Why do I write with a fountain pen? I love the feel of it, the ink flowing onto the page. The white paper beneath. Cheap wide-lined paper with holes on the edge. College-lined is too narrow a line for my pen. I wonder–did I use wide-lined in college? Where did all my class notebooks go? Thrown away at the first opportunity, I imagine.
Staples is one of my favorite places–all that paper! All those pens! I usually restrain myself. But it’s a happy day when I can buy some post-it note pads. I used to buy razor point pens too. But now I
have to buy them online.
I used them for years. I used to be so careful of them, using them until their point disappeared. I should have rushed through them, indifferent to how many more days’ use I would have.

I left the fountain pen home last summer. I won’t do that again.

Well, my cracking (see previous post) did no good. We just had storm no. 500,213. or so. No–they have names. Must be Xerxes by now.
I pulled my living room shades down so I wouldn’t see the snow falling, eternally falling.
This morning, the shades went up and I gazed on a new clean white world.
My yoga guru flew to Porto Rico last Friday, and, after a few days there, onto a cruise ship for a week.
The last thing he said to me as I went out the door after class was, Porto Rico is the home of the Pina Colada.
No Xerxes for him.

Now that we have permanent snow here in the Northeast corner of Connecticut, the ice that forms every day makes little overhangs above the driveway. The snow melts from below and sinks into the ground, leaving for awhile little extensions of thin ice.
I love to step on these thin ice overhangs. They make a lovely crackling sound when broken. Sometimes I stamp on them and sometimes I tap them.
I’ve been doing it all my life. I think I used to believe I was speeding up the melting of ice and snow.
Every morning there’s fresh overhangs. And looking at the thermometer there’ll be many more days that I’ll be able to help end the winter.
If I only could….

We flew SouthWest Air when we came down here to Florida, and the totem poles were still there.
The first time I flew SouthWest after a long absence I was interested to see these silver poles with odd numbers on them: etc. I knew they were meant to designate our personal waiting space. But we’d gotten up at 5:30 that morning and I expected to hear the poles hum or spin and shoot off vivid colors.
They are beautiful steel. Does anyone polish them?
Our personal waiting spaces were 30 and 31. I kept walking up to the poles and trying to find our numbers. Finally I asked a SW employee and she explained it. We pushed trough the people and found ourselves at the front of the second line in A group. I like being at the head of the line.

This year, we went Business class and we were A1 and A2. Yes!