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Frigid again today, not much exercise except for running up and down several staircases having forgotten essential materials which needed to go from the Art room to the classroom where I was teaching. Also threading needles, at which I found myself better than most 7th graders, who looked quite physically and mentally challenged at times, trying desperately to push that thread through the eye of the needle.   And then some arm-wrestling with my 8th graders to shouts of Bou-wer! Bou-wer! (I won some, lost some, but only to the biggest strongest boys!).

Mountains of snow on the sidewalks, on the edges of the highways, in designated areas of parking lots, where the town snow gets dumped.  People become very angry with one another during cleanup after a huge snowstorm in the city, because where do you put all the shovelled snow?  Each household is responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of the house, and any fire hydrants, but there is no space to fling the snow to, as we have here on our hill in the woods, where we can pile it up next to the wood-pile, or on to the lawn, or shovel it down the bank of the hill through the trees.

There are feuds about parking places too, because if someone has just taken all the time and effort to shovel the space, they are not going to be happy when another person takes advantage of the spot without having done any of the back-breaking work.  So people constantly leave objects to save their spaces, and sometimes they are really weird things, like cooking pots, large pumpkins, cat carriers, standing fans, and even an ironing board.  There have been cases of people taking others' spots and coming out in the morning to find their tires flat, shot with nail-guns.

But of course, like everything else, snow-removal comes with an ecological price.  The roads are treated with chemicals before the storm, or during, and then all that snow is collected and pushed into parking lots, sometimes tipped directly into rivers and ponds.  But even if this is not the case, when the mountains of snow melt in the spring, all the chemicals are mingled with the runoff which of course goes into the groundwater and the rivers and ponds and ultimately, the ocean. Oh, I think I just found another thing to worry about, woohoo!

Today on our way to lunch my friend Mohamed noticed that a funeral was taking place in the large cemetery near our school.  The temperature was about -5C and the mourners stood around the grave in all that cold and snow.  I didn't even know they could bury someone when the ground is covered in ice and snow.  I suppose it is a leftover from some book I read where they couldn't bury the body in the frozen ground, but of course now, in the 21st century, we must have the technology to dig a six-foot deep hole even in the dead of a New England winter.

I am reading a book called A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which is rather wonderful and fascinating and has similarities to the remarkable Stranger than Fiction, which was Nick's favourite movie for the longest time.  Much of the story takes place in Japan, and when the old great-grandmother Jiko, who is a Buddhist nun of 104, dies, I was captivated by the description of how the body is prepared for cremation.  She is washed and then dressed in a white kimono, hand-sewn with no knots in the cotton, so that she can slough it off easily and not be tied to the world.

The body is placed on a metal tray which goes into the crematorium oven, and when it is over, the tray is slid out again and all that remains is a skeleton of warm white bones.  The relatives all stand around with one chopstick each, and they work with a partner to pick up all the bones and deposit them in the funeral urn, starting with the feet, because you don't want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity.  The most important bone is the nodobotoke, which I think is the hyoid bone.  It is called the Throat Buddha, and is the last bone put on the top of the pile in the urn, and if it is found it is very good luck and that person will enter nirvana and the ocean of tranquility.

In the western world we are so scared of death, have such an aversion to the subject, that when it comes up invariably someone will propose that we change it.  Death is inevitable and it seems strange that there is such a taboo about it.  I love the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, because it means that dying is just a part of the whole circle, as one's soul is reborn again according to your karma, which depends on how well you lived in your previous life.

When I arrived at school this morning I was greeted by this beautiful maple.

 And then this evening when I made my way out to the cold parking lot at dusk, it bade me goodbye.

And when I arrived home in the dark I nearly tripped over the mermaid on the steps, still fast asleep!  Snow mermaids, huh?  What a life.