The snow? It fell some this morning. It rained more in the afternoon; and the latter made a memory of the former. This is at least what I saw on the rooftops of Columbia City, the streets of the International District, and the e-bikes of Capitol Hill. But at around 5 pm (the time of writing), snow is doing the best it can to make a comeback. We will see how that goes. But more interesting than the snow is how the leaves of Seattle fell in a massive way during the Thanksgiving break, which I spent in Portland and also Yamhill, parts of which remind me of the hills and valleys of the home of my ancestors, the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. Not long after I returned to Seattle on Sunday, November 27, I felt, as I sat on a garden chair, weirdly exposed. The leaves, which hung around for longer than usual this autumn, had finally fallen.

But this feeling of exposure, as uncomfortable as it was, was nothing like the shock I experienced when I visited Central Park for the first time in the winter of 2018. The place looked like a graveyard of trees. None of them had leaves. Their branches rose from the ground like the gnarled fingers of the dead. I realized then and there how profoundly the Pacific Northwest had shaped my mind and sense of place and mode of being. Our part of the world for sure has its fair share of deciduous trees, but it's not defined by them. It's defined, instead, by evergreen trees, the leaves and needles that, like the cathedral of Combray, "[sail] the centuries." My mind has become these timeless trees. What in the hell was Frederick Olmsted thinking when he landscaped the most famous park in the world?    

It's getting cold out here, you know what I'm saying?

SDOT is preparing for more snow, according to KOMO. But all of that is a waste of time. When the real snow falls, there is nothing to do but shut this city down.

As unimpressive as today's snow has so far been, it was enough to cancel "177 flights arriving at or departing from Sea-Tac." On top of all that, 436 flights were knocked out of their planned/promised/ticket-printed times. The Seattle Times obtained this information from the "flight tracking website FlightAware."

What caught my eye in this post wasn't the excessive hate that Seattle's top far-right commentator, Jason Rantz, dropped all over Sea-Tac's International Arrivals Facility, which opened earlier this year: "Leave it to SeaTac Airport to 'upgrade' a terminal to make it less efficient and more miserable... The gates are seemingly endless...  [The] confusing placement for Global Entry passengers... It’s as if Greta Thunberg consulted on the project..." No. What's striking here is that Rantz spent Thanksgiving in London. London is not in the USA. What kind of patriot misses the opportunity to celebrate the extermination of millions of Native Americans? 

Rantz: "I got to experience the IAF during my November 26 flight back from London." This should be a HUGE scandal.

Because Ballard has become another country in our own city. How on earth do you get there? 

One more thing about Rantz. While he was in London on the day America-loving Americans make a grand meal out of the food and land taken from people described, in the 19th century, as the "white man's burden"—and two days before he was huffing and puffing at the International Arrivals Facility ("Inexplicably, the Global Entry checkpoint is above baggage claim...")—the 2,700 workers at the "Mississippi-based furniture company, United Furniture Industries" were abruptly fired. This certainly ruined their Turkey Day. 

Fired furniture worker reported by Yahoo Finance had this to say: 

“It’s not fair to the laborers who seriously worked so hard to be blindsided like this. It’s not fair to the mom who just had a baby to wonder if she even has health insurance to cover it. It’s not fair to the cancer patient amid chemo about how to pay for her treatments,” the Post quoted one of the laid-off employees as saying.

How could this have been avoided or resisted? If the workers were unionized. It's the only true weapon workers have against capitalists.

This happened today:

If it happens to snow tonight, I will certainly listen to Vince Guaraldi's "Christmastime Is Here (Instrumental)" as I walk down the CBD-warm street.

These are my words about this work of American beauty

It is, I think, one of the most beautiful pieces of jazz ever composed. Listening to it is like watching falling snow through a window. The room is warm, something is roasting in the oven, and outside, the flakes are falling faintly through the universe and upon the trees, the hedges, the water gutters, the telephone poles, and the rooftops of a thousand apartment buildings. This is where you want to be forever. This is Vince Guaraldi's "Christmastime Is Here (Instrumental)." It opens with a trembling bass, like someone coming out of the cold, stamping their feet, brushing the snow off their shoulders, hanging the winter coat, rubbing and blowing on numb fingers, and entering the living room where there is a window, watching the flakes falling faintly upon all the buildings and the living.