Beautiful night

We tried to leave the city early today, to get a head start on a weekend away at the house in the country, a constant antidote to the mid-winter grimness that seems to have settled in to New York to stay for a while.

There's a promise of snow, real snow this weekend for Dear Alex to see and play in, something that both Beautiful Wife and myself love and encourage, probably for reasons of a certain nostalgia too deeply buried to name. I know I loved snow, snowy days, and the real warmth of returning inside after hours of play, numb and red-cheeked and soaked.

It started off with a good plan, but devolved into a bit of a struggle that ended with a late departure and meeting Dear Alex and Nanny J. uptown at a 'playdate'. Beautiful Wife went in to collect Dear Alex, and returned a few minutes later - we bundled the girl into the carseat, loaded up and set off to get out of town only to come up against that late-Friday-afternoon traffic of others fleeing the city. A few minutes into the drive, BW noted that she might have stepped in dog-poop somewhere along the way, and almost instantly I caught the first whiff of that mournful smell of regret. A great conversation with Dear Alex ensued about the nature of dog poop and it's disposal, and how silly it was that it was on mommy's shoe, and more importantly how mommy should always look out for dog-poopie and you should step over it and not in it. The kid can be really funny. She was in a great and happy mood to be traveling tonight with us, and stayed awake long enough to see and comment on a beautiful full moon on the rise, chasing us as we headed west across the George Washington Bridge and into the night.

This post is about nothing, really, but the beauty of this night and a way to ease myself back into trying to write more regularly and clearly and well about the life and times of Dear Alex, to take notes on her quirks and my various fascinations with them.

Tonight, I wish I could wake her up and show her the biggest full moon of 2009, and take her outside to feel the dead cold and see the magic of this night as bright as day, with the trees sparkling in their coating of ice from the storm of last week. I would say "shhh - listen" and we could share the deep subsonic booming sounds of the frozen lake settling in for the rest of the winter, and the loud crackling of the deer walking through a neighbor's frozen backyard.

For now, Dear Alex sleeps, probably dreaming of princesses and bunnies. We'll get outside and enjoy the snow and the world tomorrow.