Powder Snow Quotes

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.

Just so you know, this is the last time I ever trust you," I say. "But you're so cute all covered in snow." "Shut up and help me find my ski." We search through the powder for a while, but don't locate my missing ski. After ten fruitless minutes I'm convinced that the mountain has eaten it.

I'm jealous of your hooks," Kevin replied. "Having no hands is better than having two equally strong hands." Don't be ridiculous," one of the white-faced women replied. "Having a white face is worse than both of your situations." "But you have a white face because you put makeup on," Colette said, as Sunny climbed back out of the trunk and knelt down in the snow. "You're putting powder on your face right now.

I love this place; I love mountains and big skies and forests. And the weather is still supremely beautiful even though the lower peaks are powdered with fresh snow. But Heavens! What sun. It never has an ending. I am basking at this minute - half past four - too hot without a hat, & the sky is that transparent blue only to be seen in autumn - the forest trees steeped in light.

Roger, listening intently, couldn't keep from asking a question at this point. Is it true Colonel Stark said 'Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes?' Lee coughed discreetly. Well sir. I couldn't say for sure as no one said that, but I didn't hear it myself. Mind, I DID hear one colonel call out, 'Any whoreson fool wastes his powder afore the bastards are close enough to kill is gonna get his musket shoved up his arse butt-first!

The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.

At Last It's a perfect winter day. No wind. No Arctic freeze. Cloudless azure sky. A day to fly. Snow drapes the mountain like ermine, fabulous feather- light powder coaxing me to flee the confines of my room, brave the mostly plowed road up to the closest ski resort. To run from the cloying silence connected Mom and Dad, into encompassing stillness far away from city dirt and noise Far above suburban gridlock. Far beyond the grasp of home.

They have a complicated saying that likens snow to love." "It speaks of the beauty and the harshness, of watching a perfect flake land on bare skin and melt away in an instant. Of the soft powder giving way underfoot and the creeping chill of ice in your bones turning your lips blue and your fingertips black. Of terrible pain and delirious joy.

He is capable of turning everything into anything--snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow--for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.

Even her powders and face paint couldn't disguise the age lines and gripe lines that ran as deep as the railway tracks some said were bound to cross our mountain any day so.

... but in the winter they were ensconced in a white powder of sparkling snow.

It fell like powdered sugar, brittle, yet airy and without direction as it covered the land under an unforgiving tomb.

I Won’t Fly Today Too much to do, despite the snow, which made all local schools close their doors. What a winter! Usually, I love watching the white stuff fall. But after a month with only short respites, I keep hoping for a critical blue sky. Instead, amazing waves of silvery clouds sweep over the crest of the Sierra, open their obese bellies, and release foot upon foot of crisp new powder. The ski resorts would be happy, except the roads are so hard to travel that people are staying home. So it kind of boggles the mind that three guys are laying carpet in the living room. Just goes to show the power of money. In less than an hour, the stain Conner left on the hardwood will be a ghost.

It's like we're in the Snow Queen's land,' Lottie breathed, powder catching on her lips as she spoke. Ellie reached to take her hand and, together, they walked down the steps into the boundless white world beyond.

The snow-white angel alone remains, hovering over Tara Burgess’s fresh grave, holding a single black rose in one hand. She does not move, does not even bat an eyelash. Her powdered face stays frozen in sorrow. The increasing rain pulls stray feathers from her wings and pins them to the mud below.

golden and worn, the dingy color of mustard powder. A piano sat off to the side, with photographs

It was so pure, the snow, the purest of all powders, I thought, so pure it must be from elsewhere, from another planet.

Snow. As ever the silent snow. It hems you in, lifts your spirit, and as you soar awhile it lets you down for being the meaningless ashen powder that it is.

Life is like skiing in the powder snow. You can see where everybody else has gone and where they end up, but you must chose your own path and take it. You can never follow the exact same path.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

Sometimes the good parts and the hard ones are so close together—like the inhale and exhale of the same breath.

THE SNOW. It sifts from leaden sieves, It powders all the wood, It fills with alabaster wool

Powder over power.

She attempted to explain. "I—when ... It was sitting in the snow, and—" The spoft-spoken words fell off the side of the bed, emptying to the floor like powder.

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.

Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.

Thirty minutes before sundown, they completed digging and packing their shelter in the snow. With the tarp secured over it, Ryan could only hope it would be enough to shelter them from the cold. He’d watched enough survival shows to know how to navigate down a snowy mountain, and he knew the best way to live through an avalanche, but he’d be damned if he could recall an episode that taught him how to fend off man-eating hellions in knee-deep powder.

They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire. They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and then they disappeared.

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

In 2018, the average US weekend window lift ticket price was $122.30. That’s thirty times greater than the $4.18 it was in 1965. Over the same half century, US disposable family income grew slightly less than threefold. That means the lift ticket price grew ten times faster than people’s ability to afford them.

The wind blew snow off the cliff so that it drifted down around him like sparkling magic powder. In the moonlight, he cast a huge shadow on the ice. Cork saw the old man suddenly in a kind of vision, as if beholding in the long black shadow the real Meloux, a great hunter spirit, silent and powerful. Cork was very grateful to have the old man on his side.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple. Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred. Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fizzed angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears. He opened his eyes. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. The faucets turned on and off in his cheeks. Here on the plum-shadowed side of the house with maple leaves making a creek-water running in the hot wind at the window he read spice-cabinet names.

...Following the bird you lay into a deep turn in the steepening descent. It [the snow] is super soft, bottomless and amazingly light, yet supportive. It feels like something in between floating on top, and within the top of a deep-pile carpet as you link turn after turn down the open glacier. Each side of you are fellow riders, though not too close, whooping with exhilaration and flying down, down towards the valley below. The pitch gets steeper and the slope widens out, with seemingly endless space to the sides and an untracked oblivion ahead and beneath you. Each turn is delicious softness; you can almost feel every snow crystal reacting with the base of your skis. Those skis feel like extensions of your feet, and you connect with the mountain through a portal link created by the snowpack, as the spray from the turn hangs in the air behind you...

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

Psychologists have found that the most significant common trait among people who are pulled to the mountains is something called sensation seeking. “Neuroscience calls it novelty, it’s the willingness to take risks for the sake of rewards,” says Cynthia Thomson, a health researcher who looks at behavioral genetics. “Compared to people who don’t ski, skiers are higher on the sensation-seeking scale. They have a low threshold for boredom, and tend to look for more exciting experiences, even if there are dangers associated with them.

The fire truck lumbered forward. Thick branches cracked and shattered under the tires. By the time Harper pulled herself part of the way up into the passenger seat, he was doing nearly twenty miles per hour. He swung around the larch, building speed slowly but surely on a straight stretch of road that climbed to the top of a little rise. The snow-wing plow struck the tree. The larch wasn’t swatted clear so much as pulverized, branches shattering in a cloud of gray powder and black fragments. The Freightliner screamed. Harper felt she was hearing Jakob’s true voice

I hope you know that when you’re happy, or sad, or joyful, when you’re melancholy on spring days, or rainy nights, or autumn evenings, I’d be right there with you, watching the leaves change. And during cold winters by the popping and cracking of a chimney fire, as the snow powders the limbs of the cedars, I’d be there, with you, lying beside you when you wake up and when you go to sleep. And I’d never abandon you. I’d be there for you when you need me. And starting now, I’ll be there for you as long as my time on earth shall last. All you ever have to do is tell me what you want or need and I’ll provide that for you, if it’s within my power. I swear I’ll love you the rest of my life.

Cool green foods became the natural choice in restaurants and teahouses. Matcha, the powdered green tea used for the tea ceremony, flavored ice cream, jewel-like gelatin cubes, and sweet whipped cream eaten in parfaits and layered with grapes, pineapple chunks, and chewy white mochi balls. There were Japanese-style snow cones, huge hills of shaved ice drizzled with green tea syrup, along with green tea-flavored mousse and tea-tainted sponge cake. Matcha flavored savory items too, including green tea noodles served hot in dashi soup, as well as chilled and heaped on a bamboo draining mat with a cold dipping sauce of dashi, mirin, and soy. There was green tea-flavored wheat gluten and the traditional Kyoto-style dish of white rice topped with thin petals of sashimi that you "cooked" at the table by drenching it with brewed green tea from a tiny teapot.

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. It is unending. I heave myself over the final lip and strain to pull myself clear of the edge. I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating. Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air. I unclip off the rope while still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up. I get to my feet and start staggering onward. I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags semisubmerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit--the place of dreams. I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me. It is adrenaline coursing around my veins and muscles. I have never felt so strong--and yet so weak--all at the same time. Intermittent waves of adrenaline and fatigue come and go as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments. I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope. A sweeping curve--curling along the crest of the ridge toward the summit. Thank God. It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up onto the roof of the world. I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused. I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask. However many of these pathetically slow shuffles I take, this place never seems to get any closer. But it is. Slowly the summit is looming a little nearer. I can feel my eyes welling up with tears. I start to cry and cry inside my mask. Emotions held in for so long. I can’t hold them back any longer. I stagger on.

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is that Nature tyrannizes over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a quick bound set to your captice. The leaning tower can only lean so far. The verandah or pagoda roof can curve upward only to a certain point. The slope of your roof is determined by the weight of snow. It is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the architect may range: gravity, wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and such like, have more to say than he. It is the law of fluids that prescribes the shape of the boat, — keel, rudder, and bows, — and, in the finer fluid above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems to have no option about his tools, but merely the necessity to learn from Nature what will fit best, as if he were fitting a screw or a door.

It is strange and fine—Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures. At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious—a home which is forty miles deep and envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain—a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth—the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the important member of the family—in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of showing it.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides. When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles. Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips. At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying. When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside. Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone. It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. A

What a gentle, pleasing flavor! It's as if I've taken a bite of powdery snow! Using that special explosion oven, she baked thin sheets of piecrust at a high temperature until they were nice and crispy... layering them together to create a mille-feuille! One bite and they crumble into delicate flakes... which then meld with the elegantly smooth and sweetly rich meringue created by the blades of her chain carving knife! "Excellently done! With every bite I take... ... my mouth fills with flavorful joy. It's so good I can't help but writhe in my seat!" What?! Out of nowhere... my tongue was assaulted with an explosion of thick, full-bodied sweetness? "Ah! There are flakes of chocolate in between the mille-feuille layers?" "I call those my CLUSTER CHOCO CHIPS. I mixed almond powder and mint leaves into chocolate and then chilled it until it was good and hard." Crushing that chocolate with a sledgehammer, I deployed the fragments into the piecrust, set to explode with just enough firepower! Protected by the layers of crust, the chocolate didn't melt during baking and was instead tempered... resulting in chocolate chips that have the crunch and richness of baking chocolate! The more you eat, the more you trip, setting off a chain of explosions... ... as if triggering a cluster bomb! "These are the specs of what I have dubbed... ... my CLUSTER BOMB CAKE!

You?” Crowfeather decided he was still in some weird dream. “Like ‘Hey, you’?” “No, flea-brain,” the tabby tom responded, with an exasperated twitch of his whiskers. “Yew, like the tree.” “Oh, sorry,” Crowfeather mewed, then added after a moment, “I’m Crowfeather. Thanks for helping me.” “You’re welcome. I’ve learned a bit about patching up injured cats in my time, and I like to help out when I can.” Yew finished his massage and stood back, rubbing his paw in the snow to clean off the juices. “Try sitting up.” Crowfeather obeyed; his head swam, and every one of his muscles shrieked in protest, but he managed to stay upright. He found himself in the lee of a large, jutting outcrop of rocks, with only a thin powdering of snow covering the tough moorland grass. Beyond the shelter, all the hills were hidden in a thick layer of snow, the white expanse stretching in all directions as far as Crowfeather could see. More flakes were slowly drifting down. Though clouds hid the sun, he guessed that sunhigh would be long past. “How did you find me, in all this?” he asked. Yew looked thoughtful. “That was strange,” he replied. “I was hunting, down there on the edge of the forest. Then I saw a gray she-cat—the prettiest cat I ever laid eyes on. She beckoned me to follow her, and she brought me up here. But when we got here, I couldn’t find her . . . only you, half buried in the snow and looking just about dead.” For a moment his bold amber gaze softened. “Her fur glittered like stars. . . .” Feathertail! Warmth spread through Crowfeather from ears to tail-tip, as if he were basking in the sun of greenleaf. She saved me! Injured and unconscious in the snow, he would have frozen to death if no cat had found him.

As Frank promised, there was no other public explosion. Still. The multiple times when she came home to find him idle again, just sitting on the sofa staring at the rug, were unnerving. She tried; she really tried. But every bit of housework—however minor—was hers: his clothes scattered on the floor, food-encrusted dishes in the sink, ketchup bottles left open, beard hair in the drain, waterlogged towels bunched on bathroom tiles. Lily could go on and on. And did. Complaints grew into one-sided arguments, since he wouldn’t engage. “Where were you?” “Just out.” “Out where?” “Down the street.” Bar? Barbershop? Pool hall. He certainly wasn’t sitting in the park. “Frank, could you rinse the milk bottles before you put them on the stoop?” “Sorry. I’ll do it now.” “Too late. I’ve done it already. You know, I can’t do everything.” “Nobody can.” “But you can do something, can’t you?” “Lily, please. I’ll do anything you want.” “What I want? This place is ours.” The fog of displeasure surrounding Lily thickened. Her resentment was justified by his clear indifference, along with his combination of need and irresponsibility. Their bed work, once so downright good to a young woman who had known no other, became a duty. On that snowy day when he asked to borrow all that money to take care of his sick sister in Georgia, Lily’s disgust fought with relief and lost. She picked up the dog tags he’d left on the bathroom sink and hid them away in a drawer next to her bankbook. Now the apartment was all hers to clean properly, put things where they belonged, and wake up knowing they’d not been moved or smashed to pieces. The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang’s cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the wall she wanted to break through, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed. That was what her parents had taught her and what she had promised them: To choose, they insisted, and not ever be moved. Let no insult or slight knock her off her ground. Or, as her father was fond of misquoting, “Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A tougher lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.” The afternoon Frank left, Lily moved to the front window, startled to see heavy snowflakes powdering the street. She decided to shop right away in case the weather became an impediment. Once outside, she spotted a leather change purse on the sidewalk. Opening it she saw it was full of coins—mostly quarters and fifty-cent pieces. Immediately she wondered if anybody was watching her. Did the curtains across the street shift a little? The passengers in the car rolling by—did they see? Lily closed the purse and placed it on the porch post. When she returned with a shopping bag full of emergency food and supplies the purse was still there, though covered in a fluff of snow. Lily didn’t look around. Casually she scooped it up and dropped it into the groceries. Later, spread out on the side of the bed where Frank had slept, the coins, cold and bright, seemed a perfectly fair trade. In Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered. Who could mistake a sign that clear? Not Lillian Florence Jones.

A fine white snow floated down as if a baker were in the sky, sifting powdered sugar over a plain, brown world.

Cedar Valley It's well offthe beaten path, and that's just how wilderness-lovers like it Nick Nault Photography Island Lake Lodge, about 15 kilometres outside of Fernie, offers in-chalet luxury and pristine mounds of snow as far as the eye can see. Mark Sissons | 878 words They say there are no friends on a powder day. This may be true at most North American ski resorts, where it's every powder hound for himself in the mad morning rush to lay down first tracks after an overnight dump, but not from where I'm standing, perched on a ridgeline overlooking the

About three blocks north, I found a train track, and began to follow it in the same direction I was going. The sun stabbed the immaculate white snow with a blinding glow, and I was thrilled to be a part of the show. The air was indescribably cold, but I was well insulated in my long dark wool coat. It absorbed the heat from the distant white dime of a sun which was rising in the southeastern sky but not getting much closer as it rose. Facing the icy dawn, my heart leapt with joy: I was free!  I slipped and slid and laughed on the icy rails. White was everywhere. The thick blanket made it impossible to read the terrain, especially the small details. After a time, I saw what seemed to be the perfect place to enter the freeway. There were no vehicles on it, I had seen none since I began walking parallel to it on the tracks, and that was more than an hour earlier. The entry ramp was less than fifty yards away. If I had wings, or maybe skis, I would be there in a heartbeat. When I took my second step, I was one hip deep in frozen powder; the other leg was awkwardly turned up the slope. Managing to bring the second leg down, it sunk up to the knee. As I put more pressure on it, I was now level again: both thighs hip deep in snow. I laughed at myself, then trudged forward, crawling out of the hole, slipping and landing on my face. It was both comical and frightening.

At 5:00 a.m. the clubs get going properly; the Forbes stumble down from their loggias, grinning and swaying tipsily. They are all dressed the same, in expensive striped silk shirts tucked into designer jeans, all tanned and plump and glistening with money and self-satisfaction. They join the cattle on the dance floor. Everyone is wrecked by now and bounces around sweating, so fast it’s almost in slow motion. They exchange these sweet, simple glances of mutual recognition, as if the masks have come off and they’re all in on one big joke. And then you realize how equal the Forbes and the girls really are. They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier-mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5:00 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: “Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?

FOODS KNOWN TO BE HIGH IN FODMAPS THAT SHOULD THEREFORE BE RESTRICTED* Additives (sweeteners and added fiber): fructo-oligosaccharides, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, inulin, isomalt, mannitol, maltitol, polydextrose, sorbitol, xylitol Cereal and grain foods: bran (from wheat, rye, or barley); bread (from wheat, rye, or barley); breakfast cereals, granolas, and muesli (from wheat, rye, or barley); crackers (from wheat or rye); pasta, including couscous and gnocchi (from wheat); wheat noodles (chow mein, udon, etc.) Drinks: chamomile and fennel tea, chicory-based coffee substitutes, juices made from unsuitable fruits (below) Fruits: apples, apricots, Asian pears, blackberries, boysenberries, cherries, figs, mangoes, nectarines, peaches, pears, persimmons, plums, prunes, tamarillos, watermelon, white peaches Legumes: beans (all kinds, including certain forms of soy, such as textured vegetable protein/TVP), chickpeas, lentils Milk and milk products: custard, ice cream, milk (cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s, including whole, low-fat, skim, evaporated, and condensed), pudding, soft cheeses, yogurt (cow’s, sheep’s, or goat’s) Nuts: cashews, pistachios Vegetables: artichokes (globe and Jerusalem), asparagus, cauliflower, garlic (and garlic powder in large amounts), leeks, mushrooms, onions (red, white, yellow, and onion powder), scallions (white part), shallots, snow peas, sugar snap peas

She approach the jagged snow powdered clefts.

into a crouch, using the force of the momentum to thwack the blunt side of her sword against the back of Balin's knees. The warrior buckled and crashed downward, catching himself with his free hand. He scooped a mound of snow into his fist. "You've discovered my weakness. Height can be a disadvantage as well as a benefit." At least I can enter the shadowwalk to ease my loneliness, and you cannot block me. Guilt seized her at the thought of the forbidden power, and she hesitated, losing sight of her surroundings for a moment. A shower of snow hit her face, blinding her. She heard Balin grunt as he moved. Astrid reached up to rub the freezing wet powder from her eyes, but when her vision cleared Balin was nowhere to be seen. She spun, but something whacked her across the middle of her back, sending her flying. The force of the blow knocked her several paces forward, plunging her into the snow. Her face met the bite of frost as she fell flat on the ground. A chill spread through her. She spat flurries from her mouth, struggling to get upright. The frigid tip of Balin's blade pinched the side of her neck, pressing her back down. Caught, she

There was still the dirty snow, piles of it that looked like they were rotting, stained black, peppered with garbage. The white powder that loosed itself from the sky in small handfuls, like plaster falling from a ceiling, never managed to cover up the filth.

injured her ankle during the first week of physical training so that had been the end of her WAAF career. Now Susan extricated her arm from the blanket and glanced at her wristwatch. ‘The NAAFI should be open any time now for some cocoa and supper,’ she commented as Livvy rose to throw some more wood onto the stove that stood in the middle of the room. It was a temperamental thing, often throwing out more smoke than heat. ‘Ouch!’ Livvy cried as she opened the door and it spat at her. ‘I swear this ruddy thing waits for me to do that!’ She hastily threw the log she was holding in and slammed the door shut, causing smoke to billow into the hut and make them all cough. Amanda quickly took out her compact and applied lipstick and powder to her nose, then fluffing her hair up she asked, ‘So who’s coming then?’ As they had all discovered, Amanda hated being seen without her make-up, whereas the rest of them were usually bundled up in layers of clothing just intent on keeping as warm as they could with no thought to how they looked. They all rose and when Nell opened the door a gust of snow blew in at them. ‘Ugh! Bloody weather,’ Susan grumbled as they stepped out into the raging blizzard. ‘Perhaps we should have put the kettle on the stove and made our own drinks tonight!’ ‘Ah, but some of those handsome RAF chaps could be in,’ Amanda pointed out. The RAF base was not far from theirs and when the pilots weren’t flying they often used the NAAFI for a meal. Susan and Livvy exchanged an amused glance, then, heads bent, they picked their way through the deepening snow and just for a moment Livvy thought of the warm, cosy little kitchen back at the lodge. In the very kitchen that Livvy was thinking of, Sunday was just opening the door to John, who had popped in to check that all was well. Their relationship had undergone a subtle change since he had made the unexpected proposal. For a time, they had lost their easy relationship and she had felt slightly embarrassed when in his company and had stopped visiting Treetops as frequently as she had previously. But since the departure of Giles and Livvy they were becoming closer again, finding comfort in each other’s company. ‘How are you all?’ he asked as Sunday quickly closed the door behind him and he stamped the snow from his boots. Already his coat was beginning to steam in the warm atmosphere, and she smiled as she ushered him to the fireside chair and hurried off to set the kettle on the range. ‘We’re fine. Kathy is upstairs getting the twins to sleep.’ Without asking she spooned tea leaves into the pot from the caddy and lifted down two cups

They wore full-coverage raid suits, thick-filtered helmets, their gloves embellished with a ridge of claw-like, upturned hooks along each knuckle, all emblazoned with the logo of Atlas—Greek Titan of Endurance—shouldering the world in a neon blue silhouette.

Jones was like a boy atop a mountain after a fresh snowfall; if a great mass of powder was ready to tumble down the slope, he could throw a well-aimed stone and set off an avalanche of money. Of course, as Jones insisted, he could no more move a market against fundamental economic forces than a boy on a mountain can cause snow to fall uphill. But the ability to start an avalanche is a formidable thing. If he could judge a market’s potential for a move, Jones could set off a chain reaction at a time of his choosing—and be the first to win from it.

Snow was blowing, windwards. The powder swirled, like white dust from the cosmos, about his head and feet. - The Girl in The Red Cape: A Mystical Sled Ride

Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one.

Before he got five feet, a snowball hit him square in the face. He wiped it away to see her leaning out from behind a big tree, laughing. “Did I mention I was good in softball?” she asked through her laughter. “I pitched!” The chase was on—Ian took after her with a roar that was answered by giggles. He was stronger and more sure in the snow, but she was agile and quick and managed to get off a few snowballs while he was in pursuit. She ran around trees, rounded the shed at least once, took a few snowballs in the back and retaliated. But the chase ended when she tripped on something under the snow and did a face-plant right into the soft white powder. He rushed to her side, scared, and rolled her over to find her laughing and spitting snow. He just looked down at her in wonder—did nothing disturb her? Scare her? Panic or worry her? He covered her mouth with his for a long kiss, and when he let her go she said, “Before we go inside, we should make snow angels.” “I’m not making snow angels,” he said. “What if Buck sees me? It would ruin my reputation forever.” “Just one, then. Yours would be so big—like Gabriel, for sure.” “Then will you go inside with me? No more screwing around?” “Aw—I thought that was your favorite part?” she asked, taking a handful of snow and shoving it in his face. With a growl, he got to his feet, lifted her off the ground and threw her over his shoulder, carrying her back to the cabin. He stood her in front of the door and brushed the snow off her before letting her enter, then did the same himself. “You’ve forgotten how to play,” she accused him. “You play around enough for both of us,” he said.

A web of chain mail, linked rings each flattened where the ends met and clinched with a tiny rivet, rattled about his knees. Mark felt the fine powdering of rust that fell from the rings. It was green. The rings had turned to greenness in their decay, as herbs did in health. Where the greenness had fallen away, the knees beating it out slowly like fine green snow, the metal was hot and bright and yellow. It began to chime when the green decay was gone; gongs struck by imperious lords in their tens of thousands, calling their servitors to battle with demanding yellow sound. A

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees The only good thing about this rough land was firewood. No human had ever gathered a fallen branch here. So they could stay warm, but they had nothing to cook over the flames. It seemed to Eben the Indians ought to worry more about this than they did. They spent every daylight hour looking for game, found nothing and did not mention it. Instead, they sat by the fire, smoked and told war stories. It was the captives who discussed food, describing meals they had had a month ago or hoped to have in the future. They discussed pancakes, maple syrup and butter. Stew and biscuits and apple pie. Ruth said to Mercy, “You and Eben and Joseph are so proud of your savage vocabulary. Tell them they’re Indians, they’re supposed to know how to find deer.” “There aren’t any deer,” said Joseph. Ruth snorted. “We just have stupid Indians.” Suddenly the whole thing seemed hilarious to Mercy: a little circle of starving white children, crouching in the snow, and a little circle of apparently not starving Indian men, sitting in the snow, all of them surrounded by hundreds of miles of trees, while Ruth spat fire. “Ruth,” said Mercy, “do you know what your name means?” “My name is Ruth.” “Your name is Mahakemo,” Mercy told her. “And it means ‘Fire Eats Her’.” Mercy began to laugh, and Joseph and Eben and Sarah laughed with her. Even Eliza looked interested, but Ruth, furious to find that the Indians were laughing at her instead of being respectful of her, began throwing things at Mercy. Mercy rolled out of range while Ruth pelted her with Joseph’s hat and Tannhahorens’s mittens and then with snowballs; finding them too soft, Ruth grabbed her Indians powder horn. Mercy jumped up and ran away from Ruth and out into the snow, and in front of her were a pair of yellow eyes. The eyes were level with Mercy’s waist. They were not human eyes. No deer for humans also meant no deer for wolves. Mercy meant to scream, but Tannhahorens got there first, in the form of a bullet. Wolf for dinner. It turned out that the English could eat anything if they were hungry enough.

The true skier does not follow where others lead. He is not confined to a piste. He is an artist who creates a pattern of lovely lines from virgin and uncorrupted snow. What marble is to the sculptor, so are the latent harmonies of ridge and hollow, powder, and sun-softened crust to the true skier.

The theory of person-environment fit says that you might be happier and more fulfilled in certain places because of your temperament, values, and goals. That your characteristics might match up best with a landscape or a location. It’s often applied to business structure, and organizational psychology, but could just as well apply to life in the mountains.

Snow is a changing, fragile substance, which accumulates in layers: a deep puffy storm, followed by an inch of rain. Wind crust followed by cold light flakes. Avalanches are a combination of three factors: a sliding surface, a slope steep enough to slide, and a trigger. Here in Utah—and in other high, dry parts of the Rockies—more often than not, there’s a deep unbonded layer in that snowpack that could always slide, given a trigger. It seems to happen the same way almost every season. The first thin snowfall covers the mountains in a crystalized layer of sugar and anticipation. Then it stops, like climatic clockwork, for a few weeks. That layer of unbonded snow is exposed to the air, which sucks out moisture, creating slippery, faceted snow crystals called depth hoar. It forms a perfect sliding surface. When the snow starts in earnest, that surface, which avalanche forecasters call a persistent weak layer, is at the very bottom, slick and unbonded, ready to slide. That’s one of the constant hazards of skiing, you always know it’s down there. Just how big it could break is a question of what comes in on top of it.

There are subtle markers that delineate space, as well as clothing, language, social codes, and behaviors that indicate someone might be an insider. I often make immediate judgy assumptions based on what other skiers are wearing, or how they carry their gear. If you look at the symbolism and the cultural clues about who is welcome—the athletes, the ads—they’re largely white. When you show up to ski, you’re facing everyday systemic racism, as well as the factors specific to these towns.

It was July, and we'd ordered patbingsu to share to stave off the humidity. This rendition was far more elaborate than the homespun efforts of my childhood, its base a perfect soft powder of snow slathered in sweet red beans and garnished with pristinely cut strawberries, perfect squares of ripe mango, and little cushions of multicolored rice cakes. A fine web of condensed milk drizzled over the sides, and vanilla soft serve towered high on top.

Being able to avoid thinking about something is the embodiment of privilege and for white people that is deeply embedded in American land use, social structure, and politics.

but when he put on the leather boots, he found he could walk right out of the powder snow.

Studies have shown that people are happier when they don’t have as many choices. We don’t always want to be optimizing.

SNOW Plentiful snow deepens the path to the woods. Hay, hawing, shakes the juniper, Gray squirrel and titmouse trick in hectic moods, Fluff buffeters of down and fur. Jay skates on ice-blue air with bluer flight, Dives in down-soft whirl and comes up light. The dried and dead hackberry dangles white, Tall trees droop down while ground grows up, And the powder-white snuff blows from the wind’s lip…

Lauren Slater depicts such a state a year after starting Prozac: It’s been almost a year now since I’ve composed a short story or a poem, I who always thought of myself as a writer, all tortured and intense. I can just manage this journal. So maybe I’m not a writer anymore. Maybe Prozac has made me into a nun, or a nurse, or worse, a Calgon Lady. Why can’t I manage a simple story? Why is my voice—all my voices—so lost to me? Every morning, before work, I come to the blank page and look at it. It looks like winter. It is February in my mind. I think of the things people have said about the blank page, all the images. Sheet of snow. Anesthetized skin. To those images I add my own: the white of Prozac powder, spread thin.

Sleet had changed to snow, which fell steadily as I drove. White powder filled the hollows in the land, erased the gutters, piled on the fir trees like lines of cocaine. Everything—buildings, sidewalks, lights—turned blurry as snow enshrouded the city. Denver went silent under the soft, murderous weight.

There were so many things Astra would miss from the other three seasons: the first crocuses bursting through the still-cold soil, robins hopping around in the thawing snow, the sun beating down on her face at a Brewsters game, the air sticky but bearable because she knew it would end when the season shifted into fall, the noticeable change in August when the humidity evaporated and the night temperatures dropped, the inevitable morning in October when she woke up to the world iced in frost, like a giant baker had sprinkled everything with powdered sugar.

…fresh, bottomless powder is the Holy Grail, but pow is elusive. True enlightenment can be found in things like soft corduroy on a 27-degree bluebird day. It's times like these when the perfect wax, sharp edges, and strong legs can make you feel part of the mountain, allow you to create carves as organic as the snowmelt streams that'll rush downhill in April.

One beautiful winter morning when Utah’s deep powder snow was perfect for experienced skiers, he and Elder W. Craig Zwick headed to a nearby resort for a day on the slopes. As they hopped on the four-person chairlift for their umpteenth ride up the mountain, a young man skied up and got on with them. They remarked how wonderful it was that Monday morning to be out in the fresh Utah snow, and the young man responded, “Yes, but my life is in a shambles.” Elder Zwick remembered, “I felt like saying, ‘This is your lucky day,’ and about then the man realized he was on the chairlift with President Nelson and gasped. “In about four minutes,” Elder Zwick related, “President Nelson taught that young man the importance of the Book of Mormon and promised that if he would read it every day, his problems wouldn’t go away but they would be alleviated. That is how clearly he taught” (Church News/KSL Interview, January 5, 2018).

For seven months each year, the subarctic environment is transformed by a gift (or perhaps some would say a curse) of the weather. This, of course, is snow. By midwinter the land is covered by soft powder lying two to six feet deep in the forest, hardened to dunelike drifts on the broad lakes and rivers, creating a nivean world of its own. The coming of snow is forecast by many signs… When the sky is bright orange at sunrise there will be snow, "usually two mornings later." Perhaps the best sign of snow is a moondog, a luminous circle around a bright winter moon. When the Koyukon speak of it, they say, "the moon pulls his (parka] ruff around his face," as if he is telling them that snow is coming soon. The Koyukon people regard snow as an elemental part of their world, much like the river, the air, or the sun. It can be a great inconvenience at times, but mostly it is a benefit. Without snow, the ease and freedom of winter travel would be lost, the movements of animals would not be faithfully recorded, the winter darkness would be far deeper, and the quintessential beauty of the world would be lessened. I never heard Koyukon people complain about snow, even when it stubbornly refused to melt away in late spring.

According to scientists who study avalanches for a living, snow has the widest range of physical properties of any known substance. What’s amazing is that the Eskimo language doesn’t have more words for it. Powder snow, corn snow, sugar snow, windpack. Neve, slab, spring powder, spit, and fluff. Thawing and freezing it changes with every degree of temperature, every passing second. Goose down, ball bearings, broken styrofoam. Then there are the properties of snow that are not physical, or not exactly physical: its lethal whims, its harmlessness, its delicacy, its power, its relentlessness, its flirtatious disregard, its sublime beauty.

In Xenophon's summary of the allegory [Prodicus' "Choice of Heracles'' ] the young Heracles has sat down at a crossroads, not knowing which path to follow through life. As he sits deliberating, two women appear to him. Their physical appearance is a study in contrasts, and they are clearly villainness and heroine. Evil (Kakia) is overfed, plump, rouged, and all powdered up. She wears revealing clothes and is vain, viewing herself in a mirror and turning around to see if she is being admired. Virtue (Arete), on the other hand, wears simple white; her only adornments are purity, modesty, and temperance. These apparitions proceed to give speeches in praise of the life that they can give Heracles. Evil speaks first-an ominous choice, since in such debates, the first speaker typically loses. She offers Heracles a life of free, effortless pleasure. There will be no delights that he will not taste, no difficulties that he will not avoid. He need never worry about wars and affairs. All he need trouble himself about will be what food or drink to take; what to look at, hear, smell or touch for his pleasure; what partner he might enjoy, how he might sleep softest, and how he can obtain all these with the least toil (aponOtata). If ever there are shortages, he will not suffer ponos or hardship either in body or soul. Rather "you will enjoy those things that others work to produce, and you will not hold back from profiting everywhere." Evil tells Heracles her name, but adds confidentially that to her friends she is known as Happiness (Eudaimonia). Very different is the tone and substance of Virtue's argument. For while Evil would have Heracles live for himself alone and treat others as means to his self-gratification, Virtue begins by saying that she knows Heracles' parents and nature: Heracles must live up to his Olympian heritage. Therefore she will not deceive him with "hymns to pleasure." Evil's enticements are in fact contrary to the divine ordering, "for the gods have given men nothing good without ponos and diligence." There follows a series of emphatic verbal nouns to hammer home this truth: if you want divine favor, you must worship the gods; if you want to be admired, you must do good works for your friends; if you want to be honored, you must benefit your city and Greece; if you want the earth to bear crops, you must cultivate the land. Flocks require tending, war demands practice. And if you want strength (Heracles' trademark), you must accustom your body to serve your will, and you must train "with ponoi and sweat:' At this point, Evil bursts in to deplore such a harsh lifestyle. She is immediately silenced, however, as Virtue argues that duality is essential to a sense of fulfillment and even to pleasure itself. For paradoxically, ponos (pain, struggle) makes pleasure pleasurable. Evil's vision of happiness is one of continual and languid orgy-food without hunger, drink without thirst, sex without desire, sleep without weariness. But as experience shows, continual partying soon loses its zest, even if one goes so far as to cool expensive drinks "with snow" in summertime. By contrast, Virtue's own followers have no real trouble in satisfying their desires. They do so not by committing violence against others or living off others' labor, but by simply "holding off until they actually do desire" food or drink. Hunger is the best sauce, and it is free. Furthermore, Virtue appeals to Heracles' native idealism. What hedonists have ever accomplished any "fine work" (ergon kalon)? None, for no beautiful or divine deed is ever done "without me [Virtue] ." Therefore, wherever there are energetic, effective people, Virtue is present: she is a helper to craftsmen, a guard of the household, a partner in peacetime ponoi, an ally for the works (erga) of war, the best support of friendship. To choose Evil would be shameful and not even extremely pleasurable, while with Virtue one will lead the most varied and honorable life.

the waiting umpires animated snow-men, the heap of sawdust at either end a pyramid of powdered

DO I WANT TO KNOW why you have a blood-soaked piece of Keefe’s cape? Or is that, like, a normal thing for you guys to have?” Marella whispered as their small ash-covered group shivered outside the massive silver door that Sophie had previously only seen in Keefe’s memory. Howling winds whipped through the night air, making the gray-white powder on their skin zing as if they’d been drenched in ice water. Sophie could barely distinguish their forms from the shadows and snow. The only thing that stood out was the faint blue flash of the starstone hairpin that she’d retucked into her bun after the leap—and the red-stained fabric in her hands. The iron smell made her gag, but she sucked in a freezing lungful and reminded herself that Keefe was safe—which was more than she could say for herself at the moment. “My theory is that Keefe made one too many jokes about Fitzphie, and Sophie finally threw him off a cliff,” Tam told Marella, careful to keep his voice low. “I could see that,” Marella agreed. “By the way, how long has Fitzphie been official?

The first words Snape speaks to Harry have a hidden reference to Lily Potter’s death. He asks “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” A Pottermore article explains: asphodel is a type of lily. Wormwood is associated with regret or bitterness.

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead ends. . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible touch, which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline season here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless breathing around you.

The poet wants a pancake with white snow powder.

At 5 a.m. the clubs get going properly; the Forbeses stumble down from their loggias, grinning and swaying tipsily. They are all dressed the same, in expensive striped silk shirts tucked into designer jeans, all tanned and plump and glistening with money and self-satisfaction. They join the cattle on the dance floor. Everyone is wrecked by now and bounces around sweating, so fast it’s almost in slow motion. They exchange these sweet, simple glances of mutual recognition, as if the masks have come off and they’re all in on one big joke. And then you realise how equal the Forbeses and the girls really are. They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many Westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: ‘Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?’ A Hero for Our Times I am in a meeting at TNT when my phone goes off.

My stomach growls as I think about the beignets I ate that day, those magical deep-fried pillows of dough, covered in half an inch of powdered sugar. The exterior was crisp and golden, and when I took a bite--- the airy, cloud-like interior still warm from the deep fryer--- the powdered sugar fell into my lap like snow. I'd known the beignet was a cousin of the doughnut, but somehow without the hole in the middle, it managed to surpass any notion I had of what a doughnut could be.

Sitting cross-legged in a small closet, with her hands folded in her lap, Achava put her mind on the things heaven. She liked a quotation that Paul the Apostle used. “I am seated in the heavenlies with Christ.” She pictured Jesus sitting by the Father. His robe and hair were whiter than snow. The band around his waist was shimmering gold. In her mind’s eye, she saw Him hold her in His arms, filling her with His power. She imagined angels around the throne, sprinkling her with powdered diamonds. “I need your will to be done on earth, just as it is in heaven. Your angels are powerful. I need some of that power.” She sat another fifteen minutes soaking in His presence. She felt electricity flow through her body. She knew she had been empowered. God had mercy on her once again.

small town with only three hundred and ninety-four inhabitants. The area around Arnakke had been inhabited since the Stone Age. The name meant “eagle’s neck” since there used to be a lot of eagles fishing in the fjord that was called Isefjorden. You could still spot them occasionally, I was told, but it was rare now. I looked up at the sky between the trees but saw only crows. The road was slippery from the wet snow. The trees covered in the white powder. We had packed the car with sledges and winter clothing. I looked forward to tumbling in the snow with Julie and building a huge snowman or a snow cabin. I inhaled the icy air deeply into my lungs. The kids complained that it was getting cold in the car so I rolled up the window. I looked at Sune. This was going to be great, I thought. Just me and the people I loved in a small cabin

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over the mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? But here we are, working our way down the driveway. one shovelful at a time. We toss the light powder into the clean air. We feel the cold most on our faces. And with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, bud Buddha keeps on shoveling. This is the true religion, the religion of snow, and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky, I say, but he is too busy to hear me He has thrown himself into shoveling snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway you could back the car down easily and drive off into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio. All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentary and he is inside the generous pocket of his silence, until the house is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us; then, I hear him speak. After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards? Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring cups of hot chlorate to the table while you shuffle the deck, and our boots stand dripping by the door. Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the fun blade again deep into the glittering white snow.

It’s pure joy, that physical exhilaration and overflow of emotion – it’s joy; the pure, sparkling joy of skiing on a snow cloud. 

Her kimono stood out from her neck,and her back and shoulders were like a white fan spread under it. There was something sad about the full flesh under that white powder. It suggested a woolen cloth,and again it suggested the pelt of some animal.

popularised by Americans and Canadians, where ‘needle dancers’ could be found. ‘Vicious Drug Powder – Cocaine Driving Hundreds Mad – Women and Aliens Prey on Soldiers’; London was ‘In Grip Of The Drug Craze’ at ‘Secret “Coke” Parties of “Snow Snifters” ’. The police bore witness to the phenomenon, associating it with thieves, sodomites, ‘retailers of Malthusian appliances [i.e. contraceptives], quack medicines and that class of offensive literature’.

It’s the most beautiful day I can imagine. The sky is perfectly blue, the winds that threatened the heli not visible to the naked eye. The mountains stretch endless around us. We’re more or less below the tree line, down by the drainage basin for one of the area’s sparkling-clear rivers. Snow-shrouded pines cluster in snowy bowls and are scattered sparser over the slopes. The powder is waist deep after the last few days’ snowfall, soft as down and white as confetti.

You can try to cover up depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach's compositions for the organ in Our Saviour's Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who's listening. That's the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action. I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of submerging yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.