I have often wondered why the human species doesn’t all live in temperate weather – weather like they have in California or Italy or anywhere in their latitudinal band.

Because in ancient times, before polar fleece and Goretex, rain and cold must have been even more miserable. So why didn’t those ancients start walking toward the warmth? These people braved the land bridge from Asia to North America, for godsakes. Why would they stop in Alaska to live in igloos and face months when daylight hours were in the single digits? Why would they stop in the northwest to sit in windowless longhouses waiting for the rain to stop?

I think there is a need, especially in Seattle, for a website called findthesun.com. You would punch in your grey, depressing zipcode and some high tech combination of maps and weather forecasts would direct you to the closest sunny roadside spot. Ideally these spots would have wi-fi. When the rain became unbearable, I could consult findthesun.com, hop in the car and go there.

Of course, there is the alternative offered by full spectrum lighting. My friend Ileen has accustomed herself to this. She sits before her light each day of winter for a half hour, in her sunglasses, reading. It seems a sort of worship – the Klieg light at the end of the world – but cool, too, because of the sunglasses.

I guess it makes sense that sun-worshipping religions sprung up in sunny places: Greece (Helios), the Aztecs in Mexico, India, Babylonia. But it’s not that I want to worship the sun, it’s just my childhood in California set up an expectation that has gone wanting for 35 years in Seattle.

I suppose there is some character building going on here. I’m not one of those sunbirds who escape to Phoenix for the grey months. At least when the beautiful days from April to October come along, I can feel I earned them.

Yes, here we have another day of grey. Cottony grey-blue clouds rest on the darker blue-grey of the Sound. Luckily our family has a getaway to Palm Springs planned.

Glad I don’t have to walk all the way to get there.

What better day for a Winter Count than a day we are snowed in? All around us snow on snow, snow on snow — and yet another snow cloud moving in across the Sound.

Winter Count is the Plains Indians practice of recording each year’s memorable events in a spiral of symbols drawn on an animal hide, sometimes on the sides of teepees. These drawings were added to each year at winter camp, commemorating, for instance, the year of the one horned buffalo, the year of the comet, or the year of the flood.

It is something to think about. What significant event would you record for 2008 in your own Winter Count?

For me, it is Mom’s death. February 16, 2008.

Were I to mark a symbol on the side of the teepee that is this new blog, I would paint my mom with wings — because she spent some of her happiest hours piloting her Piper Commanche. After more or less raising five kids, she turned her considerable intellect to air racing across the United States. In one of her rambly conversations near the end, when her mind was loosely tethered, she told me she and Dad had flown their little plane around the world, though she wasn’t quite sure what route they had taken over the Himalayas to get to China. Even when she could no longer get out, she was still flying.

Into the void left by Mom’s absence has flooded the love and energy of my sisters Susan, Nancy and Kate, and my brother, Tim. We are closer than ever. I think Mom and Dad must look down on us and be glad for that.

Q: How do you begin writing?
A: I sit down with my laptop and start moving my fingers over the keyboard. I can’t wait to see where my writing will take me. Wendell Berry says it better in this poem:

Traveling at Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.
– Wendell Berry

What “tree or stone or bird” will be the bud of my new direction? Will I make it back before dark?

Today I join the league of writers who blog on the Internet. My journal here is a new beginning and beginnings are my favorite part of any writing project. With beginnings, all the promise, all the possibilities, are still out there in front. Shining. I relish finding those first words or images that belong to a story and seeing where they lead.

I wonder if my dad felt like this when he sat down to write his Sierra Lookout column for the Sonora Union Democrat? Year after year, column after column. I expect that for him, too, writing was a way to figure out what he thought. His topics veered from early spring in the foothills (exquisite) to the shenanigans of Tuolumne Water District No. Two (frustrating).

In the months to follow I expect I will write about our dogs and the garden and writing and books and kindnesses and things that make me laugh, friends and family, growing old, bicycling, marriage, the kids, playing the ukulele, Yosemite, how to purchase athlete’s foot cream in Florence, Italy, and – hard to avoid in the Northwest – the rain.

But for this first one, I think I will begin with thanks. Thanks to the talented Max Waugh and his able assistant Jenn Hixson for creating and developing my new website.

Thanks for this new beginning.