I Surrender

It's silly to complain about what we can't control or change. Nonetheless, I loathe winter. Blessed/cursed with low blood pressure, I'm always cold and must hibernate under four or more layers of clothing, and that's before donning outerwear. While I'm immensely grateful to own houses in both Bolton Hill and Rehoboth Beach, every year I fear the volatile price of oil and propane. And then there's snow.

I'm not snow-phobic. I don't need to prepare because I'm always prepared. I mostly work from home, so I can usually limit my interaction with it beyond shoveling, though any such encounter narrows my footwear options to styles I find less than appealing. I know - it should be my worst problem. Wall-to-wall, we're-all-going-to-die TV coverage, a Baltimore fact of life, is annoying. I will admit snow is pretty, but it gets ugly fast.

I do appreciate how cozy snow makes me feel in my house. And my block, always so picturesque with the median park, fountain, and rowhouses and institutional buildings in varying late-nineteenth century architectural styles, does wear winter white particularly well. But all in all, the only good thing about winter is fur.

Sitting here now in my tiny kitchen's only chair, watching the snow softly falling on the back porch, I am noticing how snow piled up on the balustrade's finials has morphed their round form into a shape perfectly echoing the dormer windows of the magnificent carriage house providing backdrop. And from my perch, the finials align faultlessly with the dormers, as if I had planned their placement from this exact spot so that I might witness this utterly astounding vertical symmetry every time I sit down.

I painstaking plotted almost every detail of this room, the back porch, and the formal garden. My calculations, my specifications drove contractors to distraction (though how they pointed with pride to the results). Visitors often note the precision and care with with I have designed in the details - and you know who is in the details, according to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But not only can I not take credit for what I have just seen, I also can't explain how, even with this same perspective every day for years, this realization has eluded me until now. Why?

Maybe it was something in the stillness and the quiet that freed my mind and let it roam - made possible by surrendering to something exactly opposite of my perfectly-planned spaces and not at all under my control.