A Winter Day

It starts with a spin around the trails at Wirth Park at 7:30 in the morning. For the first time in quite a while, the snow was great, the temperatures were moderate ... and there was nobody there! No school teams, not even a single ski-skater. We did the "woods" trail, pausing often to admire the peachy light in the sky and the luminescent blue of the chalky and still pristine snow.  Ah, bliss!

Hilary went off to sort old photographs with her parents, and I settled down in the "office" to work on a few books. An hour here, and hour there. Then Norton called. He wasn't happy with the proofs he'd received from China. A blank journal with a photo of Paul Bunyan on it. He was eager to stop by for a consultation. Fine.

"I thought we'd gotten rid of that sign," he said as he handed me the proof.

"No," I replied, "I removed the sign on the other side. Right here. You can still see the post. But I could change the other sign, remove the date and the word Bemidji, and make it read Paul and Babe."

"And what about the back?" Norton said. "It's sort of blank."

"How about if I lighten it up and then create a noise panel so it glistens a little bit?" He liked that idea.

Twenty minutes later I'd sent off another proof to China and we were talking about the Timberwolves. Would they beat the woeful Knicks tonight? Probably not.

An hour later I was making Brazilian black bean soup from a recipe out of the Moosewood Cookbook. Outside the dining room window, goldfinches and siskins were quietly feeding together on the thistle feeder, while cardinals both male and female were fighting one another off ferociously on the sunflower feeder just above their heads.

I'd put a CD on the stereo of a strange group called the Westerlies that we heard last night at the Machine Shop. It's composed of two trumpeters and two trombonists doing everything from Beiderbecke and Ellington to Ravel and Debussy, as well as their own compositions. That arrangement of timbres calls for precision as well as dynamic control, and these young performers had it—now brash and joyous, now as rich and mellifluous as the soundtrack to an old Western. A friend had given us the tickets, so we'd bought to CD as a contribution to the cause. A day later, it made a pleasant complement to the birds and the bright sun on snow outside the window, and the aroma of cumin and garlic within.

But my biggest accomplishment of the day came early on: I succeeded in canceling my subscription to Amazon Prime. That may not sound like such a big deal, but yesterday, when I went in to terminate our free three-month trial, which was due to expire at the end of the month, I was shocked to discover that it had already been renewed—for a year!

"So that's how they sucker you in," I thought, cursing myself for my dilatory behavior.

"Why not call customer service?" Hilary said. "Maybe we can get our money back."

"Not likely," I said. There's probably some fine print somewhere that says, "Ten days prior to your expiration, your subscription will automatically blah, blah, blah."

But I found, double-checking the website, that there was a way to back out of the agreement, if you hadn't made use of the benefits. Thus with a single keystroke, I wiped an entire year of guilt and recrimination from my conscience, and a year of impulse purchases off of my shelves.

I could live again!