December 12. Alien days for my son and me. The days are more alien than we are to each other. I’m desperately trying to wring terrain from the days. The path from this house to theirs is ten minutes through the woods – not much, really, but it can make you anxious. How can it be so far? And when I walked the route for the first time on Friday – Google insisted it was the right one – a staircase pretty much at the beginning of the path was so snowed in and slippery that I fell several times trying to get down it, eventually sliding helplessly down one landing at a time. (Only today, Sunday evening, someone had taken a shovel to the steps). Then with my son it was fun to get up and down those steps, he immediately made a competition out of it.