Weeknotes: February 26 - March 1, 2024

Driving home through western New York. The ski trip was mostly brown and warm. The brown Allegheny River and National Forest, brown leafless trees on hills of brown earth. At the resort white strips of man-made snow rolled like avenues down the mountainside, a bright tarmac of ice, slush, and gritty false powder. I loved it anyway.

We cross the bridge over Chautauqua Lake which so enchanted me the first time I saw it back in 2000. After lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Mentor, Ohio, we detour to the Mentor Lagoons, a nature preserve bordering Lake Erie. A beaver-felled tree, its stump like a sharpened pencil, lays not ten free from our car. It's the second one I've seen on this trip.