Climate Change overwhelms Monculi

Snow has covered everything.  Deep snow and it's freezing cold.  This snow is more than settled - it's settled in.  It has also brought down a large branch from the pine tree doing duty as an olmo in the middle of the piazza.  Unfortunately my little red Lancia caught it.  Couldn't come down on the Landy, which would have shrugged it off.  It can't even be taken down the hill to be mended because it hasn't any chains. 

From the upstairs sala windows I can watch the cars skidding round the bends towards the city - chains are no exaggeration - so no festive outing to the last market before Christmas to load up with tinsel and toffee, pomegranates and pandoro and presents wrapped like works of art (the bookshop does particularly fine Bauhaus-style wraps, it must be the all those geometric forms dictating style).

I shall boil a fine piece of beef with some veal bones that Mr HG skated across to the butcher for earlier; carrots, celery, a red onion; make a maionese of hard-boiled eggs and chopped capers with the new oil.  There is pearl barley  I brought back from Poland in the store cupboard, and long leaves of tightly crinkled dark green cabbage, beet leaves, a big jar of those summer-bottled tomatoes, so resented then but so welcome now, thank you for all that hard bottling work, some of those white, fluffy potatoes -not the yellow, waxy small ones - and we'll have soup for a seige.

Good thing I dressed in my velveteen track suit this morning, with fluffy socks and one of those fleecy-lined undershirts from Brussels; I must have known I wasn't going across the doors even before I opened the shutters.  The light was all wrong, the bells were muffled, no footsteps on their way to Mass; open the window, unlatch, push, and it wasn't just the cold that took the breath away.  Miles and miles and miles of perfect white.