Reading: Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

14 March 2002: Nothing

There is something profoundly weird about walking through a snowstorm with a peeling face. There is something weird about a woman who has managed to live more than 30 years without regularly falling over cliffs despite never remembering sunscreen. Although I do commonly walk into walls.

Winter. Sunscreen. Two concepts that do not readily link in my New England-inured mind. But when you snowshoe at 10,000 feet on a gloriously sunny day, snowshoeing meaning that you are on top of reflective snow, sunscreen shouldn't be as far from your mind as it was from mine. After only a little while I added an earwarmer headband, so until yesterday the most embarrassing part of this burn was my two-tone forehead. Hey, flesh-tone and red, I looked like Fugly! But starting yesterday morning, the most embarrassing thing has been the peeling.

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From our first year here, from our maybe second trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, we have a favorite photograph, of us on a boulder overlooking Bear Lake. We enlarged it to 8.5x11 for family Christmas presents one year. At some point, the regular 4x6 disappeared from its photo album. Several years ago I made a binder of negatives, every negative that we possess.

Tuesday morning I woke from a sound sleep well before dawn slapping my hand across my eyes as I realized I had lost the negative. I remembered that, not too long ago, I removed the negative from the binder to make reprints, and that RDC, seeing me with the floppy strip and deeply satisfied with digital photography, had feigned ignorance of what a negative is, and that he had, nonetheless, chided me for not using Special Spandy Whatever to transport the negative, and that I had carefully tucked the negative into a book.

What woke me up was remembering that I had done nothing since with the negative and I had no idea what book it might be in. I figured even I, sunscreenless or not, wouldn't've been stupid enough to put it into a library book, so all I had to do was go through every book that has been on the dining table since the turn of the year and it would turn up. Snort.

This morning I went through my backpack, adding my sandwich, removing a Scientific American, removing Guns, Germs, and Steel (since I am enjoying rereading Nobody's Fool), and finding, in the magazine, the envelope from my sister's thank-you card with the negative inside. Whew. Then I walked to work for the first time in months, enjoying the snow, as my face peeled.

The other thing I have to do at lunch today, besides bring the negative to the photography shop, is mail a package to JGW. He arrived in Colorado with his clothes for the week in a suitcase that he feared wouldn't fit into Cassidy, what with four pairs of skis (EJB brought two), an unbelievable quantity of food, and everything else. So I offered him whatever bags he needed of ours. He used the red L.L. Bean pack and a tattered black nylon duffel RDC was surprised to know we still own (I'm throwing it out). JGW apparently hadn't seen his goggles and one black glove against the black floor of the pack, so I have that to mail. Then I'm going to read more Richard Russo.

Also, like a good little independent bookstore patron, I asked the TC Tuesday night about Muse Asylum, a book I saw at B&N recently. They haven't had it since October. So I'll probably get that today. There are empty shelves in our bookcases, and we can't have that.