PAUL CHRISTENSEN

I've been watching the snow recede from the hill opposite the house. It takes a long time if the snowfall was heavy, which it was two weeks ago. More snow has since come and filled in the melted crannies, but that too has begun to recede. There may be more snow this weekend, but the temperature is slowly creeping up into the low forties, which means we don't have those menacing daggers of ice hanging from the rain gutters. I feel stirrings in the earth of a spring that is sti

My son rolls his eyes up whenever I ask him how the weather is over there. He can't believe I reached a dead end in our phone conversation after not seeing one another for several months. He lives in Marseille, and I am here in Vermont during the winter. So he calls us now and then to check in on us, and shows us a few pictures of his kids, who never fail to elicit the usual grandparent oohs and ahs. Then I pop my favorite question when there is a pause in our talk. He takes

I used to go up to Sutton Place on the East River just to dream about living there one day. The apartments all hang over the edge of the embankment with tall windows full of luxurious lamplight. I was a teenager working in Midtown Manhattan at a seedy office full of dead-enders. I was eighteen earning sixty dollars a week for a disbarred lawyer who was a whiz at making crooked deals to supply airplane parts to foreign air forces scattered across the Middle East. I was his Fre