Voyage of the
White Kayak
The first of these dreams is more a tableau than an unfolding story. I am sitting in a car. At least I think it is a car, because I can feel the vibrations of the engine running. I am warm, yet I know it is quite cold outside. Across the road, which is very narrow, a woman with her back to me waits beside a steel fence topped by a wooden rail. A lighted cigarette dangles from her hand. She wears a soft brown wool coat trimmed with fur and a fur toque hat. It is snowing but so lightly that I might not have realized it was snowing at all except for small flakes accumulating at the edges of the fur hat.
Beside me on the seat is a brown envelope. There is a name written on it, my name, but the envelope is sealed, and I know that I must not open it without permission and so it lies unopened.
Looking again toward the woman, I can see that two young girls of different heights, who seem to be her daughters, have now joined her. I turn the envelope over and over without looking, and I watch as the woman and the girls walk away disappearing into the almost invisible snow.
As much as the first dream is mundane and uneventful, the other unfolds in another time and a place so different as to be another world. A stone hut perches upon the side of a treeless mountain, which seems as though it must be at the very top of the earth. Small, with a roof of flat stones, it is an elegant structure very like a chapel in a country churchyard. There is a small sleek black horse standing untethered and motionless just outside the door. It is adorned with a jeweled bridle and saddle looking like an illustration from the Arabian Nights. I see that I am dressed all in black, a black jacket and cape and a soft flat cap and black leggings and slippers.
I enter the hut with familiarity as though it were my home, which it must be, but what I see is like another dream playing within my dream, and what I feel is a foreboding of misfortune and separation and death. The open doorway frames the figure of a woman dressed in a blue flounced gown and a headdress like the Queen of Diamonds, a woman I call mother, but who I know is not really my mother. She bends over the corpse, for so it seems to be a corpse, of a big hulk of a man, with face and lips as blue as the dress, who lies supine and still on the damp stone floor.
Trembling, my dream mother drizzles a syrupy liquid the color of blood onto the dead man's cold lips and, whether by chemistry or by sorcery, he sucks in a great gasping breath, groans, and turns a lighter shade of blue. A dagger, which had been clasped in the man’s right hand, rolls free as the convulsive death grip loosens, and it clatters briefly and lightly on the stones. I pick up the dagger and slide it inside my belt. The lady takes a step back and collapses exhausted in a carved wood chair looking undecided whether to weep or scream and does neither but speaks to me in a language I have heard nowhere outside the dream, and I answer in the same tongue.
In the next moment, as the dead man continues to revive, without the sentiment or formality of goodbye, even in the strange language, she hurriedly lifts me on the horse. Handing me a bag I know is filled with silver she whips the pony's neck, and I plunge down the steep mountain with the blackness of my clothes and the horse’s mane merging with the blackness of the night to the sound of the breathing of the horse and the clinking of the coins.
Last night I dreamed both these dreams together, something that had never happened before.
I was wondering about that and wondering also whether to spend the last of my money on cigarettes or coffee. Lunch was out-of the question. It’s an engraved rule of the guide books that the closer you get to Venice’s Piazza San Marco the more expensive everything becomes, most especially food, and I was sitting in a very expensive zone.
I had two cigarettes left, so I decided on the coffee. I lit a cigarette, sipped the coffee and basked in the deceptive euphoria of being now totally broke, that is until it occurred to me that I wasn’t quite there yet. Tucked in my wallet was a silver dollar I had carried since grade school, a “life jacket” from my father. ” As long as you’ve got that dollar you'll never be broke." And to this moment I never had been.
I took out the dollar and spun it on the glass tabletop. I thought of trying to buy another coffee, but a priest was walking by, and, on impulse, I sprang up and pressed the coin in his hand. I murmured, “For the poor.” He looked at me quizzically, so I spoke again. "Pour les pauvres." still not wanting to test my Italian. "Merci mille fois." he answered in kind, hurrying away without looking back.
"Such unmitigated generosity. And that accent. Decidedly Americanski. Am I right, Amigo?” A voice from behind and then facing me.
"Looks like you gave away the price of a coffee and biscuit. Can I buy us both a refill?"
The speaker was about my age, tall, nattily dressed in blue serge, club tie and a gray trench coat carefully folded but carelessly draped over his left shoulder.
“Any conditions?” I asked ungratefully.
He smiled and shook his head.
"Then I accept.” This time with an inflection of gratitude. “Unconditionally.” I added.
He sat down, motioned for a waiter, and barked a lengthy order in Italian. Coffee, cake and brandy appeared almost instantaneously and then more coffee moments later.
My host was neither cheap nor shy. “So where you from, friend? That twang sounds like the Deep South, South New York I mean. Let me guess. Columbia?"
"Right church, wrong pew. NYU,” I added, “By way of Rockaway Beach. South enough for you?”
"Hey, Cooper Union. We're practically blood brothers. What brings you to Venezia?" What indeed.
"Curiosity and John Ruskin."
"Yeah, Ruskin invited me too. Very hospitable fellow. Then I invited him to my concert tour, but he turned me down."
"You, a musician?" I knew the answer already. I wanted the details.
“ I claim to be. Jazz piano. Playing some army bases, a nightclub here and there. Concertizing tonight across the Lagoon. No jazz this time. Satie. Giving the black keys a rest. Is it just you and Ruskin, or is there another with you?”
“No I’m solo.”
“Doing the Grand Tour alone?” He snapped open a cigarette case and offered me a smoke. I took two.
“It’s not a pleasure trip, believe me. Call it a bereavement journey.”
“A death in the family, I’m sorry.”
“Not family, a friend, well not exactly a friend. A classmate. He died in France in that big avalanche at Val d’Isère. Harry, that was his name, had told his parents if anything ever happened to him that they should call me. He died. They called. I had some time on my hands, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to turn them down, so here I am.”
“This is a bit of a detour from Val d’Isère, isn't it?” He asked the obvious question.
“I tried to claim his body, but it had already been buried in a mass grave. I’m waiting for them to retrieve it for me to identify. Also, there are problems. If the decomposition is too advanced they may not let me transport him at all, at least not right away. So I have time to kill.”
“Was he a skier?”
"Not at all, He had been traveling in Europe teaching, volunteering, kind of a professional do-gooder. When he heard about the avalanche there, he went to join the rescue, and then the second avalanche hit and he was buried under thirty feet of the white stuff.”
“Nice reward. Remind me to stop rescuing people. You were close then, roommates?”
“No that's the funny thing. I barely knew him. We had classes together, but he was quiet. We talked maybe a half dozen times and then just about papers, tests, that kind of thing. But I couldn't turn his parents down. They’re old, and the news put his mother in the hospital. They paid plane fare over and the boat back and expenses while I’m here.”
“I thought you looked somewhat impoverished. Sorry to insult you. My mistake."
“Well you aren’t completely mistaken. I left Val d’Isère on Sunday. No banks open. No banks left, to be more accurate. There’s money waiting in Milan. But without you buying lunch I might not have had any. Thanks again.”
“Look, maybe we can do one another a favor. I told you I’m here on a musical tour. Turns out we've been invited to Rome and we leave tomorrow.”
“That’s sounds great. So what’s the problem?”
“Well, my mother has a cousin who has a cousin etc. and so on. She volunteered me to deliver a letter. In person, naturally. She made a solemn promise that I am just about to break. You could save my honor, such as it is, and take it for me. I’ll do a deal like your friend’s parents. I’ll pay train and bus and another $200,”
“$200? What's so important?”
“Like I said, I promised personal delivery. But it doesn’t have to be me. You don’t have to deceive anyone. Just be polite for a couple of hours to two old Italian ladies. Come on. They live in a village called Luino on Lake Maggiore. A manageable car trip from Milan. You’re going to Milan anyway. I heard it’s beautiful. Luino not Milan. Well, anyway, who has ever heard of an ugly lake? You’re in limbo right? You’ve got to wait for your French clerks to give you the green light. Why not see some of Italy other than this floating museum?”
Feeling a slight chill, I ordered another hot coffee, make that blazing hot. It seemed that there were conditions after all.
That night I attended my new friend’s piano recital. The piano was positioned on a small, improvised stage in an antique drawing room large enough to accommodate twenty or so upholstered armchairs. As the music began I relaxed involuntarily. Then slowly but relentlessly the restrained melancholy of the composition made me oblivious to everything except the sight and sound of my countryman’s gentle but methodical striking of the white piano keys. Sweet, sweet oblivion.
At seven the next morning, with an excursion to Lake Maggiore not entirely out of the question, I boarded the train to Milan.
In Italy rusticity occasionally borders closely on dilapidation. The address before me had crossed that border. Shutters once green hung askew. The last flakes of paint applied in Etruscan times, clung to the exterior and roof tiles were missing in clusters. My soft knock was answered right away by a petite lady who might have been anywhere from sixty to ninety. I spoke a name previously given me, which brought smiles and a hug. Another lady, even older and more frail, joined us and gave an equally effusive welcome despite her frailty.
The house was Spartan but immaculate -- the walls hung with old photographs of women holding parasols, men in uniform and colored pictures of saints. The younger opened the letter and read the several pages with tears in her eyes pausing periodically to paraphrase for her companion. At the end they just sat quietly holding hands. The reader picked up the empty envelope and flexing it glanced furtively inside. I had shaken many a birthday card with the same expectancy. Remembering the two hundred in lire the piano player had given me I reached in my pocket for the roll of bills, which I handed to the ladies gesturing apologies for forgetfulness. I guessed my jazz-playing pal had meant it for them all along. Clearly, two hundred dollars in lire made a profound difference to them, and their gratitude was heartbreaking.
My weak Italian could no longer be kept in the cupboard. They talked the remainder of the afternoon, and, mostly, I listened, comprehending very little except their poverty and loneliness, the customary punishments for having lived too long.
We shared bread and soup for dinner after which they assigned me to a day bed in the smallest of four small rooms'
I slept fitfully, dreaming of being swept away in a primordial flood, but this was no dream. A cold rain was beating straight through a place where roof tiles were missing. Moving the bed was to no avail, so there was no sleep until early morning when the downpour finally abated. I dozed intermittently and finally awoke to the smell of coffee and bread and to the sight of a breakfast that I suspected was more lavish than the ladies were accustomed.
The front of the house faced directly on the street. The rear was suspended in cantilever over a dirt floored goat cellar. As I had hoped, within the cellar were roof tiles, tools and paint. A roofer’s son, I knew two things, water seeks its own level and leaks are immediately forgotten when the weather clears. I wasn’t about to forget either. For a second I thought of Harry who had forgotten that even frozen water flows downhill. A bad joke even to think, and I repented. Poor Harry.
A good field surgeon starts out by ligating the severed artery, and a good roofer takes the same approach. I located the bleeding artery, the largest gap in the tiles, then spent most of two days piecing in the missing tiles, fastening them with long nails and cementing them in place with mortar. It was still winter and still cold, and my modest intent was to make the place dry for the ladies.
On a trip to the village the next day after, I learned that there was no progress in Val d’Isère, so my project expanded to include smearing some paint on the front facade and regreening and rehanging the shutters. The front door was irreparable but, as I pondered the problem, an old man crowned with an improbable red beret, who had been watching me silently for days, arrived with a serviceable replacement on a wheelbarrow. Not exactly a palace the house was now tight and dry, and perhaps my benefactor’s cousins’ cousins would escape pneumonia the rest of the winter. I worried about them more and more, and even in the absence of very little comprehensible conversation I was starting to become very fond of the ladies. What can I say? I’m a sentimentalist. At select times, that is.
The lake was indeed lovely as predicted. The ribbon of lights along the shore sparkled like the Milky Way slashing its way across the blackness of space,and I fancied myself a Flying Dutchman navigating a sea of dreams.
As cold as had been the previous night, this night was warm and balmy. This was Italy after all. Ambling along the polished cobbles, I forgot where I was until, ahead, a cascade of flickering yellow light fell on the street from between buildings. The source I found to be a little garden, which, on closer view, I saw was not a garden at all but a kind of pocket cemetery. The light was from dozens and dozens of votive candles set in front of weathered gravestones and some set teetering on the stones themselves. There appeared to be a Chapel at the rear.
The largest of the headstones had half dozen candles, enough to read the inscription, “Magdalena Zarellez” then “PACE” then Roman numbers that I tried to decipher.
“My God” silently. Then aloud “1492.”
“Good evening.” a voice in English from the Chapel door. A priest in black cassock stepped in the flickering light. Younger than me he spoke again, “Welcome.”
“Thank you Father…?”
“Paolo, Paul for you.”
“What is this place?”
“A place for the dead to rest and the living to pray.”
“I’m still kicking and not much for praying. Can I look around?’
“ Of course. It’s not a requirement to pray.”
“That stone is so old. I saw the inscription. That woman was buried when Columbus was finding the New World.
“That’s when she died. She was buried here twenty years later.”
“Who was she?”
“There are different answers to that question .In Spain where she lived they thought her a witch who divined the future. Some said she was a healer of travelers who visited her hut in the mountains. Some say she dispensed poison and picked their pockets. But then some say the same about Dr. Massoni across the road. To the people in this neighborhood she is one step removed from sainthood. She has been the protector of this district for almost five centuries.”
“What has she done lately?”
“She brought you here.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated.
“You’ve come to care for the sisters.”
“Hardly that. I brought a letter.”
“Yes, I know.’ Silence and a smile. Then, “You want to know about Donna Magdalena?”
“Tell me please."
"She was the adoptive mother of Cardinal Guillermo Sorrelli."
"And he was...?"
“A protégé of the Borgia family.” He paused waiting for a reaction. “But a holy man nonetheless."
I reacted. "Borgia as in Lucretia?”
“Lucrezia. Yes, the same one, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI and Cesare's sister. In reality not quite the villainess everyone envisions. Sorrelli himself was born in Spain in the Pyrenees, and arrived in Italy at the age of sixteen in command of a band of thirty horsemen. The people called him the Boy Captain, but not to his face. His men called him the Black Eagle for his fondness of dressing in black head to toe. He was a ferocious captain, an expert with sword and dagger, and his small band of Spanish horsemen became feared throughout Italy as henchmen of Cesare Borgia.”
Father Paul motioned me to sit on a bench among the gravestones and candles.
“He came quickly to the attention of Pope Alexander who saw that his administrative talents were even greater than his military skills. He was reputed to have a unique knowledge of poisons and antidotes. Many, then and now, and with ample reason, thought this Pope was not a holy man. Nevertheless, his office was holy, and through him God worked many miracles. One such miracle was the transformation of Sorrelli. He was made a priest, then Bishop, and then Cardinal all in what seemed the wink of an eye. Immediately on joining the Church his personality changed, and where before he was regarded with fear for his cruelty he soon became renowned for his benevolence. He gave away the wealth he had pursued so relentlessly and spent his days in study, prayer, and healing.” He paused. “And, with God’s help, he outlasted his sponsors.”
“What about the lady?”
‘Patience, I’ll get to her soon.”
Continuing,” The son of the Mayor of this town was stricken with fever and was near death. The Mayor himself rode to Como to ask the Cardinal, who was by then famous as a healer, to ask him to save the boy. The Cardinal agreed, but told the Mayor that-if the boy was to be saved that he, the Cardinal, must walk to the village. The Mayor implored that his son might be dead by then, but the Cardinal promised that if he had faith God would spare the child until he arrived. For the next four days, as the Cardinal walked through rain and mud, the boy steadily worsened. The healer arrived almost as sick as the boy, who could barely breathe. Sorrelli laid hands on the sick child, and, by evening, the boy was begging for soup.”
He paused. “In gratitude the Mayor built this Chapel. The Cardinal returned a year later to ask the mayor for leave to bury his mother in the churchyard. He needn't have asked, but his humility endeared him further in the town and most certainly with Heaven. “
“Her remains were disinterred in the Spanish mountains and brought over land by wagon over many weeks. An amazing thing happened at the burial. Before she was to be reburied the Cardinal opened her casket before all the townspeople. Twenty years dead, she appeared as though she had fallen asleep yesterday, her remains unblemished and unchanged. In her blue gown she appeared to be sleeping. To the village it was a miracle. For the body to remain so pure was the mark of a Saint. Since then the town has revered her as though she were a Saint. They still do. No one passes the cemetery without lighting a candle, and Donna Magdalena's is always lighted first.
"Four and a half centuries is a long time to dwell on fable." I spoke cynically out of reflex.
My neighbor answered me in an undeservedly kind voice.
"In Italy twenty centuries is yesterday, and our faith is not a fable."
“I'm sorry Father I spoke without thinking."
"As I said, she brought you here.”
Before retiring in the day bed that I was starting to regard as my own I thought of the priest's words. “She brought you here.” Did he mean she caused the avalanche? What a question. I decided not to attempt to answer it and swiftly tumbled into a deep and dreamless sleep.
My fortress against pneumonia was erected too late. The older sister ran a fever, which worsened steadily over two days. As there was no Cardinal to be summoned this time, and considering that Dr. Massoni across the road was thoroughly distrusted, it was decided that she would be taken to the infirmary at the Medical College at Como. The younger woman would go along. So I was left as caretaker feeling like a trespasser.
In the next half week I passed the time walking by the Lake, reading the American papers at the telegraph office and continuing lessons in Italian history with Father Paul, who had become a friend as well as a tutor. Several times I was invited by Father Paul to visit sick parishioners and was astounded to learn that I was already well known throughout the neighborhood and regarded as a good luck charm. One of the invalids even asked me to place my hand on his forehead in expectation of being healed. Apparently, Dr. Massoni was an extreme last resort.
I took the liberty of writing a long letter in English to the cousin, for whom I had acted as a courier, explaining the sisters’ difficulties and dropping iceberg sized hints that they could use some material assistance. So as not to inform on my Venetian piano friend, I left the impression that we had been here together with me staying on to mooch. I would mail the letter when I got to France, which as it turned out was to be within two days, my authorization arriving by telegram that afternoon.
I packed hurriedly and wrote a short letter, this time for the sisters, who, I trusted, would be brought back safe and sound by Donna Magdalena. I toyed briefly with the idea of walking to Como, retracing the Cardinal’s steps in reverse, but deferred that stunt for another life. The Alps were calling.
The village where Harry had been taken was a town in deep mourning. Black crape was hung from the windowsills, and the few people walking were dressed for the cold but also draped in black. A gendarme in a relatively joyous navy blue uniform and kepi directed me to a squarish, very austere building at the opposite end of the road from the station. Inside a row of glum clerks sat silently behind a long folding table. Even in the world of death the bureaucracy functions, and I had to work my way methodically down the table processing the paperwork before being escorted to identify my friend, well my schoolmate.
A lone casket set upon a sawhorse among dozens of empty sawhorses mutely testified to the magnitude of the tragedy. Now it was just Harry alone looking for a place to stop before catching his train. The casket was oddly shaped with chamfered edges top and bottom, and, except for being white rather than black, looking like a Venetian gondola without the tuning fork on the prow.
The formality of identifying the body was not a pleasant prospect. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it was certainly not Harry in street clothes looking like he was napping in the sun at Daytona Beach.
Remarkable natural preservation of the remains" they said.” Probably due to having been encased in snow for the first five days." Harry’s face had a faint smile, and if he had sat upright and asked for a cigarette I would not have been surprised.
I nodded, signed the receipt, and in two hours Harry and I, on the same train but different cars, embarked for Boulogne where we would catch the ferry to Dover and then another train to Southampton.
I got to the ferry, or I should say we got to the ferry, literally minutes before departure. They placed the casket on deck where it would benefit from natural refrigeration. I sat on a bench within eyeshot of he casket. As I kept it in sight, a shivering steward after asking my name handed me an envelope with my name and U.S. address inked in script on the outside. It had apparently been previously forwarded by the authorities in Val d’Isère and had been waiting for me. From Harry I supposed
On the reverse side of the envelope and in the same handwriting as the address was scribbled in pencil “For my friend……., to be opened in the event of my absence.”
Even though he was thirty feet away I guessed you could call him absent, so, being duly authorized, I slit open the envelope with a pocketknife. The envelope contained a letter to me from the man sleeping peacefully in the in the pale imitation of a lifeboat thirty feet away.
I read rapidly.
Hey friend.
When you get this letter I’ll be… well, actually I won’t be anything will I? No we weren’t close friends. So why did you get tapped to bring me home? Probably because you’re the one person I know who could never refuse a fellow human in need.
So what’s this all about? The best way to begin is to tell you about a nightmare that scared the life out of me and still scares me a little even as I’m writing. In my dream I am sailing in a small white boat, like a kayak, at fantastic speed through space with stars all around. The boat comes to an abrupt stop at a pier suspended in space above a deep abyss and leading at a great distance to a floating island capped by a gorgeous city of blue and green towers bathed in colored spotlights. I walk across the bridge but the handrails are broken and boards are missing and at every step the bridge bends and twists. Terrifying. Finally, I’m on firm ground outside the gates of the City, which is like a carnival with peddlers, jugglers, clowns everywhere. I am led past a table where I am asked my name, led to another table where I am handed a brown envelope and then finally to the last table where the contents of the envelope are examined by a third surly clerk. My envelope is empty.
“I’m sorry. You can’t enter without papers and you have no papers.”
“What are you expecting?” I ask.
“ Simple documentation. Anything really. Kindness, generosity, mercy, correction of injustice, getting cats out of trees, tipping 20%. The usual stuff. But you have nothing and twenty-seven years to have been collecting. You’ll have to go.”
“Where?”
“That’s your choice. ”
I mope on the ground looking at the spotlights for endless hours, days, years, I don’t know.
Then you show up. Why you, I don’t understand. I tell you the problem and you say “problem fixed-here take my envelope”. I take it and present it to the clerk. He spills out the contents and a small rectangular certificate floats out. “Oh!” they say. “This is quite adequate, actually first rate.” And the clerk commences to stamp it.
“What does it say?” I ask. Mistake. I should not have asked him to read, but he reads.
“He was hungry, but he gave his last dollar to the poor.” He looks me over with disbelief.
“Wait a moment there’s a mistake. This can't be you.” The paper bursts into flame and I am thrown back into the kayak and propelled into endless darkness.”
I woke like Scrooge on Christmas morning, scared to blazes, but unlike Scrooge not enlightened or reformed. I didn’t see a moral to the dream. Officious clerks at the Pearly Gates, well that was pretty standard fare wouldn’t you say? It was the prediction of death at 27 that rattled me. I had that same dream a hundred times again but only the first time did that clerk mention 27 years. I don’t really believe there’s a city in the sky but I do believe in oblivion, extinction, and I feared it. So maybe it was the dream, maybe just a mental breakdown. I had the crazy idea that if I couldn’t change the future I could at least slow down the clock. Clearly I needed to do something, to be somewhere, with no obvious end in sight. It occurred to me almost immediately that horizons are pretty blurry for the poor, so I took off to live among them and pretend the future didn’t exist. It’s actually not hard to find poor people. First I went to Mexico where I worked teaching the children of farmers and at night the farmers themselves. When I thought I found myself catching a glimpse of the horizon, I moved on. There were always other places and no shortage of poor and unfortunate people on this earth. But in the process I saw the obvious, that it’s an unfair world and that the world had been much less fair to others than to me. Not much of a revelation but it lessened my anxiety, and after a while I realized that the difference between 27 years and 97 years ain’t much. When I stopped wasting my time holding on to the handrails, life became surprisingly very sweet and not so frightening. So there it is. Maybe I’ll have finished with the envelope still empty but what’s the difference? I won’t have known what happened to me-you will. I would guess I’m probably in my kayak now paddling furiously through the darkness, and you will be the only one to ever know that. I know what happened to you. You accommodated the folks. It would have been unlike like you to ignore people in need. You retraced some of my steps and spread some sunshine in your wake, a habit of yours I’ve always envied but could never copy. I figure right now you’re on your way home wondering what it all means. To me there is nothing to wonder about. I’ve had my fair share of the fruits of the earth, and I’ve learned some lessons. First lesson, these bodies we live in are just suits of clothes. And the other? Love your neighbor. But you already knew that. Thanks for the rescue my friend even if it was a little late. See, you are my friend after all.
Harry
P.S.
Enclosed is something that belongs to you.
I had thought the envelope was empty, so I blew in it to see inside better. At the bottom was a small folded rectangle off paper. Not having seen one for many weeks, for a second it looked slightly unfamiliar, a dollar bill. As I murmured “Harry, Harry, Harry” to myself it was not the words I heard in my mind but the sound of practiced fingers methodically pressing on white keys
I refolded the dollar in a small square and tucked it in the recess of my wallet, insurance against being totally broke. I replaced the letter in the brown envelope and tossed it on the seat beside me. The boat’s engines had started, and I could feel the rough vibrations quickly become smooth and regular. I looked toward the rail where a young mother busied herself dabbing the faces of two little girls, her daughters I supposed. It was cold but not uncomfortable. The fog had begun to congeal, and snow had begun to fall lightly, very lightly, and, except for the soft flakes collecting on the woman's fur hat, I might not have noticed it was snowing at all.
The End
Bill Schweizer
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