowed entrance to some wayfaring snow drifts.   It worried me that I felt warm, because I had been told that illusory heat was a sign of hypothermia.  I tried to reach my hand out to feel my legs, but my arms too were frozen stiff.  There was pain behind my knees and around my ankles.  Something was constricting my veins.  I looked down, squinting in the gloom.  My legs were tied.
          A voice snapped my attention to the doorway.  “Welcome.”

It doesn’t seem fair that Harvey is gone.  The disappearing act was claimed and patented by me.  I’m the known itinerant, passing through town like a curious and inevitably uninterested wind.  He stole my move.  At the very least he could have waited for me to leave first.  Without Harvey around, this time there won’t be anyone to watch me go.

            This morning I walked around the house in my underwear and moccasins.  It was cold, but for some reason the chill felt relieving like a long anticipated punishment finally arrived.  The snow outside the window glared brightly under the sun.  My eyes ached, even when they were closed.  Once I had my tea in front of me, I considered looking for jobs on Craigslist, but the Internet was fritzing and no matter what I tried, the problem couldn’t be circumvented.  I let my head slump onto the table.  Mousy thoughts nibbled at my mind, preventing me from falling asleep, until I awoke suddenly to a truckload of snow sliding off our corrugated roof.  Whoomp.  The noise shocked me like a mother's slap, and I jumped up, feeling as if I had been injected with motivation.  Within an hour I was on my way out the door, backpack bursting, heading toward the little hut in the woods.

“Are you home?” Harvey asked over the phone last night.  I had breathlessly called him to recount my unsettling travails in the woods, expecting him to emit a more emphatic response than weird.  “I need to come over,” he said.
      He was in the doorway a half hour later, sporting a stiff camouflage getup complete with oversized boots.  “Nice,” I said.  “Is that your dad’s?” 
       His face was stern and earnest in a way that echoed very rare occasions.  “Ali, I’m leaving.”
       I raised my eyebrows.  “Where you going?”
      “Florida.”
      “Nice.  With whom?”
      “The Air Force.”
      “What?”  I dropped the plate I was washing and watched it drown beneath the suds.  Meanwhile, Harvey stood uncertainly by the door, his hands clasped behind his back, as if he were acting as the beaux in a World War I film.  The performance was so rich, I suddenly hated him.  His scrappy little face looked mouse-like, and I wanted to feed it the fastest poison.  “No, you’re not,” I said.
       “I joined the Air Force.”
       “If you really had joined, you wouldn’t have told me this way.”
       “What do you mean?”
        I sighed.  “You’re making some big show out of it, like it’s a big deal.  You should have told me when you signed up.  Did you just enlist this morning?”
        “Well, no.”
        “Well.”  I looked down.  My hands suddenly felt cold, so I slipped them in the warm dishwater.  “Congratulations.”
        “Congratulations?”
        “Didn’t you have to pass a test or something?”
        “Hey, Al, I just came over to say good-bye.  We’re headed out tonight.”
        “Tonight?  What if I hadn’t called you?  You were just going to disappear quietly like a fish that slipped the hook?”
        “Well, you did call.  And I would have stopped by.”
         “Sure.”  I wiped my wet hands on my jeans, and stood facing him.  It was important that he understand how little I was bothered by his ridiculous decision.  We stared at each other like children daring the other one to start poking. An involuntary swallow betrayed him.  A short moment later, we were hugging and I was shooing him out into the cold.

The strangest thing happened to me today.  The weather was perfect for a walk in the woods, and I wanted to see Pike’s Creek adorned with its cold weather regalia.  In winter, the banks of the creek billow with untouched snow, waiting for some thirsty animal to tear through the white powder like a detonator.  The creek itself, the color of New Age silver, powers forth like the 21^st Century too determined to be held still.  In its corners it harbors ice.  These slow movers are shrugged off to the side of the current like society’s thinkers who question the rapidity of the route and whether the end is something worth rushing toward.  Somehow, the river seems as if it doesn’t acknowledge the ice as part of itself.

                This morning I set off toward the creek's dam.  I’m not sure what the purpose of the concrete slab is, but water cascades like silk over it into a still pond.  If you follow the top of the ravine on the western edge of our property, you will run into the creek somewhere upriver from the dam.  Walking the valley of the ravine will take you right to the dam.  For some reason I decided to leave our house and beeline for the creek which would put me just east of the dam.  When I left the house it was midmorning, and the sun was out.  An epidermal crust had formed on the snow, allowing me a relatively brisk pace.  Aside from my crunchy footsteps, the woods were quiet and hollow.  All the birds were at our house, crowding the feeder.  The bear were hibernating.  The deer, being nocturnal creatures, were sleeping.

Not long into the hike, I changed my course slightly so I was heading a few degrees west.  My thinking was that I would come out of the woods on, or very near, the dam.  But my calculations were off or affected by some higher influence.  It didn’t take me long to reach the creek, but I wasn't where I thought I would be.  In the bright noontime sun, the water flashed like a blade.  There were no recognizable landmarks to be seen, so I walked west, assuming that I was downriver from the dam.  After a half mile hike through the stubble that lined the creek, I came to a wall of ashy cliffs.  The steep clay face exposed a smoky red color, as if its snowy skin had been scraped away.  The geography surprised me because I knew that the only cliffs on Pike’s Creek stood far west of the dam. Apparently, I should have walked downriver. Frustrated but determined, I decided to backtrack until I saw the dam and then I would head home.  I was already exhausted from struggling through the deeper snow, and ice was forming at the rim of my boot so it ground against my calf with each step.

                Forty minutes later I still hadn’t found the dam.  I was standing under the bridge that led Highway 13 over the creek, listening to the thrum of cars going by.  My body was warm from the movement, but my fingers were stiff.  Half of my mind said I should accept defeat and step out onto the smooth pavement.  The highway would take me back to Ski Hill Road and eventually to my house, a roundabout but faster path than navigating uphill in the snow.  My obstinacy overwhelmed me, however, and without a second thought I set my feet to my tracks and walked back along the creek.

                I never came across the dam.  My search spanned a good distance along the river, from the highway to the tall clay cliffs three miles west.  It was as if the dam had vanished.  I did stumble across a small wooden hut I had never seen before.  It was large enough to house an impoverished family, and by looking through a window, I could see basic utensils like pots and leather harnesses hanging from pegs inside.  Someone had lived there.  And judging by the good condition of the untreated wood, the inhabitant must have abandoned ship not long ago, which means they were trespassing.  I made a mental note to ask Dad about it.

The sky is patchy, and the sun is trying, but winter seems bent on clouding us over.  "Shush," it says, as it draws the veil over our cage.  "Go to sleep."  Winter induces an odd skirmish of feelings inside me.  On one hand, I want to give in to my deepest, most powerful sin--sloth.  Sleeping, the vice.  On the other hand, winter means school which means productivity and accomplishments.  All of my best writing has been done in the winer, all of my achievements, unless you count sampling every flavor of ice cream at The Candy Shoppe.  But how do I keep up my production rate when I have no forewoman egging me on with a whip in her belt?

       Harvey came over last night.  He likes my mother all too well.  It bothers me because she's not so fond of him.  She thinks he's sweet and all, but she worries that I'm going to start liking him one day and want to marry him.  "Do you think he'll finish college?" I don't even acknowledge her queries with a response.  I do let my eyes roll, but then she's off chastising me for being disrespectful.  At my parent's house, I forget that I'm twenty-two.  When Harvey got here last night I made us popcorn.  He said he was full, so I was left stuffing face alone. 
"When are you leaving?" he asked.
"Leaving?"
"Here.  From Wisconsin."
"Oh," I said.  Harvey and I weren't very good at talking about the little things.  "Not sure."
"But you will be leaving."
"I guess.  At some point."
"Okay well, just, when you do let me know.  Say good-bye.  Okay?"
"I always--I will say good-bye to you, Harvey."
"Thanks," he said.  "Is there any popcorn left?" He looked in the bowl.  It was empty.

Not long after landing in Boston, I managed to double my wardrobe.  While Hannah worked, I shopped.  Who knew that boots could transform me into someone respected and revered?  Only Urban Outfitters.  Did I consider whether a black top is worth a tango with bankruptcy?  Well. Confidence is invaluable.

One day on my way to the bus, I stopped by a modest cafe for coffee.  I had three bags from nearby boutiques in tow which made it impossible to fish change out of my purse. 
"Have you got a card that's more accessible?  We do take plastic."  The server was impatient.  He had russet-colored hair that was sticking straight up, reminding me of fallen leaves before they've relaxed into the ground. 
"My card's under probation.  I'm unemployed."
"Right," he said with a glance at my shopping bags.  He was smiling.

I didn't show Hannah my purchases, just tucked them under her bed with all of her disregarded things.  She mentioned once, during a game of cribbage, that she would kick me out if I offered to pay her rent, which I figured meant that my free loading was a topic on her mind.  It wouldn't help anyone if she found out where her potential extra income was going.

The following weekend I asked Hannah if she wanted to go to Newbury Street, since I remembered her saying on Tuesday that she needed a new sweater for work.  Within the two hours that her parking meter afforded us, we had loaded up her car with bags.  On our way home we stopped at the coffee shop, and I recognized the server who had criticized my lifestyle.  I was glad to be wearing my newest favorite shirt.  It was muslin and soft and whispered when I walked like skis sliding over fresh snow.  "Hey," I said, when it was our turn at the counter. 
"Hey," he said.  "How's the job hunting going?"
I smiled.  He remembered me.  "Not good.  Anything open here?"
"You can't have my job.  Who's this?"
"This is my sister.  Hannah."
"Hannah, what do you do?"
"I'm a teacher," she said.
By the time we left, he had her phone number, and they'd arranged a date, volunteering at the animal shelter.
When we got back in her car, she turned up the radio too loud and started singing along to a song she didn't know.  "I think I'm going to stay for a while," I yelled over the noise.  "In Boston, where I can crash with my gracious sis for free."
"Cool," she said.  "I love having you around."

Standing on the porch at my parents' house, I'm surrounded by trees and snow as far as I can see.  Nature envelopes me as completely as if I were a lost little boat on the ocean.  It's so near at hand, I can't resist reaching out and dipping my naked fingers into the cold snow.  I suppose there's no better place to be, if you're unemployed--far away from people, the colony that has deemed you useless.  You've even offered to do an internship and work for free, but they think you would be a better help if you just got out of the way.

Trees are a rare sight in Boston.  Most vegetation that finds its way into the urban center is food for the working bodies.  There are a few parks.  The most popular one is called Boston Commons.  Its landscape is contrived, but sometimes I would lie on the grass and look up through the oak leaves and pretend that I was in a clearing maintained by forest fairies.  Sun draws out chlorophyll the same in the East as it does back home.  And the sparrows in Boston chirp just like our sparrows do.  Supposedly birds have accents, but I couldn't hear the difference.  I was happy to see that my avian friends can weather the city and prove they are as versatile as humans.  They're more adaptable than I am.  If Boston was a drink, my stomach couldn't take the population concentrate very well.  I spent my mornings walking up and down the boardwalk at the beach, trying to soak up the flash of nature that the harbor provided.

"I need new boots," my sister declared, and my first Saturday in Boston she plopped me in her car and drove to Newbury Street.  Shopping came easily to me.  Reckless purchasing is a genetic skill that I had long diagnosed as one of my mother's core problems.  The realization that I didn't escape it frightens and disgusts me.  I'm unemployed.  I can't be buying myself clothes.  "What else is there to do?" my sister said on Sunday, when I tried to protest a second trip to the stores.  I looked around at the gray buildings and shrugged.

The summer I was seventeen, my grandpa announced that he had lung cancer and was going to die.  My sister wanted to know how he could get lung cancer when he had never smoked a day in his life.  Mom said that he had been a lifelong smoker but a tobacco-free grandpa.  "He wasn't allowed to smoke in front of you girls," she said, when Hannah and I looked at her in confusion.  Seven months later, Grandpa returned from the hopsital with a hole in his throat.  On Christmas Eve, he slept on the couch while we unwrapped gifts, his breath like wind roaring out of a deep cavern.  After gifts, Grandma decided he wouldn't want to be woken up and told me to lay a blanket over him.  I took my time tucking it around his tiny body, and the hole stared at me like the opening to a cave of secrets.   Before I could stop myself, I was reaching into it with my finger. Air rushed at the tip and I instantly staggered back.  I remember that the hole was surprisingly warm.  Last fall, he died.  Vestiges of the cancer staged an impressive revolt against the treatment and took hold before the doctors noticed that anything was wrong.  My grandpa left me his red truck in the will.  Hannah got his library.  I had never had a car before, and I took to the freedom with passion and abandon.  I drove hard and far.  I drove across the state, tearing through counties the way a marathon trainer whizzes by mile markers.  Sometimes I didn't get home until after midnight.  To save money, I was living with my parents.  They said I was abusing the privilege of owning my own transportation.  I said that I had a bachelor's degree and had earned the privilege to abuse my privileges.  "Still," Mom said.  "Less than .0001 percent of humans today have the ability to get up and take off on a whim, and you should appreciate it."  Within three weeks, I had quit my job at the music store and was gone.  My mind was set on venturing west, but on the road I realized that I didn't know anyone in that direction.   I was halfway to my sister's Boston apartment when the truck broke down.  It wasn't clear to me whether Grandpa knew he was passing me a senior so near her end.  When I called her from a payphone, Mom just laughed.  "He probably didn't think you would be trying to make a racehorse out of a carthorse."  I took a plane in Cleveland, and two hours later Hannah was picking me up at Logan Airport.  "I ruined the element of surprise," I said.  She hugged me and said, "You're always trying to suprise me.  You could never surprise me."  And that was the beginning of my unemployment.

Sixteen hours' worth of traveling later, I made it home.  My dad, who braved a midwestern blizzard to retrieve me, woke me up as we pulled into the driveway at midnight.  Even at that dark hour, I could see the whiteness of the snow, glowing in the night like nature's sleepless eye. And this morning I awoke to a wonderland.  Winter's dangerous element is subtle and quiet and eerily soporific. When I look out the window now, in evening, I feel like I'm being carried away in a soft burlap sack that surreptitiously enveloped me while I was falling asleep, and rather than feeling alarmed, I'm lulled by it. 

Harvey showed up around midafternoon.  I was showering and heard a noise that I would have guessed to be an uncertain knock at the door if we didn't live way out in the boonies.  I ignored it and finished my shower.  As I was pulling on my clothes, my phone rang.  "Hello?"  I said.  "Ali, it's me.  I'm outside.  I think you're inside.  I heard you singing."  I ran down the stairs and threw open the door.  And there he was.  Shivering in jersey shorts, an oversized down jacket covering his cadaverous frame.  I threw my arms around him and pulled him out of the cold.  We watched Love&Basketball, fast forwarding the parts about love.  We talked only a little.  We hadn't seen each other in over five months, but I wasn't sure if he would be interested in the adventures I had had out in Boston.  We used to have that problem when we reunited after each semester of being away at separate colleges.  He wouldn't want to hear about my drunken fiascos, and Harvey, the straight-edge, wouldn't tell me what he did on the weekends because he said he thought it would put me to sleep and make me never call him again.  "I never call you anyways,"  I said.  "You just come over."  He grinned and shrugged.  It was kind of cute, and it made me feel bad for having said what I said.

Made it to the airport.  I'm looking out the window at my plane right now.  The sun is out, lighting up its white flanks.  Underneath its belly, the snow is dyed in puce from all the chemicals needed to make it air-worthy.  In a way, it looks as if the beast soiled itself, but I'm so relieved to be here, staring at my ticket home, that the plane still glows like a heroic beauty to me.  I called nearly twenty taxi services before finding an overpriced airport shuttle that said it was no problem and they were on their way.  I told the dispatcher to not let the driver attempt accessing our street.  I would meet him on Dorchester Avenue.  The intersection, however, was also impassable, thanks to a taxi driver who had tried a side street and found himself in need of Triple A.  The shuttle driver called me and said to meet him at the end of the block, where he was waiting with a white van.  That white van was the glow of heaven, my light at the end of the tunnel.  I called him my saint.  He nodded and said it was no problem.  But there were problems, I wanted to say, and he rescued me.  On the way to the airport he asked what I was doing in Boston.  "It's a great city," he said.  "Lots of jobs.  A good place to be if you are looking for a job."  I smiled and closed my eyes.  He couldn't have understood, had I allowed myself to laugh.

Last night, Boston received a skyfull of snow, a dumping measurable only with yard sticks.  In the city there's no place to put the celestial offering, and we are left with side streets clogged like tubes full of old toothpaste.  We spent the day shoveling, packing snow up along the side of the house to try and clear a path for the cars to get out.  The cars can move now, but the street isn't clear and probably won't be for a while.  Around midday, a plow made it halfway up Grant before it became stuck and attracted the help of the entire neighborhood.  Exposed cars tightened the workable space, adding heightened tension to the already stressful situation.  The poor driver was near tears.  As soon as he was free, he backed up as fast as he could and drove away.  There has been no sign of a snow plow on our street since.   Throughout the day, we made our way around the neighborhood, helping push the unfortunate souls, returning home from their police shifts, and the arrogant idiots, who were trying to deliver pizza.  Men were reluctant to take my advice when I offered towels to slip under the wheels for traction.  I learned to let them struggle a while before offering a hand.  One man spent several hours stuck on our street, roasting in the glares of our neighbors who were hoping to keep the street open in case the plow returned.  He accepted my help and followed my instructions, and we maneuvred him out of the trap, only to watch him slide into a deeper rut a few yards down.  He thanked me anyway and proffered forty bucks.  "I feel bad," he said.  "You mentioned you were unemployed."  I couldn't take the money.  "I'm from Wisconsin," I said, by way of explanation.  Hannah and I walked to the grocery store before dinner and saw at least one car abandoned in the middle of each side street.  Meanwhile, on the highways and main thoroughfares, traffic was zooming around like money passing through the hands of the privileged.  Public transit is closed until Monday.  My only hope of getting to the aiport for my ten o'clock morning flight lies with the taxi services, none of whom are answering my phone calls.  Thanks for the unforgettable send-off, Boston. 

It's Friday, the first evening of Boston's storm of the century. Wind is blowing.  Blue snow is coating the streets with an iridiscent sheen. A small tree outside our window has turned white. Its branches, as frail as Harvey's forearms, are waving like frozen veins against the icy gale. I'm holding onto the image, because I am homesick for my parent's country house. If we were caught in a blizzard back home, we would be outside sledding. Being stuck in an East Coast city feels like an unendurable layover. I'm watching nature from behind windows like some kind of environmental voyeur. While I feel stagnant and rotten, the earth has somehow never seemed so robust. 

     

         I got a text from Harvey, who must have seen the storm on the news, that said: Don't forget your roots and your North Woods survival skills.  Hannah filled the bathtub with reserve water, in case we lose power.  I used it to wash my hair. She probably should have told me what she was planning to do with it before I watched her dip her cup into it and take a sip.  She'll be okay.  If she does end up in the hopsital it'll be because she's going crazy being stuck inside all day.  She's not used to having a three day weekend.  She's a teacher, and she's better at being busy than being idle.  When I looked up a moment ago, she was standing on a chair, bouncing up and down.  "Welcome to a day in the life of the unemployed," I said. 

 

          In conclusion, allow me to yield to this digression.  It took me hours to decide what to call this blog. On quest for the perfect title, I wound up at Thesauraus.com. I love that website. Many a morning I have wasted, sadistically sipping my coffee, while I send words that aren’t quite good enough through the wringer. On this particular venture (adventure, endeavor, exploit, pursuit, undertaking), I was looking up the word ‘unemployed.’ My findings were quite droll. The word ‘unemployed’ has a whole slew of connotations, ranging from phrases as offensive as ‘loafing’ to ones as positive as ‘free.’ Some words, like ‘unused,’ were kind of sad. Here are my favorites: between jobs, resting, closed down, disengaged, at liberty, on the bench, leisured, on the shelf, unexercised, idle, inactive.  I suppose those are all applicable, depending on my day.  And I have to say that after several months of being 'between jobs,' I'm getting really good at being unemployed.  So good, I would say, that I'm not just on the shelf; I'm taking up space on the shelf.  I did have a job for a day a few weeks ago, but more on that later.

The sun, my interminable alarm clock, was sounding through the window this morning, when I felt the familiar pangs of writer’s guilt creeping like ivy up the lattice framework of my bones.  Slothful tendencies, like waking up late, don’t necessarily lead to an idle life.  But when warming up the bed becomes the most stressful pursuit of the day, I must concede that it has been far too long since I’ve written anything.  And there’s no excuse for it.  No kids.  No real job. No fake job either, although that sounds like something worth pursuing.  My poor writing degree is starting to smell like molding compost.

            After prying myself from my sheets, I turned on some music and did a morning work out—(dancing in front of the mirror.) Then I stripped down and stepped onto my sister’s scale.  It was feeding me some fiction so I took off my socks.  My traitorous body gained two pounds from jumping jacks.  To take my mind off the enigma of weight loss, I opened a notebook that I use occasionally as a diary and started scribbling what you’re reading here.  After I got a couple of paragraphs in, I realized that journaling is like dancing when no one’s around to see you doing the windmill.  And there’s no courage in that.  So here I am, submitting my writing and embarrassing life to you all.  May you earn some respite from your tediously productive lives by reading about someone who’s turned unemployment into a profession.  Enjoy.