Postcards from Belgrade: the Snows of Autumn

Sunday, November 24, 2024

The snows of autumn are back. 

Not so long ago, the evenings were still quite balmy

 

I woke up this morning, wrapped myself up as always in my Mongolian robe, and headed out into the living room area. I call it the "Cathedral Room" because the ceilings are somewhat higher and there are twelve windows, nine of which are at least six feet off the ground. So, the room tends to give me a good sense of what the weather is like on any particular day. I saw a bunch of snow falling and all of a sudden felt really energized.

It's nice to have some real snow again.  

We typically get our first real snowfall right around Halloween, and such was the case again this year, and it has snowed a few times since then. 

On Monday of this week, we got several inches of wet, drippy snow, and it was the first time that I had to shovel. I even went out cross-country skiing on Monday--it was foolish, but I'd been jonesing for snow for some time. I skiied through the playground of the school across the street from my house, then skiied down the boulevards (Belgrade-speak for tree lawns that have no trees on them) until I got to the big field that I usually cut through when I'm walking to or from the airport. I did a couple of turns around the field but eventually had to quit because the snow was too wet and shallow. I ended up accumulating too much snow at the bottom of my skis to go much further.  

And then this morning I saw that it had snowed about six inches last night--a nice, light, powdery snow of the sort that we typically get up here in the northern Rockies. I had to shovel again, but now the snow is light. It's like shoveling packaging peanuts. 

The water in the sauna bucket
was frozen this morning

This has been a delightful autumn so far, though. Up until last week we were still regularly getting days in the 40s and 50s--ideal hiking weather. 

Not too much else has been going on here. School has been busy, unsurprisingly, but not excessively. I gave a talk at the annual MESA (Middle East Studies Association) conference ten days ago. The conference was entirely online this year, which took some of the fun out of it, but giving talks is a good way to make myself think more seriously about whatever I'm working on. Since the summer of last year, when I published the book on Nâzım  Hikmet, I've been working on a new project, so it was good to get a bit of feedback about that. 

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And that's about all that's going on here. We're on Thanksgiving break this week, and then we have just a couple of weeks left until the semester is over. I'm really looking forward to the break. There's a lot of writing that I'm looking forward to.