Well, the blizzard came and the blizzard left. These pictures are two days old. The ground is bare again back there. But today when I look into my back yard I have a nagging nostalgia. This is my backyard for only five months more. And then we move. Last Tuesday Eckerd College, a four year liberal arts college in St. Petersburg Florida, offered me a job as professor of environmental studies. In five months, this back yard will be someone else's, and my back yard will be filled with live oak and cabbage palm. No more snow. Maxim learned that we were moving by listening in to conversations Marcela and I were having. She asked about Florida a few times on Wednesday and told us she would like to move there. When Marcela picked her up from school yesterday, Maxim had explained to everyone, teachers included, that I had a new job in Florida and we were moving. "The boys cheered, Daddy." Maxim told me. "They said it was good cuz there would be more boys in the class now." "Boys are silly," I responded. Marcela asked if I had given the news to the teachers; I hadn't, none of Maxim's teachers had been in when I dropped her off in the morning. She said the teachers had all the details. That the program director, Sara, had taken her aside and asked her about it. Marcela said to Sara that she was sorry we didn't let them know first and she worried that they might have thought Maxim was telling tall tales. "No," Sara responded, "Maxim is always dependable in what she tells us. We knew she was giving us news." We beam with pride to hear such things. Yesterday morning Noah climbed into bed with me in an excited state of mind - unusual for him in the morning. "Daddy, do you bremembah the fire?" He asked wide eyed. "Was there a fire?" I queried. "Do you bremembah, Daddy? The castle was burning?" I realized he had had a dream, "I think I remember," I said, "What happened again?" "The fire was burning, and the castle was burning, and then Maxim fell into the fire. Do you bremembah?" "She fell in?" "Yes!" "What did you do?" "I shout, 'Daddy! Daddy! Maxim fell in the fire! Get her!'" "And what did I do?" "You ran in the fire and got her." "And she was ok?" "Yes." "Wow, I remember, that was scary, wasn't it?" "Yes." "But everything was ok. You did a good job and helped Maxim." "No, you got Maxim." "But you told me; you yelled." "Yes...it was a scary fire." It is a wonderful thing to be the hero of your son's first nightmares. Better than any job anywhere, these kids are the real stuff of life.

And I'll end with Emerson today, whose Idealism has quite an appealism: "Idealism...beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul." Nature 1836