THE BLUE PETER After such knowledge, what forgiveness? —T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion” The winter has settled in, and so has Anton. After Miranda returned to work, he came back home. “I’m home” were his very words of greeting when I came home from work one day, just a few days after New Year’s. My God, I thought, he’s here for good. Instead of the snow-rain-frost-snow-rain merry-go-round that is our usual winter wonderland ride—see-saw temperatures, freezing and thawing, slop-walks of slush changing overnight into treacherous slag-paths of crusty ice and snow—serious snow began falling in mid-December and continues to come down. After several winters with hardly any snow to speak of—the temperature one year hitting twenty degrees in February, but balancing that the next year with a snowstorm in October—my colleagues are now forecasting a real old-fashioned winter. Anton, of course, says global warming is to blame, and his bête noire, the automobile, is mainly to blame for that.
