Snow

It snowed yesterday, and as it snowed I looked out my window at the streetlights and tried to imagine being one of the many people who lived right around here 7,000 years ago. For them, winter must have been principally the season of death and famine. I imagined living through a winter before the invention of the stove. Every new snow must have seemed like an absolutely indecipherable mystery, a purified proof that it was no use trying to understand the forces of nature that dominated their lives. I understand now why these primitive societies developed such complex mythologies, and why those myths are so often obsessed with the weather. To someone whose source of heat is an open fire pit, and whose food requires warmth and rain, the weather is life and death.