An ague hath my ham

Reuters photo from the snowy portion of yesterday's meteorological goulache.

This picture, which ran on the Post's front page today, calls up Nancy Williams' poem "The Snow Arrives After Long Silence": "The cat at my window watches/ amazed. So many feathers and no bird!"

The weekend promises to be more in line with Ezra Pound's "Ancient Music." Wrap up warmly, or better yet find a cozy place to curl up and hibernate, dormouse-like, against the wind and bitter chill. I am pondering the wisdom of having not two but three horse sessions scheduled for when the temperatures are scheduled to dip into the single digits. It is hard to pass up the chance for extended pony time that a three-day weekend offers, but neither do I wish to lose a toe to frostbite.

The cold and mud of the trails leading to the main indoor ring, where you crunch through ice into clinging black goo, make me wonder what the 1812 retreat from Moscow must have been like. A couple of years back, I came across a first-person account from an infantryman in Napoleon's disastrous march on Russia; rare, because it's mostly officers who write, and their experience and style are different. The author wrote about the sorts of things that killed men on the retreat, some that I expected—drowning, starvation, disease—and some that I did not. As winter closed in, it got very nasty in the ranks, every man for himself and devil take the hindmost; when men staggered off the road to seek relief, many could not then rebutton their flies with hands gone stiff with cold. Soldiers who might otherwise have lived were literally caught with their pants down, stripped of coats and blankets by fellow soldiers and left to die of exposure. The author survived by stealing a Russian horse and killing the man who tried to take it from him, not to mention riding over the bodies of the less fortunate when necessary. A pragmatist and a lucky one. I wrap up a little more warmly and am grateful to go inside.